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Does the Moon increase crime and family harm incidents?

A lake isn’t only fed by pipes. This dataset arrived as a one-off dump: NZ Police’s daily report stopped at the end of 2020, so its two CSV files were dropped into the lake exactly as published, then modelled into the warehouse and matched to the Moon by date.

Waiting for the restock…

A day in the Moon cycle, against a normal dayEvery day from 2018 to 2020 is filed by days since new moon, then averaged. 100 means a normal day for that weekday and year.

By phase of the MoonThe same days grouped into eight phases.
PhaseDaysCrime against normalFamily harm against normal

What the numbers are

  • Crime occurrences and family harm investigations recorded by NZ Police each day, nationally, 1 January 2018 to 31 December 2020. They are not 111 calls: Police don’t publish call volumes by day.
  • Each day is compared with the average for the same weekday in the same year, so weekday habits and the three-year trend drop out.
  • The COVID level 3 and 4 lockdown (25 March to 13 May 2020) is left out. Public holidays and New Year are not, so a handful of days sit well above normal.
  • The Moon is taken at noon New Zealand time on each day.

Read with care

The correlation figures run from −1 to +1, where 0 is no link. Values this close to zero mean the Moon’s phase tells you nothing useful about how busy Police will be. Three years is roughly 37 lunar cycles, so a real effect of any size would show up here.

Data: New Zealand Police, policedata.nz, Daily Occurrences of Crime and Family Violence. Crown copyright, reused under CC BY 4.0. Provisional counts as at release.

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