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Eyes in a letterbox
Ellerslie residents want answers and action (Image : Tina Tiller/The Spinoff)

SocietyJune 11, 2021

The great Ellerslie mail theft mystery

Eyes in a letterbox
Ellerslie residents want answers and action (Image : Tina Tiller/The Spinoff)

Frustrated residents say the disappearance of post from a leafy Auckland suburb is ‘out of control’. But who’s responsible?

One says they ditched their mailbox for a PO box after two years of tampering. Another is scared to go out at night in case they come face-to-face with the perpetrator. A third is suffering nightmares. “The idea that people are lurking around at all hours to wilfully damage and steal from us is terrifying,” she says.

There’s fear, anger and exasperation on the streets of Ellerslie amid a growing trend of thefts from residential mailboxes. Many residents think the problem is getting worse, and that not enough is being done to stop it.

A quick search through the Ellerslie Facebook community group finds countless reports of mailboxes being broken into, with letters and parcels ripped open and their remnants scattered across the road. Reports of mail going missing or being damaged date back to 2017, but some claim it’s been going on even longer.

Many of those who post to the group have snapped photos of alleged offenders they say were caught in the act. Is the culprit is a woman with a pram? Is it several young people seen snooping? One commenter claims there are Facebook posts “nearly every day” reporting similar incidents in the area.

“What’s happening to our lovely suburb?” the residents of this East Auckland suburb ask. 

Another question asked often: is anything being done to stop it?

Broken letterboxes, damaged mail
Broken letterboxes, damaged mail (Image: Facebook)

Ellerslie resident Paul Picot is one Facebook group member left unsatisfied after reporting incidents of mail theft to the police. “I was living on Ballin Street [in Ellerslie] for about four years,” he says. “The last two years, nearly every week my mail was stolen or rummaged through, so I got a PO Box.” It didn’t end there. “I now live at a different address and still every month my letterbox gets tampered with.”

Another victim who wants to remain anonymous says he was angry to discover three recent TradeMe purchases ripped into after returning home from the long weekend. “It wasn’t the value but just the fact that they think they can just take what they want.” A pair of swim shorts went missing, but the contents of two other parcels – some pyjamas and trackpants – were stuffed back into the letterbox along with ripped packaging. “I felt very, very angry and annoyed,” they said.

Apartment block resident Hayley has only lived in Ellerslie for seven months but says the fear of break-ins is making her want to leave. “We haven’t lost anything to my knowledge, but we’ve lost our peace and sense of security. I’ve literally had two nightmares that people have broken into the apartments themselves,” she says. “I feel scared if I get home late by myself in case someone’s lurking, and hold my breath every morning as I check the page for another report of a break-in.”

Hayley says letterboxes for her building have been broken into three times, and another time a man was spotted scoping out the area with a torch. “It only seems to be getting worse. I think everyone in the community is desperate to see action.”

Amid growing concern about crime in the suburb, Ellerslie residents were last week given the chance to put questions directly to local MP Priyanca Radhakrishnan and police officer Don Allan at a “coffee with a cop” event. The small public meeting quickly became dominated by questions about mail theft and what action was being taken to curb the offending. 

It’s out of control, said one local. Another suggested a network of thieves could be responsible for coordinated “hits” on apartment blocks and townhouses. “Every single street has been targeted,” the resident claimed. Another said it was getting worse. There were calls for more security cameras in the suburb and for police to do a “mail drop” containing information on how to dissuade mailbox tampering. One individual tiptoed up to the line of suggesting vigilante justice was necessary – an idea swiftly knocked back by others.

What united all of those in attendance last Friday was frustration that the offending seemed to be able to continue. “There hasn’t really been a feedback loop between the police and community to even say that there has been a prolific offender,” one person said. 

Allan acknowledged communication could have been better and sympathised with locals’ concerns. He “guaranteed” police were even more frustrated. “We see these people every week, arresting them, bringing them before the court and then they’re released. We’re doing our part, it’s the justice system [that isn’t],” he said. Crime in Ellerslie was up across the board over the past month, he said, although he did not know the exact number of mail thefts reported. Identity theft and credit card fraud were major drivers for mail tampering, along with the proliferation of online shopping, he said. 

While he did not go as far a blaming residents for the rise in theft, Allan had some simple advice for them: “Clear letterboxes regularly.” People too often made things easy for opportunistic thieves, he said, and police could only do so much. Continuing to report suspicious activity was also key. 

After the meeting, attendee Alison said she hoped it would encourage people to take action. She helps organise weekly community patrols of Ellerslie. “We don’t actually ‘do’ anything, it’s just about being eyes on the street.” She thinks more people need to be proactive about stopping the thefts. While many were quick to write an angry comment about crime on Facebook, few had taken up her offer to join the Ellerslie Community Patrol, she said. “There’s a lot of apathy.”

When approached by The Spinoff last month, a police spokesperson said two people had been arrested in connection with mail thefts in the area and the matter was before the courts. 

