'One big massive offender' jailed

A brazen serial burglar who had been targeting Wairarapa towns earlier this year has been sentenced to eight years in jail.

However not many people are aware of the massive co-ordinated police effort to catch the notorious thief that struck fear into our communities.

Police mounted a special hunt for Lexington Lewis codenamed Operation Shadow, after they found he was probably responsible for several crimewaves in the Wellington region.

Acting senior sergeant Carolyn Watson of Wairarapa Police said the arrest was the result of a huge amount of police work from the front line to the intelligence departments and various police areas working together to get the burglar.

"It was basically intelligence-led policing, which is our direction which led to his identification, capture and arrest.

"We're quite pleased with how we caught him. Obviously it would have been good to catch him when he first offended but he was a different standard of criminal- he's career criminal," she says.

After a string of burglaries in January this year, specialist Wairarapa police analysed the burglary files looking for patterns.

"It (the burglaries) hit and then we've have a month of ferocious, hard-out offending and us back-peddling and trying to deal with all of it and then there would be a big lull," she says.

Police analysts carried out profiling and identified that a number of bank cards had been stolen in the burglaries and investigated the use of these cards just after they were taken and came up with a suspect photo from one of an ATM camera.

This photo was then posted on the police 'Bully Board' which is a national information sharing system within the police, which includes operational information on criminal activity.

A cop in Auckland spotted the picture and recognised the suspect as career burglar Lexington Lewis.

The Auckland officer told the relevant local police so now they suddenly had the name of a suspect to fit with the profile.

Sharing information with the Upper Hutt and the Kapiti Coast, Wairarapa police noticed that each area had sporadic bursts of burglaries that fit this profile, suggesting that the thief was not stopping, just moving from area to area.

"We realised that we were dealing with one big massive offender that was offending in all areas," says Sergeant Watson.

It was Lewis's burglaries in Martinborough that peaked in April that sparked the vigilante response from the community and subsequent confrontations and court action.

The thief would break into multiple homes in a night not caring whether the occupants were home or not.

Sergeant Watson says this is an example of the huge impact that these crimes can have on a community's sense of well-being and security.

"Look at what happened in Martinborough- particularly for the elderly and the vulnerable communities. He certainly accentuated their fear of crime and we were quite conscious of that, which is why we were trying to pour as many resources as we could into catching him because we didn't want the public to feel that we couldn't protect them," she says.

It was frustrating for police because even though they were putting a lot of time and effort into solving these crimes and they had strong leads, there was not a lot they could tell the public because they didn't want to alert criminals to their tactics.

Through working with police in other parts of the country they found out where he was living.

The day police executed a search warrant at his house in Upper Hutt in July he had committed a string burglaries in Masterton the previous night.

Police had some luck when they went to search his suspected place of residence.

"He wasn't there, but then he came home during the warrant and he did a runner and he was caught by a police dog," says Sergeant Watson.

They found property that he had taken from twelve occupied homes he burgled in Hillcrest Street, Ferguson Street, Liverpool Street, and York Street in one night.

It was unusual for him to come to Masterton because he usually hit towns which didn't have 24 hour police coverage.

Lewis pleaded guilty to 62 charges of burglary, 46 of using a document with intent defraud, two of attempting to use documents, two of theft and one of taking a motor vehicle.

He was sentenced to eight years in prison with a minimum non-parole period of 4.5 years.

He has a record of offending that dates back 20 years and has been in prison 14 times.

Sergeant Watson said police were concerned that the crimes might become more serious if he was confronted while in the process of burgling a house so they were very keen to nab him as soon as they could.

"That is always something that is in the back of our mind- that there is the potential for the offending to escalate," she says.

She commended the good work of the Crime Control Unit who worked huge hours to track him down.