Chinchilla residents urged to take security precautions after increase in car thefts

Police have made a series of arrests after a number of alleged car thefts in Chinchilla in the past week.

Dalby Burnett district crime prevention co-ordinator senior constable Dan O'Hara. Picture: Sam Turner

Chinchilla police are urging residents to correctly store their car keys after four vehicles were allegedly stolen in a week.

Police said in most of the cases the keys were stored within easy reach of the alleged thieves, including one vehicle which had the keys stored inside it.

This comes as a recent Queensland police report showed crime rates in parts of regional Queensland have risen to more than four times that of metropolitan areas.

“There were four thefts reported in the past week, one of those reported had actually been stolen some weeks previously but the owner had only just discovered it was missing,” Senior Constable Dan O’Hara said.

“Three have since been recovered in reasonable condition.

“Police have made arrests in relation to the matters and most of the matters have now been cleared. We can say that there were multiple suspects.”

Senior Constable O’Hara said the number of thefts were uncharacteristically high for Chinchilla.

“Four in a week is an unusual spike in thefts, in some cases thefts can be seasonal, quite often it is people coming through from out of town, a lot of the time it might not even be offenders from the local area,” he said.

“In some cases they are used for ram raids, sometimes they steal the car so they have an anonymous vehicle in which they can commit other offences.”

Senior Constable O’Hara asked residents to correctly store their keys in an effort to hinder the would-be thieves.

“In most of the cases the keys were not correctly secured, in one case the keys had been left stored inside the vehicle, it was a work vehicle and they had been left there for another worker to collect them,” he said.

“It is important you make sure you put the keys somewhere secure within your house, because people will actually enter the house and steal your key to steal your motor vehicle.

“A lot of the time they are entering the house and not stealing anything in the house other than the car keys, so people will need to make an effort to hide them somewhere in the house other than hanging them on the wall in the kitchen or in the fruit bowl on the table.

“Keep your keys in a safe spot and definitely don't leave them in the vehicle.”

Originally published as Chinchilla residents urged to take security precautions after increase in car thefts