Police Report Increase In Crime In Auckland

Press, Volume XCVIII, Issue 29070, 5 December 1959, Page 12

Police Report Increase In Crime In Auckland

(New Zealand Press Association; AUCKLAND, December 4.

More than 1000 burglaries have been committed in Auckland in the past six months. More than 750 shops, offices and factories have been broken into. There have also been several hundred cases of housebreaking.

, The police have arrested 130 offenders —mostly young men—for most of these offences. One arrest often accounts for 10 to 20 separate crimes.

Crime is steadily increasing in Auckland, according to Detective-Superintendent F. J. Brady, chief of the Auckland C. 1.8.

Already in the first four days of this month, 11 cars have been reported stolen from the city. Last month, 15 were taken in three days. An average of 30 cars are stolen every month. But every car stolen this year has been recovered. The burglaries which keep two squads of detectives working day and night from the central police station, are not organised. There

is no underworld, according to Mr Brady.

An underworld which grew and expanded in Auckland in 1955, involving several men and women in major thefts, violence, threats and gang blackmail, was quashed when the last member of the organisation was imprisoned. All are now serving sentences in the Auckland prison. After investigating hundreds of burglaries in the last six months the police have arrested 130 offenders. Most of them are young men.

Mr Brady heartily condemned louvre windows. He said they were an open invitation to burglars. “Furthermore,” he said, “people are absolutely foolish to leave money on their premises. Burglars look for the till, the safe and finally, but usually, the place where the proprietor so carefully hid his takings.” The first thing a group of young criminals usually does when going off on a spree, the police find, is to steal a car. Here, the public helps the criminal very often, by leaving keys in the ignition, and leaving the door or window unlocked. Even a window open only half an in h is ‘open sesame’ to a car converter.

“The city is getting bigger all the time," Mr Brady said. “Crime is increasing, as a natural consequence. But if we can get the public thinking, co-oper-ating, and simply using commonsense, we can do a lot to cut the rate down.”