Opinion: 1News US correspondent Logan Church recently moved to New York City and reflects on Auckland, the city he left behind.
It’s 11pm, East Village, New York City, and I’m shi**ing myself.
I’ve spent the past hour getting ready for my first 1News at 6pm live cross from New York City – packing gear carefully into bags I can carry, ironing a shirt using a towel on the kitchen bench and a cheap iron I found in a crumpled box at Target.
I'm not nervous about the cross – I'm used to those. But I'm genuinely scared of being attacked. Or mugged. Or robbed. Or worse.
And my fear isn't based on anything I've heard about crime in New York. It's based on my experience in Auckland.
When you travel to another country, you inevitably experience a series of culture shocks. For me, a striking example was how safe I felt – at least compared to where I come from.
In New Zealand, the most dangerous place I found anywhere in the country was downtown Auckland.
One particularly memorable experience, as a reporter, was when some people outside the Auckland District Court attempted to sort of bounce us down the corridor like we were in a pinball machine.
Another was when I was living in an apartment that had a view of Queen St, near the Karangahape Rd intersection. One night the police battered down the main door to our building and the alleyway below us was instantly showered in cannabis, meth pipes and actual meth as our panicked fellow residents threw incriminating items from their balconies. My flatmate and I then had to stop the building manager from taking it all and driving away. We collected what had fallen in our garage and found some cops on the street to come and take it (still not sure how legal that was).
My first week at that apartment I walked home alongside a long line of bloody footprints that seemed to be getting thicker and led into the my building. Minutes later the Armed Offenders Squad was everywhere.
Not long afterwards I was in a liquor store buying wine when the store was aggressively robbed by a couple of men. I bravely stepped up and... well to be honest I did nothing. I was too shocked to speak or move.
“Happens all the time,” the manager said. He just looked tired.
In my job I came across countless people terribly victimised by crime in Auckland. We told as many of their stories as we could. I’ve lost count of the dairy owners and petrol station workers I spoke to who'd been ram raided. On my lunch break I would go for a walk and, more often than not, I'd end up talking to someone about crime rates. Security guards. Retailers. Anyone. Everyone.
It is real. It is really bad. And my personal experiences haven't misled me: by early 2022 crime had risen in downtown Auckland by about 30 percent, compared to pre-pandemic levels. And between 2022 and this year, some analysts say there has been another substantial city-wide surge.
And more of that is was exactly what I was expecting, moving to New York. I grew up watching TV shows and dramas and I expected a city that was dangerous. People looking over their shoulders. Thieves everywhere and crime out of control.
But standing at my live location that night, finishing my cross to camera and packing down my camera equipment, I realised I felt completely safe. And statistics show that crime in New York City is indeed declining.
It's month two and I’ve done about twenty live crosses now on the streets, many at ungodly hours, and I’ve had a total of one problem. And that was a drunk person shouting at me in a because he saw a camera and thought it was funny.
I thought it was funny as well to be honest. His New York accent was so thick I couldn’t understand a word he was saying and he was wearing a costume. It was Halloween and he was having a good night.
But after a month here, I’m left feeling sad. Sad that Auckland is now that bad. That New Zealand, seen as a “peaceful country”, is really anything but.
And having met a few Kiwis in New York, most agree. It is sad.
Of course there is crime in New York. I don’t want to diminish that. Just the other day the subway train I was on had to stop in for about half an hour in a tunnel because a man had randomly pushed a woman onto the train tracks – she was lucky not to have been instantly killed.
That happens. And it’s horrible. But in Auckland it just felt worse.
I have a lot of privileges. I'm a tall man with broad shoulders and I can look imposing when I need to. If I felt that unsafe in Auckland, then God help someone without the above traits.
It’s hard to draw comparisons statistically between Auckland, with its population of about 1.6 million, and New York with its population more than five times that. We have different histories and cultures. Different problems.
I'm just going by gut feeling. And my gut tells me that New York feels safer than Auckland – a city with a problem that needs fixing.
*This story has been updated to include links to relevant statistics about crime rates.
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