By Qiuyi Tan of 
Westfield Newmarket shopping mall. Photo: Google Maps
A man has been jailed for taking 'upskirt' videos of unsuspecting young women and girls at a shopping mall.
Michael Gary Morrison, 58, used a toy helicopter box with a phone camera hidden in it to film up the skirts and dresses of 22 victims as young as 10 years old.
Many of them did not know they were being filmed until police called them months later.
"I blamed myself. Did I do something to provoke this man?" one victim said just before Morrison was sentenced on Friday at Auckland District Court.
"Almost two years later, I'm still trying to deal with what happened. I feel like I can't wear skirts in public and I avoid escalators at all cost," she said.
"My granddaughter was 10 years old at the time and oblivious to it," said a grandmother of a victim.
"We decided not to tell her."
The father of another victim, then 12, said he saw Morrison "angle the box directly up my daughter's skirt".
The court heard Morrison had built a device specifically to take videos of the unaware females.
Morrison also fashioned handles for the device that allowed it to hang close to the ground, where it could film under his victims' clothing.
Over six days in March 2021, he went to Westfield Newmarket mall, scouted for victims, and positioned himself behind them - on the escalator, waiting in line at a store, or at traffic crossings - and filmed.
His victims were girls between 10 and 18, several of them in school uniform.
All this was captured on CCTV. On the sixth day, he was caught.
"Yours was highly predatory offending, including against children," Judge Evangelos Thomas said, sentencing Morrison to 12 months in jail.
The sentence of under 24 months would normally allow for home detention to be considered, which the judge declined, pointing to an elevated need for denunciation in this case.
"People need to trust that our public places are safe, their children's innocence not compromised," he said.
"Girls, women, everybody, need to be able to trust others to act properly. You have grossly breached that trust."
* This story originally appeared in the New Zealand Herald.
