Buried in five years of NZ Police infringement data is a number that should change how you look at a camera ticket: 17,873 camera notices were waived between 2021 and 2025 under Police's own disposition codes for camera operator deployment errors and bad photo batches. Not because a driver wrote a persuasive letter — because the system itself logged the camera as wrong.
That number comes from data we obtained under the Official Information Act (ref IR-01-26-24762, signed out by the Director of Road Policing in July) covering every infringement notice from 2021 to 2025 by year, district, offence category and disposition. We've published the response letter and the full spreadsheet on our data page, so every figure below can be checked against the source.
What the five years show
- 253,046 notices were waived in total — roughly 50,000 a year, every year.
- 17,873 camera tickets were waived under operator-error and bad-photo-batch codes. These waivers need no explanation from the driver; they're the enforcement system correcting itself.
- 14,888 notices were waived because someone wrote in and their explanation was accepted — and 8,464 of those were speed camera tickets. Asking, in writing, works often enough to show up at scale.
- 2,807,021 unpaid notices went to Ministry of Justice collections over the same period — more than half a million a year that were neither paid nor contested before the deadline ran out.
- Only about 700 to 1,000 people a year, nationally, request a defended court hearing.
Two trends inside the data are worth sitting with. Officer-issued speeding enforcement grew from 313,076 notices in 2021 to 535,446 in 2025 — while waivers granted on a written explanation fell from 3,794 to 1,670 a year. More tickets, fewer discretionary waivers: the squeeze is real, and it makes the formal, written channels matter more, not less.
The honest caveats
We publish these so you don't have to trust us: Police confirmed they do not record how many disputes they receive (refused under s18(g) of the OIA — the information isn't held), so no dispute success rate exists in this data and we don't claim one. The waiver counts are successes without a denominator. Processing times aren't tracked either. And the 2025 camera figures only run to 30 June, because the camera network transferred to NZTA on 1 July 2025 — NZTA's half of the story is the subject of a separate request we're waiting on.
What it means if a camera ticket lands on you
Not that every camera is wrong — most tickets, camera tickets included, are accurate, and paying a valid one is the right call. What 17,873 documented camera errors mean is that "the camera is always right" is not a fact, it's a default you're allowed to test. Camera notices are now NZTA's to decide, the check costs nothing, and the grounds are concrete: calibration and certification, mobile-camera siting rules, image identification, and whether you were the driver at all — liability transfers if you weren't. Our free check reads your notice against those grounds and tells you honestly whether it's worth disputing — including when it isn't.
Sources: NZ Police infringement disposition data 2021–2025, released under the Official Information Act, ref IR-01-26-24762 — response letter and full dataset downloadable at getmeoff.co.nz/data. This post is general information, not legal advice; no outcome is guaranteed, and no dispute success rate exists or is implied.