Swabbed for DNA, just in case they did the Brinks robbery
Children arrested, DNA tested, interrogated and locked up… for playing in a tree | the Daily Mail — It’s good to know there are dipshits in law enforcement in England as well as here. This is pathetic bullshit. These police should be ashamed of themselves.
To the 12-year-old friends planning to build themselves a den, the cherry tree seemed an inviting source of material.
But the afternoon adventure turned into a frightening ordeal for Sam Cannon, Amy Higgins and Katy Smith after they climbed into the 20ft tree – then found themselves hauled into a police station and locked in cells for up to two hours.
Their shoes were removed and mugshots, DNA samples and mouth swabs were taken.
Officers told the children they had been seen damaging the tree which is in a wooded area of public land near their homes.
Questioned by police, the scared friends admitted they had broken some loose branches because they had wanted to build a tree house, but said they did not realise what they had done was wrong…
Amy’s mother, Jacqueline, said her daughter was left so traumatised by the police action last month she refused to sleep in her bed for a week.
Miss Higgins, 37, an office manager, added: ‘Amy was scared bucketloads to be locked up in a cell knowing murderers and rapists have been sat in the same cells. The police action was completely unbalanced. These were children playing in a tree.
found by Chuck Ray
This is part of the “look like you’re busy” approach to police work.
I guess those kids are lucky that wasn’t in the US, or they would have been shot for being terrorists (destroying public lands!). In this case they were only beaten with billy clubs by guys in funny blue hats.
Hey! You kids get off my property.
Rotten little delinquents…..
In this post-911 world, we simply cannot tolerate this behavior. Children acting like…children, jeez, what were they thinking.
Are the cops really that desperate to not confront real criminals that they pick on kids?
Sorry – answered my own question
You know, I just realized that John’s post title reads like a little poem:
Little kids arrested,
DNA tested,
interrogated and locked up…
for playing in a tree
Either he’s getting weird or I am.
Well if you’re going to protect the environment, then you have to enforce laws that do so, right? This is the same country that’ll arrest you if you shoot a burglar, or even for carrying mace.
And since when the Brittish are kind to children? You just have to check their movies and notice that 😉
This isn’t surprising in a country that encourages it’s citizens to *snitch* on their neighbors who use their garden hoses.
To understand the story fully, you have to understand the Daily Mail. It has always been very right-wing in tone, to the extent that it was sympathetic to the British Fascists in the 1930s and supported Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain’s appeasement policies in the runup to WWII. Even now, its target market is the Conservative-voting over-50s who hide behind their net curtains thinking Britain has been going steadily down the toilet more or less since the abolition of slavery.
Its stance as a bitter and persistent opponent of Tony Blair and the present Labour government, which it portrays constantly as “meddling” and “interfering”, goes down very well with the core readership (check out the comments on the original story page blaming Mr Blair personally for this incident, if you’re in any doubt). So the Mail is quite happy to overplay any apparent overstepping of authority by bodies associated with any branch of the Labour government, such as the Police or the Home Office.
That this happened to a bunch of photogenic, middle-class (implication: white) kids is a bonus for the Mail. There’s nothing it likes better than a good scare story, and the line, “Amy was scared bucketloads to be locked up in a cell knowing murderers and rapists have been sat in the same cells” was a work of sheer genius. (The journalist didn’t manage to work the word immigrant into the story – another recurring Mail theme – so they rather let themselves down there, however.)
Its unspoken threat: Blair’s police will target your family on trivial grounds next, instead of concentrating on catching “real” criminals (of which, as the Mail constantly reminds us, there are very many indeed).
I love the Mail. It’s funnier than the Weekly World News, just as accurate, and you get a fresh batch of hilarious paranoia every single day.