Officer-in-charge Jeff Taylor said the sub-region was experiencing its lowest level of crime in five years, with a 19.5 per cent reduction this financial year on the back of a 15 per cent drop the previous one. Sgt Taylor said police were hoping for it to be down by more than 20 per cent when the 2016-17 period ends on June 30.
“The reason I think it’s gone down is our sanction rates – the amount of crime we actually solve – has gone up,” Sgt Taylor said.
“So we’ve actually locked up a lot of crooks, people that have been causing us some pain over the period; we’ve managed to put a few people in prison, which has slowed things down.
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READ NOW“We used to get a lot of crime at Mundaring Weir, like breaking into cars and then obviously subsequent frauds.
“We haven’t had one at Mundaring Weir since November last year.”
He said this was due to a partnership with the Water Corporation, police patrols and charges recently laid.
“We actually charged two male offenders from Northam – one with 40 odd offences and one with 20 odd offences – and because of that it’s really just dropped off the radar,” he said.
He said their use of social media to share CCTV images of people committing crimes was another big contributor, especially for shoplifting and fuel theft, which were ongoing problems for the area.
“I’ve been able to get some contacts on the Facebook side of things and a lot of our stuff gets shared,” he said.
“Because people share our tweets and share the images of offenders, we actually solve those now, whereas before they probably weren’t solved.”
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