A mother of two was arrested for theft and held in a police custody cell for more than seven hours after she confiscated two iPads belonging to her own children. The Mail has the story.
Vanessa Brown, a 50 year-old history teacher, revealed the “unspeakable devastation and trauma” she suffered after being taken to Staines police station.
Ms Brown was searched and had custody photographs and fingerprints taken after taking away her daughters’ devices in an attempt to ensure they were not distracted from their studies.
Surrey Police, who also visited the children’s school, pulling one of Ms Brown’s daughters out of class, have since acknowledged their error.
Ms Brown was apprehended at her mother’s home in Cobham, Surrey, to which she was eventually returned only after a 12-hour ordeal that, due to her bail conditions, threatened to prevent her from seeing her children on Mother’s Day.
The incident, which follows the arrest of a couple in Hertfordshire over complaints they made about their daughter’s primary school, is likely to raise further questions about police priorities.
“I find it quite traumatic even talking about this now,” Ms Brown told LBC.
“They were able to send a police car with police officers to my children’s school, they were able to send another police car or two to arrest me.
“I know people are making reports of thefts, of assaults and very violent crimes in and around our neighbourhood, and they’re not getting a response for days.
“I cannot get to the bottom of why it was done in such a quick turnaround, maybe less than an hour – all these police cars and police officers going to an address over a completely false report of a theft.”
She said the heavy-handed approach of police, who took more than 24 hours from the moment she was arrested to inform her that no further action would be taken, had left her in a ‘catatonic state’.
“At no point did they think to themselves, ‘Oh, this is a little bit of an overreaction,'” said Ms Brown. “It was thoroughly unprofessional. They were speaking to my mother, who is in her 80s, like she was a criminal.”
This was yet another story I had to double check wasn’t published on April 1st. It’s worth reading in full. (Apparently, a Surrey Police spokesman said that a man in his 40s “had alerted them to the possible theft of the iPads, prompting a search for the device”. Which raises more questions than it answers, frankly.)
Meanwhile, 265 ‘Turkish barbers’ and other high street cash-intensive businesses have been raided by police in a three-week crackdown on money laundering and modern slavery, leading to dozens of people being arrested and more than £1 million frozen. “We’ve got powers to deal with them but there’s so many we can’t cope,” one officer told reporters. “They seem to be popping up everywhere from Iranian, Iraqi, Kurdistan, seems to be sort of in this general area.” Presumably this is just the latest lovely contribution of illegal immigration to our diverse 21st-century utopia.
Fortunately, though, police officers in Surrey have a spare moment to raid the home of a responsible parent confiscating her distracted youngsters’ devices. And in Hertfordshire, to turn up en masse and arrest parents who dare to criticise their child’s school on WhatsApp. Ever get the feeling police priorities have got a little skewed somewhere along the line?
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Is there anybody left in this country with any common sense?
I suspect not – at least in anything Government or public services related.
This Country has gone f’ing mad
Orwell + Huxley + Steroids.
100% Evil.
Please Please please give me back the old days…Worts and all, I’ll take it over this shyte!
“a man in his 40s “had alerted them to the possible theft of the iPads” Will he be charged with wasting police time or did it fill a few easy hours for the plod.
The kids’ father?
After reading the original Mail article, it seems you may well be right!
Let me guess: the woman’s spoilt daughters complained to one of their teachers that their mother had taken their phones away, perhaps even shedding tears of distress at being temporarily separated from their electronic devices, prompting the idiot man in his 40s (a male teacher?) to call the police with false accusations which he knew to be false.
Correction: the Mail article mentions that:
“Ms Brown has been involved in fraught disputes with two different men in recent years after relationships broke down, it’s understood, including the father of her children.”
As I posted elsewhere on this story its far easier to go after middle class, middle aged citizens than the gangs ruining our towns and cities…
Also I’m sorry but anyone trying to defend the police based on their lack of resources (I agree that like the NHS they’ll never have enough so need to prioritise) needs to look at this and admit the police need top to bottom reform
This was the advice (sic) given to decent law-abiding people by a serving police officer on his blog 20 years ago:
Always get your complaint in first, even if it is you who started it and you who were in the wrong. If things have gone awry and you suspect the cops are going to be called, get your retaliation in first. Ring the cops and allege for all you are worth. If you can work a racist or homophobic slant into it so much the better.
