Crime fight back

SOME of the most effective breakthroughs against the scourge of crime have been scientific.

Police on the beat protect and serve making our community feel safer in our homes and on the street than we otherwise would.

But science and technology also plays an extraordinary role in modern policing, helping maintain the thin blue line that stands between law and anarchy.

It is hard to fathom just how much police investigations have been aided by DNA testing since its advent as a crime fighting tool in the 1980s.

And now a similar technique — synthetic DNA liquid marking — is being applied to goods that could become targeted by thieves.

The importation of this latest technology, now being trialed here and in Winchelsea, was the brainchild of Craig Gillard, the local Superintendent who apparently encountered it on a Churchill Fellowship to the US and UK two years ago.

If successful, police hope it could reduce the burglary rate in Geelong by 10 per cent.

The experience overseas suggests it can act as such a deterrent to thieves as to even cut burglaries by more than half.

To say such a development here would be welcome would be an understatement.

Local victims of crime from the northern suburbs to Newtown and down the coast would be over the moon if the rate of thefts from homes and businesses was slashed in half.

The technology won’t just allow goods obtained by police to be returned to their rightful owners, it could foreseeably link criminals caught possessing the stolen goods directly to their crimes the same way physical DNA can link violent offenders to assaults.

Word should spread among criminals — and anyone they try to ‘fence’ stolen goods to — that anything they pinch could be provably stolen property.

We could then get to the point where crooks are too scared to burgle from their neighbours.

And wouldn’t that be a wonderful thing.