Chief Minister Lia Finocchiaro was aware of the under-reporting of crime and delays to accurate police crime statistics two years ago, while also knowing the stats collected since December 2023 could not be compared to previous years because of changes to the NT Police’s IT system, a transcript of 2024 Budget Estimates hearings reveals.

Ms Finocchiaro this week called an academic study, that found her CLP Government was cherry-picking stats and misleading the public about the effect of its policies amid untested claims the community was safer, a “load of nonsense”.

But the Estimates transcript shows the report found what Ms Finocchiaro and a colleague learned back in 2024, that the crime stats were prone to delays despite being publicly reported as fulsome, could be up to 15 per cent under-reported and could not be compared to previous years’ crime occurrences.

Two months before the 2024 NT election, then-opposition leader Ms Finocchiaro grilled then-police minister Brent Potter and then-commissioner Michael Murphy about the introduction of the NT Police’s SerPro system, which replaced the PROMIS system. Ms Finocchiaro was told that the introduction of SerPro in December 2023 meant that crime stats recorded in the new SerPro system could not be compared to the old PROMIS system because of differences in how the systems collected data.

She was incredulous.

“Do you think it meets the expectations of Territorians that they can no longer compare crime statistics prior to December [2023]?” she asked Mr Potter.

On August 24 this year, Ms Finocchiaro issued a press release as Chief Minister comparing those figures, claiming with no substantiation that “criminal offences have fallen to 2017 levels”, or by “10,000 [offences] a year”.

She said this was due to her government’s “strong action”, but her office refused to explain at the time how it arrived at those figures, given that the crime stats could not be compared between 2023 and now, let alone compared to 2017 figures.

As the NT Independent previously reported, police also have a disclaimer on its website warning not to compare stats, which specifically states that “crime statistics from December 2023 onwards have been determined to be not comparable with earlier published NT crime statistics”.

The transcript from the 2024 Estimates hearings also shows Ms Finocchiaro knew that actual crime stats were delayed and under-reported monthly by up to 15 per cent – the same figure raised in the recent report compiled by the Jumbunna Institute at the University of Technology Sydney.

“Speaking about SerPro and the impact that it is having on crime statistics, it says as part of the crime stats that they could be under-reported by up to 15 per cent because of the SerPro system – can you explain what that means?” Ms Finocchiaro asked at Estimates.

Mr Murphy explained that the police data on crime is “updated…as court cases progress”.

“The data occurrence can fluctuate month on month,” he said.

Just days earlier, Ms Finocchiaro’s colleague and current Cabinet member Steve Edgington had asked the Department of Attorney-General and Justice at Estimates about its involvement in compiling crime stats amid the delays and under-reporting concerns.

Carolyn Whyte, who Ms Finocchiaro last week gave a “Chief Minister’s Medal” to for her work compiling crime stats for the government, told Mr Edgington in 2024 that “over time, the crime statistics for a month gradually increase as more investigations are completed”.

“The completeness of the crime statistics can be measured retrospectively, but not at the time of publication,” Ms Whyte said, adding there were also delays.

“The workflow in the new system [SerPro] means that the crime statistics are entered at the end of an investigative process rather than at the beginning. This means that the crime statistics, when they are initially recorded, are less complete when first published, compared with the crime statistics historically.”

NT Governments of both political persuasions have used monthly police crime statistics for their own purposes, while other media outlets report those figures without providing caveats that the information is incomplete and prone to inaccuracies.

As the Jumbunna Institute’s report found, “crime data should not be viewed as the single, or even the most reliable source of information on the prevalence of crime”, adding the government does not provide publicly available information on how the data recorded by police is converted into the monthly statistical publications or how the data is “cleaned” for analysis.

The report used additional data sources, including court statistics, ABS figures, and NAAJA crime stats to gain better insight into actual crime numbers.

Ms Finocchiaro did not address those issues this week and told ABC Radio Alice Springs the report was trying to “tear [her] down because we’ve been so successful”.

Despite Ms Finocchiaro’s unsubstantiated claims there have been fewer victims of crime since her government came to power, the report relied on hard evidence that showed victimisation rates have risen, along with imprisonment rates and court listings.

NAAJA CEO Ben Grimes said this week that it was clear the CLP could not “arrest its way out of crime”, adding the real data showed crime rates were increasing.

“Everyone wants crime rates to go down, but Territorians deserve honest and accurate information,” he said.