Make a counter allegation. Regardless of the facts, never let the other side be blameless. If they beat you to the phone, ring anyway and make a counter allegation against them. Again racism or homophobia are your friends. If you are not from a visible minority ethnic culture, may I suggest that that the phrase “You gay bastard” or similar is always useful. In extremis allege sexual assault. It gives us something to bargain with when getting the other person to drop their complaint on a quid-pro-quo basis.
Actively complain about every officer and everything they do. Did they cuff you when they brought you in? Were they rude to you? Did they racially or homophobically abuse you? Didn’t get fed? Cell too cold? You are decent folk who don’t want to make a fuss but trust me, it pays to whinge and no matter how trivial and / or poorly founded your complaint there are people who will uncritically listen to you and try and prove the complaint on your behalf. Some of them are even police officers.
Show no respect to the legal system or anybody working in it. You think that if you are a difficult, unpleasant, sneering, unco-operative and rude things will go badly for you and you will be in more trouble. No sirree Bob. It seems that in fact the worse you are, the easier things will go for you if, horror of horrors, you do end up convicted. Remember to fake a drink problem if you haven’t developed one as a result of dealing with us already. Magistrates and Judges do seem to like the idea that you are basically good but the naughty alcohol made you do it. They treat you better. Crazy I know but true.
So there you go, basically anything you try and do because you are decent and straightforward hurts you badly. Act like an habitual, professional, lifestyle criminal and chances are you will walk away relatively unscathed. Copy the bad guys; it’s what they do for a living.
I did 20 odd years on the thin blue line Mr Dickie and I can confirm you are absolutely correct with your advice!
If you can get in first with a ‘complaint’ or an allegation then you automatically become the ‘victim’ with all the goodies that come with victim status..
There is absolutely nothing ‘fair’ in our justice system I can assure you!
Regards
Ralph
This just supports the point i was making under the Lucy Connolly article. The police and judiciary appear to be going over the top in making people’s lives a misery, being disproportionate with the ones who’ve done nothing wrong but ignoring/letting walk the very culprits who should be arrested/sent to prison, all irrespective of a person’s sex, as this latest example proves.
You can shoplift, fare-dodge, carry swords and threaten people, expose yourself on public transport and you can have thousands of indecent images of kids on your phone. These used to be known as ‘crimes’, but seemingly not any more. Or at least not to get you sent to jail. Anti-immigration social media posts, on the other hand…
Sorry to say it but Britain is becoming a plague nation, a festering boil on the the face of the world!
From great beginnings it has been allowed to fall into depravity by it’s own leaders! It’s become an irreversible cesspit of humanity, a modern day sodom and gomorrah
If you have any morals or values, leave now before your not allowed to!
As I understand it, before arresting an individual for suspected theft, the police need to have a reasonable suspicion that a theft (intent to permanently deprive the rightful owner of their property by dishonest means) has taken place, and that the arrest is actually necessary.
Neither of these conditions would seem to have been met, which would surely suggest a prime facie case of abuse of power by the police, and a possible charge of Wasting Police Time for the vexatious complainant? I certainly don’t think that Surrey Police should be able to bat it all off as a simple error.
And look at that couple who were arrested at home in front of their daughter for criticising something or other to do with her school on WhatsApp, as I recall. Six officers it took. Apparently so many were needed to confiscate all devices and take care of any kids and pets while the parents were down the station. Totally and utterly disproportionate and unnecessary.
Probably she does nit qualify for legal aid. Also, no leftie lawyer wouldntake it up because she seems a normal mother and there is no ethnic or gender angle for them and they don’t want to upset their mates in the police service who are doing all the things the left want anyway.
I was a custody officer for several years during my career. If this arrest had been brought before me, on hearing the officer’s reason for arrest I would have taken them into my office, away from the desk, and said “Explain that to me again”. On the basis of the justification given so far, there is NO WAY I’d have authorised detention. Only a Superintendent or above can overrule a custody officer, and had they told me to authorise detention I STILL wouldn’t have done it, because this definitely looks unlawful to me.
This is why I never got higher than sergeant, even though I was qualified to be an inspector. I refused to toe the line. I wouldn’t survive in the police service now.
An arrest also has to be ‘necessary’, hence the number of people committing serious crimes who are invited to attend a police station at a later date to be interviewed.
