Tūrangi Police: Do you know where your kids are?

Tūrangi Police spent a lot of time last week picking up young people and children and returning them home. Photo / File

Kia ora koutou katoa. In this week's report I want to draw the community's attention to the problems we have with some of our young people.

Some of them are congregating at a local house where the occupant is under the mistaken impression she is doing them a favour by providing somewhere for them to go. We are continually having to go around, pick these children up and take them back to their own homes again which is time-consuming and frustrating.

One particular child had to be picked up every day last week and returned to their placement which takes our team away from doing other, more important work to protect the local community.

Some of these young people are also breaking into dwellings and in one case, a local church. Items being taken are generally small, and able to be moved on quickly — fishing gear is one example.

This group of about eight young offenders aged between 12 and 16 years is a different group from the ones I talked about in my last report three weeks ago and we are putting some of them through the youth process, while others are gradually being moved out of our town.

As police, it feels as though some people expect the police to be parenting their children and don't appear to care where their children are or what they are doing. Other parents want to be mates with their children and that means it becomes difficult to put in rules and boundaries when they're needed.

Families and their extended whānau need to take some ownership and actually step up and be the parents supporting each other. That means making sure that children are not out doing naughty stuff and actually caring about where they are instead of leaving them out to roam around getting into trouble.

Constable Jeremy Poynter, Turangi Police. Photo / Supplied

That said, the majority of the families in our community are amazing parents and their children rarely come to police attention.

In other police news, we had six family harm incidents last week. Burglaries last week were up, with five reported.

As police we hear reports of people complaining on Facebook that they have been victims of crime, but often these crimes have never been reported to us. Please, if you or someone you know has been the victim of a crime, call 105 (ring 111 if it is happening now) and make a report so that we can investigate it.

If you have information on any crimes please call our Crimestoppers line 0800 555 111 or visit www.crimestoppers-nz.org. This is our community taking ownership and provides police with information that reduces crime and the harm it creates in our community.

Kia pai tō wiki, Jeremy.