Do you know more? Get in touch: stewart@thespinoff.co.nz

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Getty Images

OPINIONSocietyJune 8, 2021

Our juries are as broken as we are

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Getty Images

Peter McKenzie examines New Zealand’s jury system through an astounding piece of research out of Victoria University of Wellington. His conclusion? The cracks run deep.

At one point in Twelve Angry Men, cinema’s greatest legal drama, Juror 11 remarks, “This I have always thought is a remarkable thing about democracy – that we are notified by mail to come down to this place to decide on the guilt or innocence of a man we have never heard of before. We have nothing to gain or lose by our verdict. This is one of the reasons why we are strong.” 

His statement is heartwarming; the movie equally so. It focuses on the “normal” men in whose hands rests the fate of a boy accused of murder. The evidence against him is inarguable. One neighbour witnessed the killing from a distance; another heard the body hit the floor and saw the boy run away. He had a history of violent crime and owned a switchblade identical to the murder weapon. 

The 12th juror, Davis, slowly whittles down the confidence of his 11 colleagues. The neighbour who “saw” the killing couldn’t have: she wasn’t wearing her glasses. The other couldn’t have seen the boy run away: he had suffered a stroke and couldn’t have moved to the door fast enough. And anyone could have bought that type of switchblade at the local pawnshop. Eventually, all 12 vote not guilty. It’s a moving display of a jury’s power. 

But recent research suggests that in real life it’s a power not always exercised so justly.

The jurors of Twelve Angry Men (Dir. Sidney Lumet)

Robbie Taylor, a PhD Candidate at Victoria University of Wellington, recently completed his thesis on the influence of biased line-ups and unanimous eyewitnesses on jurors. In Taylor’s study, mock jurors read about a hypothetical crime and saw a police line-up from which they were told varying numbers of witnesses had identified the (innocent) defendant. The mock jurors then rated the defendant’s guilt.

What Taylor found was stunning. The greater the number of witnesses who identify the defendant as the perpetrator, the greater the likelihood the jurors would deem the defendant guilty – even where the line-up was obviously biased (for example, where one person has a scar but the rest do not). According to Taylor, “The number of witnesses seems to overcome the fact the line-up was biased; they don’t seem to understand the bias caused the consensus.” 

It’s the latest in a line of research which suggests our criminal justice process is less reliable than one might hope. That’s because the memories and people which the process relies on are far frailer than we realise. 

As Elizabeth Loftus, one of the 20th century’s most influential psychologists, has observed, “Our representation of the past takes on a living, shifting reality. It is not fixed and immutable, not a place way back there that is preserved in stone, but a living thing that changes shape, expands, shrinks, and expands again, an amoeba-­like creature.” (Loftus’ application of her research is controversial; she has testified about it in cases like that of Harvey Weinstein). But despite memory’s malleable nature, most witnesses and juries continue to misunderstand it as something closer to a reel of film, fuzzily playing back events exactly as they happened. 

Just as worrying, the people who assess the reliability of those memories are themselves biased and personally attached. Partway through Twelve Angry Men, Juror 10 begins to rant. “This kid on trial, his type – don’t you know about them? There’s a danger here. These people are dangerous. They’re wild!” 

His prejudice was explicit. More common is implicit bias; the social programming we develop at a young age which prompts us to consider certain groups with suspicion and others with respect. As Sonali Chakravarti, an associate professor of government at Wesleyan University, wrote in a recent article in the Boston Review, “Past experiences, political ideologies, and cultural priming shape how we understand events – no one can be truly impartial when asked to judge acts of intense violence and emotion.” 

Each year, the District Court holds approximately 2,000 jury trials. And each year, these systemic weaknesses almost certainly cause miscarriages of justice. In 2006, former High Court judge Sir Thomas Thorp published a report indicating that there are likely 20 innocent New Zealanders in jail at any one time. The cases of most go unnoticed and unaddressed. 

After decades of campaigning, last year the government established a Criminal Cases Review Commission to examine potential miscarriages of justice. It’s a glimmer of hope for the wrongly convicted. As an analogy, between 1999 and 2020 the Scottish Criminal Cases Review Commission recommended that 120 cases be reconsidered by the courts; two thirds ended in successful appeals. 

But this is a remedy, not a solution. It will do little to address the root causes of miscarriages of justice, which Taylor touches on in his research. And neither are there easy answers. According to Taylor, “The research that exists about judges is not much better! So we’ve got a real problem here.”

In Twelve Angry Men one juror says to Davis, “If you want to hang this jury, go right ahead. The kid will be tried again and be found guilty, sure as he’s born.” In the movie, the well-meaning Davis nevertheless saved the day. 

But while speaking to Taylor, I couldn’t help but wonder: What about all the well-meaning jurors who were nevertheless overwhelmed by the system’s weaknesses? What happened to the defendants they deemed guilty?

But wait there's more!