Yet another grotesque case where Plod needs to arrest Plod for wasting Plod’s time,
Meanwhile, now over a decade since Operation Midland, when Plod wasted millions on hounding elderly public figures, after Plod had fallen hook, line and sinker for a fantasist’s yarn.
Hold accountable Education, Education, Education – graduate entrants with theoretical knowledge of criminality and human nature fast-tracked to high-ranking positions.
In the great interview room up in the sky, Dixon of Dock Green and Inspector Barlow of Z-Cars will be spluttering in the nick’s stewed tea.
Oh to have Dixon and Inspector Barlow back again!
And Frost.
Sgt Cork would be best of all.
And there was me, as a great grandfather, thinking that it was the parents who are in charge and free to put the boundaries in place for their own children, My children, now in their 40’s are parenting their kids the same way we did with them ie. strict boundaries where ‘no’
meant no and that was it!
To deprive your children of electronic devices now attracts the attention of the police- really?
Doesn’t everybody and his dog know that Turkish Barbers = money laundering (allegedly)?
Yet the Police seem surprised?!
This doesn’t raise questions about their priorities.
It raises questions about what the purpose of the police and who they think they are.
This incident isn’t low priority, it’s a travesty and an abuse of power and should never have involved any police time at all, even if they had all the time in the world to spare.
This kind of careful and supposedly measured language is stupid and betrays a common sense-compass gone completely awry
And we were told the Police and Crime Commissioners would ensure proper use of resources and bring accountability to the police.
They have done neither.
In other words as many of us knew from the start the Police and Crime Commissioners are a complete and utter waste of taxpayers money.
Just more well-paid jobs for second rate politicians.
Damn right
Hearing about the walkout shoplifting going on unchallenged at Greggs, and looking at the average size of our Police men and women, I started putting two and two together……… I suppose that would be the logical conclusion of our present method of policing? In the good old days it used to be restricted to the Met, but now I suppose they’ve all got to get a bit of the action. And a Gregg’s sausage roll is very tasty once in a blue moon [non-flashing, that is]
Oops! I should have read the Mail article comments first!
“According to more reputable and reliable sources than this one, the police asked her about the ipads and she denied all knowledge of them. They then tracked them and found them in the house, which would give rise to suspicion of theft. For their own agenda this paper’s account decided not to mention that she denied any knowledge of their whereabouts. Why lie to the police about something like this?”
[So now it sounds like the mother being vindictive about gifts from her ex, the girls’ father. I’ve known other mothers who have done that kind of thing, robbing their kids of gifts from their dad. Zero sympathy from me.]
It’s not the job of the police to play referee for estranged couples who disagree about the parenting of their children.
Still not an arrestable offence though!
Statement from the police…
Still sounds like there’s more to it as to why they choose to deal with this with the amount of other crime ignored…
The ’40 year old man’ seems like an arse. She seems well shot of him, except for the unfortunate fact the kids allow him to remain in her life.
The police should know better than to trust an ex with an axe to grind, but they seem to prefer the easy ‘crimes’ since they’re so bad at solving the real ones.
Hard to say. There is usually more to these things than meets the eye, and strangely the heroine of the story in act 1, often becomes the villain by the end of act 3. Newspapers are about presenting the story in a sensational way to get clicks, not to reveal the truth.
Sorry but I’m not buying that.
Have your motorhome or caravan stolen (worth many, many times an iPad) with a tracker saying where it is and the police aren’t interested…
Have your phone or laptop stolen and it’s the same response, again even with trackers and some cases monitoring software to photograph the person using it…
Of course those crimes are generally committed by gangs/groups of organised criminals, usually the majority of whom are young-middle aged men, who are often armed.
Far easier to go for the middle aged, middle class (female) teacher who will come quietly…
This statement is bo11ocks and ar5e-covering. All of these easily done enquiries could and should have been done at the time of reporting. No arrest was necessary – at all.
Seeing your comment above as an ex police officer at what point does this become an unlawful arrest/false imprisonment?
They say there’s no further action, but surely (as they admit she was entitled to take them) there was never an offence in the first place and therefore the arrest and detention should never have happened?
