Kāpiti Coast community leaders are concerned social media platform TikTok has a role in vehicle thefts around Wellington, averaging about 10 per day.
Police confirmed there were 290 vehicles stolen around the Wellington Police District in February, 310 in March, and another 240 up until 20 April.
Just last week six young people - including two 12-year-olds - were referred to Youth Aid after they were "interfering with vehicles" in Waikanae Beach, according to police.
Community social media pages have a number of posts about vehicles being stolen, found or people catching thieves in the act.
Waikanae resident John Nelson had his family's seven seater Toyota Wish stolen on Monday night right outside his home.
No one heard a thing - "not even my dog heard them" - and he said it was devastating.
"We're a single income family paying a mortgage and we rely it for getting the kids to school and all sorts of stuff really."
He wanted a reassurance that police were across the issue. "It would be quite nice to see a cop car cruise up and down the street a couple of times a week just to know you're safe in your community."
Police said the reasons why youth were involved in this type of offending was "a complex one to answer" that had several factors, including the influence of social media.
A TikTok spokesperson said safety was its priority, that it removed content promoting or enabling criminal activity, and did sometimes lodge reports with police. Photo: 123RF
The help of whānau and community was needed to steer "vulnerable young people" towards better outcomes because police could not address the issue alone, police said.
Local mayor K Gurunathan thought that would not be enough.
"Local government is not resourced in this area. This is a central government issue, and the agency's issue, but we're willing to work with them to see what can be done."
He hoped police could "nip it in the bud" before things escalated to ram raids, as have recently been seen elsewhere in the country.
Gurunathan, like other community leaders, mentioned TikTok when speaking to RNZ.
Kāpiti Youth Support chief executive Raechel Osborne said people were being influenced by "unsocial behaviours" they saw on social media that were presented as OK to do.
She thought it was a flow on effect of the pandemic and platforms like TikTok were seeing increasingly younger audiences engage with them.
"Covid's isolated them [youths] so they're not able to connect with young people. What we're seeing here at KYS is an increase is demand, we are seeing our services are stretched."
She also pointed out the offenders were not necessarily locals and possibly themselves victims in someway who needed support.
Riaan de Bruyn, the leader of Kāpiti Community Patrol - a group volunteer group supporting police with local crime prevention, said he was aware of youth offenders using TikTok and posting videos to "show off".
He thought the platform was acting as an "encouraging tool".
"It's like 'hey, look what I've done, we encourage you to do the same - let's see who can get the most likes'," he said.
A TikTok spokesperson said safety was its priority, that it removed content promoting or enabling criminal activity, and did sometimes lodge reports with police.
"We remain vigilant in our commitment to countering such content and encourage our community to report potential violations of our community guidelines."
Disclaimer: an earlier version of this story used figures from Police that indicated the vehicle theft figures were in Kapiti alone. Police have had to correct this as being figures for the entire Wellington Police District.
