Wellington - Violent Xbox video games featuring random killings have been blamed by a top New Zealand police officer for rising crimes of youth violence, it was reported Wednesday. Superintendent Bill Harrison, national manager of police youth services, said that increasing rates of youth violence throughout the Western world in the last two or three years coincided with the introduction of products such as the Xbox, the New Zealand Herald reported.
He told a conference on youth crime that he had started to wonder about the impact of video games when he found his 14-year-old son playing a graphic Xbox game involving people killing each other.
"It was desensitizing him to violence," he said. "It was shifting his norm about how he would deal with conflict."
The conference was told that the number of young New Zealanders caught by police for all offences fell 17 per cent between 1996 and 2006, but the number arrested for violent crimes rose by 25 per cent.
