at the Manukau Station<\/a> on February 28, where the offenders broke in and slashed five tyres on three ambulances. <\/p>\n\u201cIn both events, an offender has illegally gained access to the stations\u2019 compounds before slashing tyres of ambulances parked there,\u201d Detective Senior Sergeant Mike Hayward said. <\/p>\n
Six ambulances had their tyres slashed, and investigators were “keeping an open mind” as to whether they were linked.<\/p>\n
Police said staff at the Manukau station only noticed the damage to their vehicle while responding to a priority incident. <\/p>\n
\u201cThis sort of offending is extremely reckless, given the ambulances were rendered inoperable,” Hayward said<\/p>\n
“It\u2019s thoughtless and risks the lives of anyone who required urgent medical care during the period that ambulances were out of action.”<\/p>\n
Hato Hone St John acting Auckland district operations manager Angela Jardine said damaging ambulances was “serious and unacceptable” and directly affected the community. <\/p>\n
\u201cAmbulances are a critical part of the emergency response system.<\/p>\n
\u201cWhen vehicles are taken out of service, it has the potential to delay care for patients who need urgent medical help.” <\/p>\n
She said the damaged ambulances were “incredibly frustrating”. <\/p>\n
Both St John and police urged anyone with information about the break-ins and subsequent slashings to come forward. <\/p>\n
\u201cThere will be people in the community who know who is responsible, and they need to do the right thing and come forward,\u201d Hayward said. <\/p>\n
Those with information were asked to call police on 105. <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"St John staff were responding to a priority call when they realised the tyres on their ambulance had…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":378499,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[3],"tags":[51,67,42,43,40,38,41,39],"class_list":["post-378498","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-headlines","tag-auckland","tag-crime-and-justice","tag-headlines","tag-news","tag-top-news","tag-top-stories","tag-topnews","tag-topstories"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/378498","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=378498"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/378498\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/378499"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=378498"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=378498"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=378498"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}