Crime figures drop in Honeydew Cluster

Following a crime stats article that stated that crime in the Honeydew Cluster was in the top four highest crime figures in the entire province. Honeydew Cluster Commander Major General Oswald Reddy thought it was time to set the record straight as those statistics were compiled out of crime stats in 2013 and are thus outdated.

Maj Gen Reddy said, “The crime stats put us in a bad light and make it seem like crime is extremely high when in fact it’s a lot lower than it was last year this time.”

He added that the police station started off 18th on the Performance Crime Chart at the start of the year and they are now in 2nd place on the chart.

“We are busy with a couple of crime prevention strategies now that contribute to lower crime with the assistance of Visible Policing and our CPF members that help to keep an eye on crime in the various areas.”

Maj Gen Reddy explained that crime starts with crime generators and crime attractors. “Crime generators can be described as certain hotspots that generate crime, these hotspots are unlicensed sheebeens and taxi ranks. Secondly, you get crime attractors that attract crime – this can be areas like shopping centres, banks and casinos that attract criminals because they know that people with wallets full of money will be visiting these places.

“In order to lower crime at these areas, we hold saturation patrols within the hotspots where we send in police officers on foot and in their vehicles and this helps to lower crime in certain hotspots. Another approach we take is primary and secondary disruptive interventions. This approach is where we hold a roadblock to target a certain gang or individual or we hold roadblocks without any intel and in both of these operations we normally make a large number of arrests.”

He said that with certain hotspots the police and security companies incorporate a target-hardening strategy where they make it harder for the criminals to get to the targets by installing burglar proofing or an alarm system at problematic properties.

“Prevention is better than cure and we need to rehabilitate the criminals and people that buy from criminals because if there is no demand for stolen goods then crime figures will decrease.”

Maj Gen Reddy said that the police still have a long way to go and that one form of crime will always be present somewhere. “If you apply pressure and manpower to a hotspot then crime will just be displaced into another area like it happened when we lower crime in certain hotspots in the Honeydew area and they moved to Cosmo City where most of the contact crimes are now committed.”

He added that the police alone cannot solve all the crime problems and no government can provide all the resources needed by the police to address these problems. “It is therefore essential that the available allocated resources are fruitfully utilised to fulfil the mandate. And one of these resources is the public that supply info and the CPF members who assist the police in various crime operations.

“The Honeydew Cluster still has a long way to go, but if we stand strong with the various role players then we might be able to reduce crime drastically in the cluster,” concluded Maj Gen Reddy.