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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