This is crazy.
A man follows a drunk driver from Tairua on the Coromandel Peninsula to the Mt Wellington motorway off-ramp in Auckland, making five 111 calls in the process, passing two marked police cars (one heading into Tairua, and another stopped on the side of the road ticketing another vehicle), but to no avail; the driver gets away with it.
A dairy owner supplies police with surveillance camera footage of a young thief, including his name and where he lives. He receives a letter from police informing him that they don't have the resources to investigate this case; the thief gets away with it.
It has just been revealed that nine reported incidents of rape on South Auckland have gone uninvestigated; nine rapists get away with it.
This is serious.
A number of things will happen. Ordinarily 'good' or 'innocent' citizens could take the law into their own hands when a crime is committed, knowing that police won't come. They further endanger themselves, and themselves risk prosecution or worse for attacking an offender or otherwise taking the law into their own hands.
What is far worse, however, is that these shortcomings are telling criminals that they can commit petty crimes (or even rape) with a high likelihood that they'll get away with it.
I'm concerned.
Update 01/04/05: Not long after posting this it was reported that there were in fact 11 unallocated rape cases in South Auckland. And last night I discover (see this tvnz.co.nz news article) that the truth is that there are 22 unassigned rape cases in South Auckland, with half of them being child rape cases.
There are a total of 1,134 unallocated cases in Counties/Manukau, with as many again being allocated, but not under active investigation. The rest of the country has 909 unallocated cases, including three rape cases.
