It’s been a busy month in Umdloti for police and security companies, especially the last two weeks which produced two residential burglaries, a hijacking and a business robbery – queue CSI Miami theme song.
Two houses were broken into on Bellamont Road on the evening of Tuesday, September 26 and the early hours of Thursday, September 28, while more property owners reported incidents of trespassing in the hours leading up to the second incident.
Sandwiched in between on September 27 was the hijacking of a branded Marshall Security armed response vehicle in broad daylight on South Beach Road, followed by a business robbery at the Umdloti commercial centre on Monday, October 2.
This is a frightening spike in crime for Umdloti, and judging by the subsequent exponential growth in the Umdloti Crime Alert WhatsApp group’s membership, the community were unnerved.
But the devil is in the detail and careful examination of each case lead me to the potentially unpopular opinion that Umdloti is not yet the dream destination for armed gangs and hijackers we may have feared at some point last week.
Let me explain. It appears the hijacking on September 27 only happened because the suspects were cornered by Marshall Security (who responded to a suspicious vehicle entering Umdloti) and they were desperate to make a getaway.
Realising that their cover had been blown, the criminals parked their stolen car in the South Beach Road car park and were casually walking in the direction of the garage when they were confronted.
Although they were up to no good, they probably didn’t come to Umdloti explicitly to hijack a car, least of all a branded armed response vehicle.
The business robbery, as it turns out, was a poorly executed inside job that saw the entire “gang” behind bars before the end of the week, stewing in their own juices.
In Afrikaans one would say “slim vang sy baas”, meaning they, particularly the criminal mastermind on the inside, were too clever for their own good and got caught in their own “cleverness”.
Kudos to Durban North Saps detectives for quickly putting two and two together.
The burglar that roamed Bellamont Road must have gasped when his return to the goose that laid the golden eggs less than 24 hours earlier, was foiled by security guards who had done their homework.
Although he managed to run away (burglars on foot are notoriously difficult to catch in the bush), I don’t think he enjoyed the frantic trail run, before being hunted with a massive thermal drone for hours.
However, we know from experience that there will always be more burglars, especially in the run-up to the festive season (we all need to do our Christmas shopping somewhere), so arm your alarm systems and don’t leave doors and windows open.
We are fortunate that we can still walk to restaurants at night and our kids can still have a relatively old school childhood, walking to the beach to meet friends and spend the day there.
We should never take that for granted.
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