A POLICE “shock and awe” campaign targeting teen criminals these holidays may be extended until Christmas, Wagga Police have said.
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Operation Assure has been in swing since Wednesday last week and has already netted a reduction in residential home break-ins, the program’s coordinator Detective Sergeant Ryan Sheaff said.
The highly successful campaign is in operation for the second time this year after literally stopping “kiddie crims” in their tracks on Wagga’s streets throughout February.
It comes as latest figures from the NSW Bureau of Crime Statistics showed Wagga had a home break-in rate three times higher than the rest of the state from June 2015 to June 2016.
Wagga also ranked seventh in NSW for stealing from a vehicle or unsecured dwelling for that 12 month period.
Detective Sergeant Sheaff while it was only slated to run for five weeks, he was looking at extending the operation past school holidays and through the rest of the year.
“What we have to do is look at the resources we have available,” he said.
“As you can imagine, we are taking resources from other areas to target this, so we will be looking at whether we can keep doing that, and if so we will keep running that until Christmas.”
Wagga Neighbourhood Watch vice president David Abbott welcomed the chance for Operation Assure to extend if there were enough police to staff it.
“It was very well received earlier this year,” he said.
“When it ended, a lot of people were upset that it wasn’t an ongoing thing.”
Detective Sergeant Sheaff said besides a reduction in home break-ins, several criminals had been caught in the act since the operation began.
Last Wednesday, four girls aged 14 and 15 were dealt with under the Young Offenders Act after being busted by police with shoplifted goods in Wagga Marketplace. A 45-year-old Mount Austin man arrested with stolen goods on Monday was also a bonus byproduct of the extra police around from the youth crime operation.
Detective Sergeant Sheaff said Wagga’s youth crime was not strategic and was preventable through extra patrols.
“It’s not something we have seen is overly organised,” he said. “It’s spontaneous and opportunistic so by having police out there we are preventing crime.”