That’s a genuine question as this arrest and then “no action” seems to be getting out of hand
Also sorry will that arrest (even with no further action) show on an enhanced DBS check? Like the ones teachers have to keep renewing…
Sorry for the slow response. Put simply, it’s unlawful if the arrest cannot be justified, either by law or by moral necessity. There are laws which officers apply to make arrests, but an officer can derogate from a law if they can justify it (it should happen rarely, but seems to be done ubiquitously now, judging from almost daily reports of outrageous and bizarre arrests).
You can’t make an arrest simply because a law has been broken. That arrest has to be necessary and reasonable. If reasonable enquiries can be done before an arrest is made, then they should be done, because those enquiries might negate the need to arrest. They might even prove that no law has been broken – as in this case.
I’ve had officers stand before me explaining their reason for arrest, and on hearing that reason have taken them to one side and explained how they have misapplied the law or misinterpreted it. I have then declined to authorise detention and the suspect gets dusted down and taken home.
Coppers are human, and humans make mistakes. I made many mistakes myself and I’ve seen many other officers’ mistakes also, and while they did make mistakes, they were honest mistakes with no malice or corruption. However, the closer I got to the end of my career, the more I saw the levels of officers’ knowledge getting worse and worse,and not always in the very young in service.
Now I believe the police service is institutionally incompetent from bottom to top. It politically corrected itself away from practical policing and became a target-hitting exercise. Anyone who you would call ‘old school’ wasn’t welcome any more, and many many experienced officers left. So much experience walked out of the door, or just gave up and kept their heads down pending reitrement, that what you have now is brand new officers being taught by nearly new officers who are being guided by very inexperienced officers who are supervised by inexperienced managers. It’s a cycle of bad practice which I noticed back in the mid-00s. I pointed it out and was looked at like I had two heads.
Thank you.
Personally my issue isn’t with them making mistakes, as you say police officers are human.
My issue is that firstly these mistakes always seem to benefit one group/be to the detriment of another group…
Secondly that there’s no accountability for these mistakes.
Police officers have a huge amount of power over our lives and when they get things wrong (such as this case) there needs to be real consequences for them as there would be the public.
I’m a truck driver and if I make a mistake I know I could lose my licence (and job) or at worst go to prison. There doesn’t seem to be that accountability in the police…
As an aside my employer has provided us all with legal cover for any police attended accidents/incidents at work and we’re not to give statements until we’ve spoken to them (other than confirming our identity and which vehicle we were driving). I (and a few others) have contacted them and got the same arrangement (at my cost) if something happens in my personal life due to the possible consequences rather than relying on the duty brief.
I’m starting to feel like the way the country is heading I need to do the same with a specialist criminal solicitor as well in case I get a knock on the door.
I never expected this as a law abiding citizen in my own country
White, middle aged and middleclass. The only people the filth are brave enough to,tackle
What about working class? They’re the ones getting it in the neck, as anyone with functioning eyes can attest to.
The gestapo are out of control. No government seems interested in telling rhe chief constables that their jobs are on the line unless they focus on their real job, and not woke communism.
I utterly despise the police. I have no time for them or any of their problems. The rank and file are as guilty as the top management. Sack them all and replace with only white, English heritage, men. Do not recruit any women.
If people, regardless of colour or sex, have earned their place in the force through merit alone and not any kind of preferential treatment, then they have every right to be there, but the emphasis here is on ‘merit’. If you are against the discrimination of white male recruits to the police force but you are advocating the banning of women from joining the profession then that singles you out as both a hypocrite and a misogynist.
My son recently had his iPhone taken at knife point in central London. Passcode too. Within minutes the thieves went to the Apple shop and tried to spend thousands via ApplePay. The transactions failed as they were flagged as suspicious. They also ordered an Uber to Manchester on it. Evidence aplenty right? CCTV? Plod in the case? No to the latter. They gave him a crime number and a nonchalant shrug as if to say, “ah well, shit happens.”
Oh for a time machine. This world is crazy.
We the people must no longer harbour any ill feelings towards others unless they are white or have colonialist, capitalist leanings. Any display of anger or annoyance due to barbaric atrocities by those who cannot claim to be members of the human race due to their actions, will not be tolerated by the oppressors in charge, as they need the depraved monsters support to stay in power.
The problem is, despite what they all say, from central government to local council, they do not care what you think unless they can benefit from the kudos of their actions, or they can prosecute you for your comments. Yep, Ive lost faith in the lot of them and going further right.. …..knock…knock!
https://anth1001.wordpress.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/04/enoch-powell_speech.pdf
….and so begins the text of a former statesman… until he spoke his mind!
