Te Radar: Criminal stupidity is not just the prerogative of the criminal class

I suspect there is nothing that cheers up our overworked constabulary so much as the sheer idiocy of the criminal mind.

No doubt there were many wry smiles and chuckling constables round the nation's police stations as reports filtered through of the antics of the petrol thieves of Waipukurau.

These reports did not refer to recent oil companies' price rises. Rather to a trio of vagabonds who filled their car with what they thought was illicitly gained petrol from an unsuspecting farmer's tank.

Regrettably, the fuel they stole turned out to be diesel.

When their car wouldn't start, they decided to investigate. All they needed was a little light. Fortuitously, one of the perpetrators had a lighter. The resulting flames from their burning car soon gave the foolish felons more than enough light to see the error of their ways.

These stories may serve to distract police from their own criminal stupidity, such as the directive from headquarters to some officers that they, and their supervisors, would be charged if they responded to an armed incident carrying their Glock pistols.

Somehow it seems that an "administrative blunder" has meant many officers have yet to re-qualify to carry the weapons. Let's hope the criminals don't find out.

Still, it could be worse. We could live in Malaysia, where crime must be so low that the Government has decreed that police now have the power to randomly search people's cellphones for pornographic images.

Back here the recent police porn scandal is among many reasons being blamed for the lack of people enlisting. One unfortunate officer was quoted in this newspaper as saying, "We cannot get bums on seats." Ironically, it seems they had no trouble getting bums on to their computer screens.

With so much other work available, it leaves only the truly civic-minded and the undesirable to step forward to fill the police boots.

This situation certainly makes any political parties' claims to increase police numbers seem at best a little naive.

Conversely, there are also claims that our prisons are overcrowded. There is, of course, a simple solution: bunk beds.

Oddly, we never hear of the IRD being short-staffed. What does this say about the priorities of our fellow citizens?

Personally, I am less afraid of being a victim of crime than I am of birds.

I have never entirely trusted birds, with their unnervingly beady eyes. Now it seems I am being vindicated.

The upsurge in sniffling starlings and sneezing chickens is the merely the beginning of the global pandemic known as bird flu.

As migrating hordes of flu-riddled suicide-birds invade Africa and Europe, the poultry farmers of the Netherlands are being urged to combat the plague by using the Taleban technique: keeping their birds indoors.

So it seems that we can finally answer that age-old question: Why did the chicken cross the road? To give us the flu.

When millions of us lie dead, that may not seem quite so funny.