Police attribute the drop in this type of crime to their policy of targeting regular offenders.
The head of the force’s planning and research department, Dr Ian Skinner, said that experience over the past five years would normally lead them to expect about 480 burglaries a year in the Island.
‘That already compared favourably with the early 1990s, when there were about 750 burglaries a year, so it is good news that we are driving the figures down even further,’ he said.
Chief inspector André Bonjour said that their investigation team had been set up in the knowledge that a hard core of offenders tended to commit a large proportion of crime.
‘By gathering intelligence on key individuals and their associates, we are now better able than ever to catch offenders red-handed or identify the culprit swiftly,’ he said.
This approach, he added, had led to the Island’s current generation of career criminals finding it increasingly difficult to pursue a life of crime, which was reflected in the significant downturn in burglaries.
