The murders increased in Australia’s most populous state, driven by homicides from various victims, including a shopping mall massacre in which six people were killed.
A total of 85 people were murdered in New South Wales in 2024, against 56 the previous year and the largest number since 2014, the Bureau of Crime Statistics and Research Reports.
Joel Cauchi, 40, fatally stabbed his victims and injured 12 others in Westfield Bondi Junction in Sydney before a police officer killed him in one of the country’s worst mass murders.
The crime department said there were eight multiple murders in 2024, resulting in 22 murder victims compared to an average of two events a year.
About 63 incidents in 2024 were murders of unique victims, comparable to recent years, according to the agency.
The victims of murder were 46 men, 26 women and 13 children, he said, adding almost half of the murders related to domestic violence.
In addition to the murder, the department said the crimes in 12 of its 13 main offense categories have been stable in the last 24 months.
“None of the 13 categories of main crimes has increased in the two years until December 2024, while one stole the motor vehicle, it fell significantly,” Fitzgerald said.
For many offenses, the recent stable trend follows years of decline, she said. As a result, registered incidents of assault, break and enter, steal general and malicious damage to the property are much lower than a decade ago.
Registered incidents of domestic aggression, non -domestic aggression and sexual violence, however, have increased in the last decade.
Liberation occurs after the Crime Statistics Department in February found that younger people were arrested in NSW’s arrests as judges increasingly refused bail according to controversial legislative control intended to contain regional crime.
