Photographing teens breeds distrust
I sympathise with the two young teenagers who were photographed by the police for no reason at all (Chronicle, March 10).
I can understand that they are distrustful, to say the least, of the police.
In the mid 50s, when I was a bit younger than the two boys, I used to go to Spriggens Park every Saturday to watch the senior rugby. It was the habit of us kids to ask the men in the crowd if they’d finished with their soft drink bottles and we’d take them to the canteen at the end of the grandstand and cash them in for threepence each.
One day a policeman took me behind the stand and accused me of having been there that morning pinching something, I forget what, and in vain I told him that I’d been elsewhere playing rugby as usual on Saturday morning. Nevertheless, he stole five shillings worth of threepences from me and told me to bugger off.
Even though I’d noted the policeman’s number on his uniform I didn’t tell my father. He was a lawyer with the Ma¯ ori Affairs Department at the time and if I had told him he would have demanded more than an apology at the police station.
But, like the boys, I was ashamed and embarrassed. And like them I have never since entirely trusted the police.
I D FERGUSON
Whanganui
Lonely inhabitants
Re Potonga Neilson’s letter (Chronicle, March 4).
Thank you thank you Potonga — “Will we become lonely inhabitants ...”
This is so important, it so needs saying. Virginia Lake — five years ago I used to see fantails, grey warblers, tuis, sparrows, blackbirds, and a chaffinch . . . now not one. Ducks yes, many ducks, coots, pukekos, swans, dabchicks, waiting to be fed.
And in my garden, five years ago, many birds when I first moved here. Then they started to vanish. And I read somewhere that birds and insects were disappearing, even sparrows.
So I stopped spraying twice a year, round the house, to stop the insects coming in. And I stopped killing insects. Now I even have spiders, in the house, on the car. If they get alarmingly big, I catch them in a jar, and let them go in the park.
And I started feeding birds. Now there are birds here again . . . sparrows, blackbirds, starlings, grey warblers, and mynahs.
SARA DICKON
Whanganui