2011年9月19日星期一

Police seek to expand public interaction

When Leslie and Dakota Kalawaia were awakened as room MJ-808 were flicked on and off early one morning in their Kahului home, they at first didn't realize there was a stranger in the house.

The couple didn't get a good look at a large naked man who ran out of Dakota Kalawaia's bedroom past Leslie Kalawaia and pushed through the living room screen door. "We were both shocked," Leslie Kalawaia said. "I was just worried about her."

But after chasing the intruder as he ran through the garage and jumped over a side wall, Leslie Kalawaia took note of the license plate of the van that the man got into before it "dug out" from the front of a neighbor's house on Kuula Street. He yelled out the license plate letters and numbers to his wife, telling her to call 911.

The Kalawaias' call at about 5 a.m. July 7, 2009, reporting the license plate number of the van, led to the arrest later that day of a man implicated in a home invasion spree in Kahului, said Lt. Wayne Ibarra, who was working as the patrol district commander at the time.

Now commander of the police Community Relations Section, Ibarra cited the couple's actions as one of the successes of Neighborhood Crime Watch programs. Police have helped residents organize about 170 of the groups on Maui to look out for and report suspicious activity.

Police are hoping to expand on such efforts by providing information on residential burglaries and vehicle thefts and break-ins in Maui County to be published each Monday in The Maui News. The information, including dates, times and street locations of the crimes, will be from the weeklong period starting two weeks earlier so that the majority of such crime reports will be included.

Police Chief Gary Yabuta said the Maui Police Department is committed to providing the information as part of its goals and objectives "to enhance our relationships with the community."

Officer Ernest Grace of the Community Relations Section is using MPD's new computer system to compile the information.

"The technology we spent a lot of money on is to extract information, possibly pinpoint problems in crime and allocate our resources accordingly," Yabuta said. "To make it work, the community has to know what's going on in their own community."

He said property crimes, which are often associated with drug problems, are one of the main concerns on the island.

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