Editorial: Police made right choice on medals

Just a few weeks ago, when we asked the police how much they had paid out in rewards over the past five years, they replied, nothing. Of the nearly $800,000 offered for information over that period, not a cent had been handed over. Fully $300,000 of that amount had been offered for the return of the medals stolen from the Waiouru Army Museum in December and yesterday a good chunk of that money changed hands.

The recipients seem to be known only to an Auckland lawyer, Chris Comeskey, a former policeman who says he knows the thieves well enough to tell the Herald on Sunday, "They are not bad guys. In fact, they were quite likeable. I just think they had no idea what a furore this would cause." He even issued a statement from one of them expressing "deep regret" and apologising "to the people of New Zealand".

We have to take Mr Comeskey's work at face value. He has produced the medals. The fact that he has sworn never to divulge the identity of those who took them is his right as a lawyer, it seems. He says it took painstaking weeks to negotiate the medals' return before they might have been spirited out of the country.

The suspicion remains, though, that whoever took the medals knew their value primarily lay in this country where they could hardly be exchanged privately. They included Victoria Crosses awarded to our well-known war heroes. Their sentimental value to the nation was practically priceless. A reward was bound to be offered for their return.

The outcome negotiated by Mr Comeskey means crime does pay in this case. The police obviously do not know whom he has been negotiating with. Police were given one of the medals a month ago to prove he was on to the haul, and undertook to keep their distance while he completed the deal.

It is sickening that anybody should profit from the return of goods they had no right to take, doubly sickening when the goods are national treasures with a sentimental value to the country that exceeds what they might fetch on a black market. But what choice did the police have? If their criminal intelligence was not as good as Mr Comeskey's, or they could not offer the thieves the protection he could, they had a choice of going after his contacts or recovering the medals as quickly as possible.

They made the choice the country would have wanted once the medals had been missing for 10 weeks and most had accepted they would never be seen again. It is much more important to have them back in safekeeping than to have the satisfaction of seeing the thieves behind bars.

The medals were lost because the Army museum's security was not secure enough, and we owe the medals' return to the generosity of those who posted the reward, Lord Michael Ashcroft, a British collector who offered $200,000, and a former United States Marine, Tom Sturgess, now a Nelson businessman.

They put up the money knowing that it might line the pockets of thieves. If they can be content with the return of the treasures, so can we all. The real regret is that when crime is seen to pay like this, it can only encourage more of it. Waiouru seems to have had an elaborate alarm that worked in response to the break-in, but not well enough.

It is now up to institutions such as the Army museum to ensure not only that the medals collection is displayed with better security but that all rare and valuable items on public display are protected against similar theft. And they ought to go back on display. Replicas are no substitute. If the public was to be denied further chance to see the real honours pinned on the chests of those exceptional soldiers, it would be worse than a reward for crime, it would be a surrender to it. Our heroes would not thank us for that.