The casual meet and greet allowed Inspector Dan Skelly and his fellow officers the opportunity to mingle with the public while addressing what he believes to be an inaccurate perception of crime in Wellington.

“We want to get the message out about our current crime trends – it’s great news for Wellington, crime stats are low, and the last BOCSAR figures released a few days ago prove that,” Inspector Skelly said. “However, in Wellington we find there seems to be a large amount of people that have a perception that the crime is higher than what it is. It isn’t.”

Inspector Skelly made reference to statistics which reveal seven break and enters reported for February 2018, in comparison to 57 the same time last year.

“That’s a great improvement and that is reality at the moment, the community should be very happy with that,” he said. 

Inspector Skelly believes a number of television programs have harmed the town’s reputation in what is otherwise a great community.

“I know from facts and figures the crime isn’t what people think it is and we should see that for what it is, the cold hard light of day, the facts and figures prove that crime stats are down,” he said.

“Now, we’re always going to have peaks and troughs in crime, I’m not saying it’s going to continue, I’m saying the police in Wellington and the Orana Mid-Western Police District will be working proactively 24-seven to try and maintain the current low statistics.”

Re-engineering of the Orana Local Area Command into the Orana Mid-Western Police District – which has 21 police stations and 230 staff – will allow police the resources and flexibility to achieve this goal, according to Inspector Skelly. He affirmed police will do their best to drive the crime rate down as low as possible.

“We are out there, it’s not a matter of if, it’s a matter of when,” he said. “We want to remove the people who feed off the good people in the community.”