The 111 Files: Can you solve crime puzzle?

The Rotorua police count on information from the public to investigate crime happening in our community. We receive information from a number of sources, including information from the "Crimestoppers" 0800 phone line.

Crimestoppers is an independent organisation established to assist police and other law-enforcement agencies to solve crime. Anyone can pass on information to Crimestoppers by calling a free-to-call 0800 phone number or via an internet on-line message (www.crimestoppers-nz.org). The information is then sent to police, where it becomes available for us to act on.

The Crimestoppers system enables members of the Rotorua community who wish to provide information, to do so anonymously. This anonymity empowers Rotorua residents to do something about crime in their community without fear of their identity becoming known to the police or the people they are providing information about.

Police can use the information we receive to assist when investigating crime. Recently we used Crimestoppers information to target drug dealers.

Four search warrants were executed on an address being used by suspected drug dealers, resulted in drugs with a combined value of approximately $200,000 being seized.

Often members of our community have the last piece of the puzzle and it is not until that additional bit of information is passed to police that we then have enough to tackle a particular crime issue.

From a police point of view every snippet of information is important. In the past it has been this last often little piece of information that was the key to solving a major crime. I can not stress enough how important Crimestoppers is to the reducing crime.