Bee warned. Anyone thinking of pilfering honey from a Waihola stall is likely to be stung.<\/p>\n
After falling prey to a sticky-fingered honey thief in February, Otago Gold Honey co-owner Carlee McCaw said the power of community, and a good set of security cameras, helped bring the alleged offender to justice.<\/p>\n
\u2018\u2018It was pretty overwhelming, the community support \u2014 we had a huge amount of help from the public and the police.\u2019\u2019<\/p>\n
On February 18, a blonde woman brazenly helped herself to armfuls of honey and eggs for the last time after visiting the Ms McCaw\u2019s roadside stall in Waihola five or six times over a two-year period.<\/p>\n
The eggs she helped herself to came from a local primary school-aged child who was selling them for pocket money.<\/p>\n
However, after posting very clear pictures of the alleged thief to social media, going to police and speaking to the\u00a0Otago Daily Times, the offender was quickly identified.<\/p>\n
Ms McCaw said the case was now with police.<\/p>\n
\u2018\u2018We don\u2019t put pictures of people up on social media unless we\u2019re pretty positive that we\u2019re going to be able to get an ID \u2014 it\u2019s really got to be definitive for us that they have actually taken something.\u2019\u2019<\/p>\n
She said she had a roughly 99% success rate and only one person had escaped justice.<\/p>\n
\u2018\u2018We noticed that the first couple of times that we put things up on social media we noticed a massive drop-off in just little bits going missing \u2014 it does make a difference and I think it also makes a difference that the police are so proactive about it.\u2019\u2019<\/p>\n
Most roadside vendors nationwide would have similar problems with thefts, Ms McCaw said, and she had tips for prevention.<\/p>\n
\u2018\u2018Don\u2019t assume the police aren\u2019t interested … what we\u2019ve found is that the people that are doing this, they\u2019re not just doing it to us, and it\u2019s often representative of a pattern of behaviour and it\u2019s all about evidence gathering for the police.\u2019\u2019<\/p>\n
She said reporting the first theft to police was nerve-racking.<\/p>\n
However, usually they would find that once they reported the theft, they were \u2018\u2018fifth in line\u2019\u2019 in terms of victims, and definitive video evidence was often the nail in the coffin.<\/p>\n
\u2018\u2018We\u2019ve invested quite a bit in our security cameras \u2014 it\u2019s a long-term thing for us in that for every person that we catch we view it as a direct contribution to our security system.\u2019\u2019<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Bee warned. Anyone thinking of pilfering honey from a Waihola stall is likely to be stung. After falling…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":376620,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[111,43,139,69],"class_list":{"0":"post-376619","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-new-zealand","8":"tag-new-zealand","9":"tag-news","10":"tag-newzealand","11":"tag-nz"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/376619","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=376619"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/376619\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/376620"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=376619"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=376619"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=376619"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}