Increase in crime feels too close for comfort

Tuesday, 20 June 2023

The Cosmic store on Colombo St had its front windows smashed by a car at 4.15am on Tuesday.

Mike Yardley is a Christchurch-based writer on current affairs and travel.

OPINION: Walking by Cosmic’s Colombo St store in Sydenham last week, the ravages of yet another ram-raid stopped me in my tracks.

As I cast my eyes over the beleaguered shop frontage, all boarded up in plywood, the store assistant shook her head in despairing resignation.

“Yep – we were hit again. And they were a bunch of bloody 12-year-olds!” she thundered.

The ram-raid had occurred a week earlier, the second in as many months on this store. (Police confirmed four youths were arrested after being apprehended in Ashburton, shortly after the aggravated burglary, in which they allegedly reversed a stolen Mazda Atenza through the shopfront.)

In May, the first smash-and-grab on Cosmic occurred alongside the ram-raid on the neighbouring store, Westende Jewellers.

Huge crates of greywacke stones remain stationed outside the jewellery store, in a bid to thwart a repeat incursion.

With Christchurch seemingly seeing a sustained increase in crime, not only is the brazen nature of the offending highly visible, but it feels far too close for comfort.

Cosmic in Sydenham was ram-raided, allegedly by a group of 12-year-olds, at the beginning of June, the second time the business has been hit.

The explosion in ram-raids has been a potent headline-grabber, across the nation, for the past 12 months.

In a curious bid to hose down public alarm, Police National Headquarters has gone to great lengths to downplay the spike “in vehicles being used to enter a premise to commit a burglary”. The police website proudly asserts that “ram-raids peaked in August 2022.”

Some 116 such offences were clocked across the country last August, and at the start of April, the Beehive issued a press release trumpeting “the 65% fall in ram-raids over the past six months”.

That was predicated on the monthly ram-raid count dropping to 44 in February. However, since then, the monthly ticker has climbed significantly again, with 57 ram-raids in March and 68 in April.

May’s data is due out this week, but trawling through media reportage of such incidents in recent weeks, it’s highly conceivable that it will eclipse April’s count.

Huge crates of greywacke stones sit outside Westende Jewellers to prevent a repeat of the ram-raid in May.

It’s particularly concerning that the surge in ram-raids in Canterbury is still spiralling - it most certainly did not peak in August. Such a rose-tinted view would appear to be an awfully Auckland-centric reading of the data.

Canterbury racked up 21 ram-raids in March and April, more than the Auckland City, Counties-Manukau or Waikato police districts, respectively. In stark contrast, the Wellington district reported none at all.

Wigram MP Megan Woods is confident that the Christchurch roll-out of the intensive youth programmes Kotahi te Whakaaro and Circuit Breaker will soon blunt the spike in local ram-raids. I wish I could share her confidence.

Meanwhile, have you noticed a common denominator underpinning a vast swathe of ram-raids and commercial burglaries in Christchurch? 4am-5am seems to be the favoured hour for these smash-and-grabs.

Is it just a coincidence that this is when police response capability is at its lowest ebb, with the overnight shift winding down and many rostered officers already “off-line,” processing jobs and their copious paperwork requirements?

Police numbers in Canterbury have increased by 123 officers in the last six years, despite the Government boasting of 1800 new officers nationally, Mike Yardley writes.

The Government proudly spruiks how it has boosted frontline police ranks.

But its political rhetoric about “1800 extra police on the beat” has been embellished, given 270 of those extra staff are authorised officers with no powers of arrest. They certainly won’t be on the beat.

Be that as it may, Police Minister Ginny Andersen is emphasising that with 10,700 frontline officers, the blue line has expanded by 21% since 2017.

Police Association president Chris Cahill argues that “the growth in demand and crime has swamped any meaningful increase in capacity”.

Speak to any Christchurch cop, and they will tell you how stretched they are, pulled from pillar to post.

As The Press reported on Saturday, Christchurch has experienced a 57% annual increase in reported theft. And only 5% of offences resulted in court action.

I’m deeply concerned that the Canterbury Police District is not getting its fair share of extra officers.

Police National Headquarters confirms to me that as of June 1, the number of frontline officers in Canterbury has increased by 123, compared with six years ago.

That’s 123 out of 1800, 7% of the pool, despite Canterbury comprising 13% of the national population.

We have been grossly short-changed.