$2000 of clothing swiped in smash-and-grab

More than $2000 worth of clothing, taken in minutes, is the latest crime to frustrate a Feilding retailer.

The front window of Turners Sports was smashed with a hammer at 2.30am on Wednesday while a red Commodore waited outside on Manchester St.

It’s the latest in a spate of incidents that has town businesses worried about security.

At the time of the break-in, shop manager Philip Pearpoint had placed a handwritten cardboard sign at the front of his shop in solidarity with dairy owners following the killing of a worker in Auckland.

Pearpoint said the loss of the clothing stolen was covered by insurance, but he was concerned what more brazen attacks were becoming.

‘‘I’ve been in the business 46 years and normally I’m catching a thief once a month. If you do the maths, I reckon I’ve caught over 500 thieves in our shop. The individual police officers have been fantastic ... but they’re just spread too thinly.’’

He said it had been a longstanding pressure point between business owners, police, and the council.

‘‘We’ve written letters to the mayor, we’ve had town protests, we’ve written letters to the police – and to be fair, they’re trying their best. But we need a solution. It’s a huge concern to all of us retailers.’’

Turners thankfully avoided the worst-case scenario. It stocks firearms, but no guns had been taken.

The main target has been clothing and, because of this, the racks Pearpoint would usually place on the pavement have had to be moved closer to the front door.

He believed clothes had been targeted because they were easy to sell on and hard to track down.

Pearpoint said shop owners needed to better know their rights.

‘‘If I find a thief in my shop, I won’t hesitate to detain them until police arrive,’’ he said.

‘‘But some [owners] don’t know you can do that and are worried they might be breaking a law themselves if they try to stop a thief on their own. We’re hoping to organise a gathering of retail workers with police to make them more aware.’’

Pearpoint has been one of Feilding’s more active business owners in preventing crime in his shop.

In 2018, he even jumped into a thief’s car as it was making a getaway. He was dragged 700 metres up the road before being dumped out on South St, suffering minor injuries.

In 2016, he received a cracked jaw when a thief hit him, and two years earlier he broke his wrist when banging on the car window of a shoplifter.