HOUSE BREAKERS.

Auckland Star, Volume LXVI, Issue 250, 22 October 1935, Page 15

HOUSE BREAKERS.

A SYDNEY NUISANCE.

MANY WEEK-END CRIMES. POLICE FORCE INADEQUATE 1 (From Our Own Correspondent.) SYDNEY, October 10. One of the permanent features of our police news on Monday mornings is the recurrence —sometimes in an extensive list —of "week-end" burglaries. More especially in the fine summer weather families leave their homes for the greater part of two days, and too often when they return find them rifled and despoiled.

Of courso in a city that includes within the metropolitan area nearly a million and a half inhabitants something of tlie sort may naturally he expected, and some of our suburbs seem particularly liable to epidemics of this kind. A few weeks ago a householder wrote to the "Sydney Morning Herald" complaining bitterly that the burglars will not leave him alone. His house, has been broken into five times. After the first three robberies he decided to leave that suburb—for the good and sufficient reason that the insurance companies refused to take further risks in that locality. On two occasions the men were caught. The last time they refused to divulge where they had hidden the stolen goods, but they got off very lightly, being sentenced to a short term of imprisonment, which was suspended on condition of "good behaviour for two years."

Danger to Womenfolk. This householder enlarges, with pardonable emotion, on the harrowing spectacle presented by his house after the burglars had finished with it—rooms ransacked, wardrobes forced, locks broken, household treasures gone —to say nothing of the painful and possibly dangerous shock that such happenings inflict upon the women and children of the family. The worst of it is that, as a private citizen, this householder has been refused leave to "carry a gun" or to take other steps which, as he politely puts it, "might make the home immune" from depredations in the future.

Of course, it is quite easy to point out that the great Australian cities—for Melbourne shares this unpleasant notoriety with Sydney—are not so badly off, in regard to burglaries, as London arid New York. In the United States many people seem to have come to the conclusion that it is quite impossible for the policc to cope effectively with burglaries and there are in the large cities

"burglary-defence associations," which own their own "police force" and accept on certain terms the responsibility of providing that protection against burglars which apparently the official "defenders of law and order" cannot supply. A correspondent writing to the "Sydney Morning Herald" asks us to console ourselves with the reflection that in London burglaries are a daily occurrence and not a week-end specialty as they are in Sydney," and he instances a recent case in which a private house was broken into in the great metropolis and a heavy steel safe and its contents, valued at £10.000, removed from the third floor while the owners and servants were all "at home" in the building. But this correspondent points out that in England the police protection amounts to "one per 120 of the population, while in Sydney we have about one policeman to 800 people." Heavy Punishments Rare.

No doubt one of the chief reasons for the frequency and the success of burglaries in Sydney is the comparative weakness of our police force. Our policemen. and the detectives of the Criminal Investigation Bureau are certainly efficient, but there arc not enough of them. Still, there is another reason to be discovered in the comparative lightness of the sentences often imposed here for burglary. The householder, whom I quoted first, who has suffered five distinct and . separate burglaries, has protested vigorously that the penalties enforced now-a-days are not severe enough to act as an. effective deterrent. He quotes the conclusion of a report on one of the cases, which is very much to the point:—"The prisoner pleaded guilty and the police withdrew 18 other charges." The prisoner was then sentenced to a few months' imprisonment, which was "suspended on paying a certain amount, to be of good behaviour for two years."

There are plently of parallels to tliis extract to be found in our criminal court records; and it surely cannot be maintained that sentences of this kind provide any adequate defence for peaceful citizens or any effective intimidation for the enterprising burglar. On these remarks, some tender-hearted sonl sent to the "Herald" a highly characteristic comment: —"The law," lie wrote, "is not expected to be ferocious—better to place a man on probation for two years, and so possibly save him than sentence him for two years, and make him a hardened criminal." From which, at least, two inferences may he drawn — that this easy-going altruist has not studied the literature of penology, and that ho has never been burgled.