And welcome to Police 5, breaking and entering.
Those words almost sound mild, but they certainly don't accurately describe the real effect
of somebody breaking into your home while you aren't there.
In Queensland right now, breaking and entering is rife.
In every city in this state, people are experiencing outrages on their personal property to the
tune of 72 a day.
And by the way, 60% of all breaking and entering is done by juveniles.
But getting back to what breaking and entering really means, listen to the reaction of a
typical victim after she got home and found her home had been broken and entered.
Well, quite a sickening feeling because I walked in and see everything, a great mess
and things all over the place and it's just the feeling that somebody has been in your
house looking through all your personal belongings and wondering what's there, wondering if they're
still in the house and you sort of, it just leaves this dead feeling in your house I guess.
It's not very pleasant at all.
Does this reaction follow through in subsequent nights for you?
I mean you still feel pretty easy about it.
Oh yeah, oh yeah.
Every car that pulls up at the front or drives by or slowly, you're on edge the whole time.
Every time you go out, you're just wondering all night, you're thinking well what's going
to be there when I come home and it's not nice at all.
I hope it eventually goes but I don't think it'll take a long time.
But of course it's not all youngsters doing the breaking and entering.
An awful lot of adults are doing it.
They steal videos, a favourite target and anything else that's easily sellable.
Now most times they have a ready-made market which is a warning if somebody offers you
a cheap video recorder in a pub.
Another warning concerned anyone who knocks on your door and asks if so and so lives there.
Detective Senior Sergeant John Meskell knows all about such techniques.
The situation you're seeing now is a typical daylight breaking enter where you have a female
part of a gang goes up and knocks on the house door to see if anybody's home.
Anybody home?
Nobody's at home, she goes back to a vehicle where she has two accomplices and she tells
them they then go and they break into the house and steal the property.
So we know they're a little bitLONmates too我們的事 hides why we even do it so
And here we have a situation where we've got two sensible neighbours who are having a chat,
their front door, and they see something untoward happening and one of the neighbours is sensible
enough to jot down the number of the car and through that number we can then trace the
owner of that car and who the offenders are.
And what we would like, Jim, as people, to be sticky beaks and what's happening around
them.
If a person who's leaving their home, going away somewhere, they should tell the next
door neighbours where they're going, how long they've been away for, and in particular ask
them if they see anything untoward, to phone the police and not to be frightened of making
a fool of themselves because in many instances we've been able to apprehend offenders.
There were 637 houses broken and entered in Brisbane during the month of March and in
the Cairns, Innisfail, Moriba area, 151 break and enters.
So as Detective Senior Sergeant John Meskell says, let's help to cut it down, become a
burglar catching sticky beak.
Your house could be next.
Our thanks to the Brisbane Youth Theatre for our young actors and see you next time.