Dubbo police are hopeful a combination of significant factors can help the city lower its rate of break-and-enters in the coming months.
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While 2016 went down as one of the worst on record for home invasions within the city, figures from the early months of 2017 have flattened out.
A drop in February was countered by a slight rise in March, with 83 reported incidents of break, enter and steal from dwellings.
That figure is up from 80 last year, as well as the 78 reports from February.
But data for April so far has revealed a significant drop in comparison to 12 months ago.
“We're only 17 days in to the month obviously so we don’t want to jinx it, but we’re tracking pretty well,” Orana LAC acting superintendent Scott Tanner said.
“We made a couple of significant arrests late last month, and we’ve implemented some programs aimed at recidivist offenders as well as at-risk youth.
“We’re throwing everything we can at it, because it has been a big problem, and we’re finding that the combination of these arrests and particularly these new programs, as well as people generally getting the message about home and car security, is helping.
“As an example, in one of the programs we’re running with the Department of Corrective Services, we have 15 at-risk youths that we’re working with, and none of them have been in any trouble since we started in January.
“There’s no magic solution but we’re working across a number of different areas to try and curb the problem.”
In other figures from March, 23 vehicles were reported as stolen while there were 49 incidents of items being reported as stolen from motor vehicles.