The recent release of last year's crime statistics from the NSW Bureau of Crime Statistics and Research shows most major crime categories dropping over the last five years, based on the September quarterly reports.

In particular, malicious damage to property has shown a huge swing downwards despite last year's string of deliberate fires. With malicious property damage being mostly associated with youth, police have been heartened that intervention and engagement programs are seeing success.

Crime manager and Detective Inspector Eugene Stek said that COVID had caused a significant lapse in youth engagement programs like the Police Citizens Youth Club.

"I think the drop in that malicious damage can be attributed to a lot of those programs like the youth club. Those programs are in full swing now, there's that engagement," Detective Inspector Stek said.

"There was a bit of a gap during COVID in respect to those engagement programs. Those programs are coming back now, but it was frustrating ... The fires are the same. We attribute that to youth engagement, but we also increased our patrols there. We looked at the intelligence from our detectives for that and we increased our high visibility patrolling."

While crime took a downturn for the most part, the year showed a huge upswing in personal thefts. Detective Inspector Stek explained that many of the reports could be attributed to domestic violence, which remains a major problem across regional NSW.

"A lot of it comes back to domestic violence incidents, sometimes people take their partner's phones and that counts as theft. Let's say there's a couple fighting in a carpark, one of them grabs the other's phone. That will be reported as a theft in that sense."

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Griffith's domestic violence rate remains high, but cops are placing a strong emphasis on intervention and compliance checks to try and bring numbers down.

"It's very high, but that seems to be coming down now because of those checks. The more compliance checks we do, it does reduce domestic violence," Detective Inspector Stek said.

"We did a lot of work in that space leading up to Christmas, making sure everyone is okay and making sure those supports are there. That seems to have worked - sometimes you get that spike in Christmas but we didn't see that last year."

Going ahead this year, police will be prioritising domestic violence checks and more intervention programs to reduce the rate of violence and abuse.

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