Increase in house burglaries around the city

Hi-Tech Security regional operations manager, Callum MacPherson, said they noticed this by comparing the statistics for first 20 days of March to last year.
Mac Pherson said, “Further, the tendency is that suspects have targeted homes with no alarms or where alarms are not activated.”

He said alarm systems did not prevent suspects from breaking into a home, but at least helped control the loss suffered. “But what few people realise is that when we respond to a break-in there is a complete contingency plan in place to attempt to find the suspects. This in turn, has led to successes and has a great further crime prevention effect.”

MacPherson said they had made four arrests in Steiltes, three at El Madre and four arrests in West Acres.

He added that once they knew that criminals had broken into an area, multiple units were called on in the search. “This means criminals have little chance of easily committing a second offence in the area. Thus, when breaking into homes without alarms, they are able to break into multiple homes in an area and, even if just targeting individual homes, there is no pressure on their escape, as no one is aware they are there.”

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“There are criminal syndicates operating in our area and a lot of effort goes into the tracking and gathering of information on them. Residents of Nelspruit must assist us by arming alarms and keeping windows closed, as part of multiple syndicates’ modus operandi is using the ‘fishing method’ to hook valuables through windows as to not trigger alarms. Cases have been reported where these suspects climbed through burglar proofing and gained access into the homes.”

In the past two months they have had excellent arrests combatting the crime, but at present, there were still criminal syndicates operating in the city.