The Supreme Function Of Statemenship is to provide against preventable evils. In seeking to do so, it encounters obstacles which are deeply rooted in human nature. One is that by the very order of things such evils are not demonstrable until they have occurred: at each stage in their onset there is room for doubt and for dispute whether they be real or imaginary. By the same token, they attract little attention in comparison with current troubles, which are both indisputable and pressing: whence the besetting temptation of all politics to concern itself with the immediate present at the expense of the future. of Blood”
But isn’t it strange that…
“She is head of THEOLOGY, Philosophy and ETHICS at school close to her home in Cobham, Surrey where she has lived for almost 20 years.”
What are the parents & pupils supposed to think of the woman in charge of teaching the children THEOLOGY and ETHICS, who chose to LIE IN THE FACES of the police? All she had to do was honestly admit she had taken them, show them the phones, explain her reasons, and insist that she had the right to do so, and the police would have been satisfied.
But no, she chose to brazen it out like any criminal, and double down on her LIES, even when they told her the phones were tracked to her mother’s house, forcing them to search the property to find them. She should have been charged with “Wasting Police Time”.
How “ethical” or “theological” is that?
What kind of MORAL EXAMPLE did she set for the pupils?
In my view, she has no right to complain about the police action.
Maybe the authorities are desperate for some white women to throw into jail to balance out their arrest/conviction statistics. They should have just charged her, refused bail and put her on six months remand if she doesn’t plea guilty.
a definition of a police state
In a free society, that is in a stateless society, a free market would exist, for every kind of service, which businesses could address in whatsoever way they considered a competitive manner. Some organisations may offer policing services on a subscription basis, some may work through insurance providers and perhaps, more likely, a presently unimaginable solution would yet be found to whatever need for policing services existed. That model would then constantly evolve and improve; driven by demand and consumer choice.
A policing organisation that started to behave as we see cops funded via stolen money (taxation) behave, would most likley find their customers rapidly departed to a better provider – I mean, for starters: who wants to pay for a gang of bullies conducting themselves in such a inefficient and costly manner. Such poor public relations would backfire unless, that is, they come to your door and Taser you if you do not pay for their protection racket.
If they did Taser you for not paying it would be clear you needed the services of a better operation who would start their contract with you by getting the ugly Taser and theft cops, BadCop Inc, off your back. A business that intended to force you to place your business with them would need to have a far more subtle method of capturing and retaining your business.
One good way of making you stay with ‘BadCop Inc’ would be to provide their nasty violence based monopolistic service free of charge. That would have the effect of making it very difficult for widespread competition to get started as they would need to fund their service in some way. Conversely BadCop Inc. could fund their service through a charge made on everything everyone sells including everyone’s time they sell at ‘work’. BadCop could simultaneously take a slice on the earnings of everything everybody buys too.
But nonetheless people would not be happy. They would quickly realise that BadCop Inc. was just running the mother of all protection rackets. BadCop would have to take more money and provide, monopolistically, more supposed ‘benefits’ or their ‘customers’ would realise they were just being enslaved. So BadCop could open schools, to indoctrinate their public from the get-go, allow their ‘customers’ to vote for who, from a list, the next BadCop boss will be, BadCop could build roads so they can get about and collect their tithe. BadCop could see their friend’s business’ made money from the enterprise too and could tell these corporate cooperators what to do, such as making sure the papers, radio and TV never tell the enslaved public any sort of truth.
With all this enterprise at their hands BadCop would still have one big problem: it would slowly but surely rot from the inside out and the public would eventually see for themselves its ugliness and its threat. To counter this BadCop Inc. would have to continuously stupefy their enslaved public, make them believe BadCop is essential for humanity, and, whilst keeping their threat of violence always visible, cast themselves and their regime of violence as being utterly legitimate. Make people believe in them. Surround themselves with ceremony, ritual, costumes and badges. Make it a cult. This may be an inefficient and expensive business plan but it is the only viable option if BadCop wants to remain in business.
I follow this YouTube channel by a barrister. Listening to this, this case isn’t quite as black and white as it might seem. If I understand it correctly, the mother was quite allusive about the location of the iPads and there is the involvement of an unknown male:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7sR8mgbJMVQ&t=601s