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by Paul Taylor - Lakes Weekly Bulletin

You don’t need to lock your doors in Queenstown.

This has long been something of a point of pride for locals and as an ex-pat it’s something I tell my friends and family back home in the UK, where if something isn’t nailed down, there’s a good chance it will be nicked. When I lived in city centre Manchester, I had to park my old banger on the street. It was broken into at least five times in two years, windows smashed, even though there was nothing inside and I left the glove box open and parcel shelf off. In another example (there are many), a friend parked his truck with a trailer and ride-on-mower outside his house, popped back inside to get something and when he came out, trailer and mower were gone. As a teenager, I had my beloved mountain bike pinched from my garage a few days before Christmas.

I was shocked when I settled in Queenstown that a Kiwi friend would leave his expensive Apple laptop on the passenger seat of his car or work van. It’s the same in Dubai, where there’s something called the Dubai Test. You leave your Rolex and laptop on a table, walk away for a few hours, come back and find they’ve not been touched. In both Dubai and Queenstown, the locals are obviously generally good sorts, although in Dubai there’s probably the added incentive of fairly draconian punishments for theft.

Anyway, it has taken me 10 years to chill out about potential theft, and not lock the house every time I pop out for five minutes. I still lock the car and all the house doors at night. Thing is, it now looks as if Queenstown is unfortunately slowly catching up to the rest of the world in terms of property crime.

Each week, our reporter Sue Fea talks to local cops and emergency services for her Crimeline page (p6). It appears to me, from this, there’s more and more car break-ins, thefts and burglaries than ever before. Some of it is definitely kids misbehaving but not all of it. I also read on social media about someone who’d had $25k worth of tools stolen from their house on Valentine’s Day. That makes me wonder whether we have a professional gang of thieves operating in the town. We’ve always had late-night assaults and drunken shenanigans, but this seems more organised.

It’s bloody sad and annoying because the actions of a few pricks means the time has now come for us to take security more seriously - empty cars and vans, lock doors, install security cameras, put bikes away. Maybe it’s another symptom of growth, like the traffic and housing shortage. If it is organised crims, I hope the cops catch them, and I hope our other small-town freedoms - kids walking home from school, no muggings, no knife crime and other nasties - are not so easily lost.