Herald editorial: Visitors witness brazen crime and inept policing

Elke Schwarz with her children Robin (right), Marius and Lukas (left) who were here on holiday from Germany when their car with all possessions inside were stolen. Photo / Dean Purcell

New Zealanders are hospitable people. We like to think that any one of us would go out of our way to help a visitor in need of advice or directions.

Even this country's border officials are a pleasant change from the surly reception to be expected at airport immigration desks elsewhere. Here, we imagine, tourists find a small population of friendly, fair-minded people and a like-minded but effective police force.

How appalling then, to read of the experience of a German family in Auckland last weekend.

The woman and her three sons went to Waiheke on Saturday, leaving their car in the city. When they returned that evening the car was not where they had left it in a Wilson's parking building.

A few shards of glass in its space showed it had been stolen with all their possessions.

That was bad enough but the next day they found their car parked outside the very hostel in Queen St where they were staying.

Three women were in the car and one of them appeared to be offering the family's clothes for sale to passersby. A child in the car was wearing items from their bags. The police were called and the family waited for them to turn up. They never did.

It is an astonishing commentary on our police these days that the occupants of the stolen car obviously did not expect them to turn up.

They remained parked there long enough for the visitor to approach them several times. The woman selling the clothes insisted they had found the suitcase in the street, as if that gave them rightful possession of it.

The visitor asked for at least their passports to be returned to them, they were supposed to fly out that evening. Even that request was refused.

What sort of brazen culture of crime are we breeding when something such as this could happen on a Sunday morning in Queen St? Car thieves or receivers of stolen goods would once have abandoned the items quickly and fled as soon as they realised they had been seen. But that was when the police were likely to answer a call.

These days they are in no hurry even to offer an explanation of why that call failed to jog them in to action.

The impression this family has been given of New Zealand's street crime, law enforcement and commercial service does not bear thinking.

They were probably too anxious that day to read the Herald on Sunday's account of a Whangarei man whose metal detector found a platinum wedding ring in the sand on Lang's Beach.

He went to great trouble tracing its London jeweller and the ring was returned to a woman who was on holiday here at Christmas.

That beachcomber represents the best of New Zealand. Unfortunately, others let us down.