What are police up to?

MONDAY, JANUARY 24, 2011

What are police doing?

I had to deal with a very irate 30 year old daughter last week. She lives with her aunt in a not so good area of Rotorua and over the past two months, her car has been broken into twice and my sister’s home burgled and ransacked to the tune of in excess of $20,000 of goods and damage.

Once again last week, the number one daughter’s car was broken into and a ring she had in the glove box was taken. I spoke to a friend of mine who is involved in a civilian manner with the local police. It turns out there has been a huge increase in burglaries in the area, some 15 had been reported in the past two weeks. Yet my sister – who had someone closeby do a fair bit of digging and who found the names of the alleged toe-rags my daughter had interrupted during the house burglary and who had furnished police with the names – has heard nothing at all from the police about it. Nor has she heard anything from Victim Support, whom the police are supposed to pass on these kinds of things to. And this despite being front page news in the local daily paper for the burglary and page four on Saturday where the family spoke of feeling like they were being hounded out of the city. And even with that report I had to question the journalist’s line of thinking – there was not one comment from a senior police officer as to what the police were actually doing about the problem.

So – where are the police here? Where is the community constable even? Where is anyone from the force trying to track down the maggots responsible for this huge increase and to get around the small community and pick up the ante in encouraging people to keep an eye on each other’s homes and to let them know that many of these burglaries are happening in daylight hours? Police have descriptions – even the group offenders dog has been described. Yet not one of the three people I have spoken to whom this has affected in the past fortnight have seen or heard from police since the initial event. And not one of these people has had a call from Victim Support.

One wonders whether or not the fact that many of these people live in a low socio-economic area has a bearing on whether or not police place any importance on attending ‘routine’ events. I don’t buy that as being a good enough reason. If it was happening in Lynmore, Springfield or Baxendale, police would be in like Flynn – because these residents would be dancing up and down about it.

We’ve had no murders here in the past month. We would have had a number of family violence assaults, because Rotorua features highly in those stats – but the lines of investigation for those should be easily sorted within a week.

So…. what on earth are our local police up to?