Lockdown hit to criminals

Tasman police say one of the sideeffects of the coronavirus lockdown has been the increased visibility of criminal activity in the community.

As of yesterday, during the alert level three period there had been 16 prosecutions for lockdown breaches, along with 23 warnings and 10 youth referrals throughout the Tasman Police District.

The district covers Nelson, Marlborough and the West Coast.

On Monday, a 20-year-old woman was sentenced to 80 hours’ community work at the Nelson

District Court, after being stopped by police for breaking lockdown rules for a third time. She was four-wheel driving with friends.

However, Nelson Bays Police Area Commander Paul Borrell said many of the lockdown breach prosecutions had been for people charged with other criminal behaviour – such as burglary, theft, or drug dealing.

Borrell said while there was usually a process around educating and warning people about lockdown breaches, the same tolerance was not extended to people found breaking the law in other ways. He said the vast majority of the community had been respectful and compliant with the alert level rules.

‘‘Whereas everybody else is abiding by the rules and staying home, there’s a very small percentage of the community who are still doing what they’ve always done, and we have found they’re easier to detect and apprehend.’’

Borrell said there had been an increased focus during the past few weeks on checking bail addresses and curfews for known offenders in the region.

He said overall crime volumes had decreased quite significantly.

Due to the lockdown conditions most disorder arrests, which often occurred on Friday or Saturday nights, simply were not happening.

While there had been a big decrease in residential burglaries,

Borrell said there had been a small increase in commercial burglaries.

‘‘We don’t have a lot of commercial burglaries at the best of times, so we certainly notice them when they come in.’’

Tasman District Police Crime Manager Mark Chenery said that during the past month there had not been any noticeable slowing down of drug offending, but there had been two significant arrests relating to drug offending linked to organised crime.

He said while the lockdown would have caused problems for the sale and distribution of illegal drugs, to a certain extent it was still ‘‘business as usual’’.

Borrell said there was also concern about a potential rise in unreported family harm incidents during the past month.

He said while there had been a spike in reported incidents at the beginning of the lockdown, since then the numbers had remained similar to normal levels.

He said police had started an initiative this week to identify which families in the community were most at risk of family harm, and to visit homes to make contact with them.

‘‘If there’s going to be an increase of people coming in because they can’t safely report incidents at the moment, we want to try to get in front of it if we can before we go back to level two or level one.’’