On Police Involvement in 'Civil' Matters....
In January 2025, a seemingly run-of-the-mill parental complaint ballooned into a full arrest and detention of said parents...
The parents in question, Maxie Allen and Rosalind Levine, expressed concerns in a parents' WhatsApp group over the recruitment process for the headteacher at their daughter's school in Borehamwood, Hertfordshire,
This resulted in six uniformed police officers knocking on their door, and arresting the couple in the presence of their three-year-old daughter. They were detained on suspicion of malicious communications and harassment for 11 hours. Five weeks into their investigation, the police concluded that there was no case to answer....
And this incident is not the only such case.... More recently Vanessa Brown, a school history teacher and mother in Surrey, was arrested after removing her children's iPads in an attempt to motivate their focus on homework. They were subsequently stolen by a 40-something male and police were summoned.
Brown spent seven hours detained, having been searched, fingerprinted, and photographed. The police then agreed that the iPads belonged to her children and that she had a right to confiscate them, closing the case with no further action.
Police Over-reach or Agro- Parents...?
While such headlines make for GREAT clickbait headlines, I think that is mainly what's going on here....
It's easy to take both of these at face value and read this as police over-reach, and at first sight this seems to be the case here.
However in both cases, further evidence later came to light of the parents in question being a bit agro with either each other or the school.
In the iPad case, for example, they were stolen by the estranged father, and there had been disputes between the two parents before involving the police.
In such cases I think the police are damned if they do, damned if they don't. There might be a safeguarding risk to the children, and if they don't act and a child gets harmed, that's a far worse outcome and negative publicity.
Having said this it isn't a good look when six officers turn up to arrest ONE person... I mean that's a lot of police resources for nothing.
Final thoughts....
Part of me wants to say this is the problem of 'policing' difficult people... in both these cases civil society should be able to manage, but who the hell wants to take the lead on standing up to these people, who has the time to deal with such difficult and conflictual people?
I think that's probably it, there isn't the will or the time in civil society, so someone rings the police and they HAVE to deal with it with overkill out of fear this is one of those 0.001% of cases that goes REALLY bad!
Posted Using INLEO