Kia ora koutou. You will have already read on page 4 that police had a good result from four search warrants being executed in Tūrangi over the last week.
We were targeting stolen snowboards but it was also good to get those three firearms and the cannabis plants off the streets and return the snowboards to their owners. Four local men are being spoken to.
In terms of other happenings, we have had a bit of a spike in burglaries around town in the early hours of the mornings. It has mostly been at the northern end of the town centre, where the bowling club, a local cafe and a residential garage have all been hit.
We have some pretty good CCTV footage from two of the locations and will be reviewing it.
These burglaries are also a timely reminder to repeat our advice to protect your possessions: lock things away and don't leaving them lying around, keep valuables out of sight, lock your vehicles, homes and sheds and call police on 111 immediately if you see something suspicious.
Family harm continues to go up and down and in our town it doesn't take many incidents to cause a rise in numbers.
We are working with a couple of our repeat families and trying to get them some support around making better decisions when they are together and things start to get heated.
Our family harm officer Constable Sally Tai-Rakena is involved and all our other staff here work with families as needed.
You will also see in the report about the new community patrol vehicle that our Community Constable John Malpas is working with Safe Tūrangi to increase our Community Patrol to prevent crime too.
We've got some good things happening here in Tūrangi at present and our staff are working hard to keep crime low.
We have also had police from Taupō helping us execute search warrants on a regular basis lately and we thank them for their support. With the help of these warrants we are finding things we are looking for and sometimes more than we anticipated, as in the case with the snowboards last week.
What we often find is that where there is one form of offending, there are often others. Drugs, dishonesty, firearms have all become more prevalent and it's just the progression of what we are dealing with and how organised crime has developed. Be reassured we are prepared for it and for what we need to do to combat it.
Credit: NZHerald.co.nz