The BBC reports from a publication by the Police Federation of England and Wales about their daily duties. These include for example:
Cautioning a man from Cheshire for being “found in possession of an egg with intent to throw”, arresting a child in Kent (the kid removed a slice of cucumber from a sandwich and threw it at another youngster), or arresting two children from Manchester for being in possession of a plastic toy pistol (at least some educational effort there, but better would have been to arrest the kids’ parents).
The Police Federation of England and Wales claim that this is a consequence of Labour’s red tape “targets” — the development of which was portrayed by Adam Curtis in his BBC documentary The Trap – What Happened To Our Dream Of Freedom?. .rm files might be here…
My favourite Friday reading, Schnews, reports another one of this sort:
It was hard cheese (fl avour) for a grandmother from Crawley, fi ned £80 by jobsworth council wardens after kicking a couple of Quaver crisps into the gutter, spilled by her twenty-month-old granddaughter.
Salty stasi pounced on Barbara Judd at a bus stop after spotting the crisp-wielding toddler with her blatantly incite the granny to fl out the controversial clause in the SOCPA laws which forbids kicking more than one potato or corn snack at a time.
As it was a wet day the crispy threat had already started to disintegrate by the time the Fried Food arm of Special Branch turned up (AKA the Smokey Bacon).
“I couldn’t believe it,” said Barbara, who’s refused to pay the fi ne, “They wrote down
‘kicking two crisps’ as the offence.”
When it came to the crunch a Crawley Borough Council spokeswoman said: “We’ve cancelled the fine and apologised to the family for being over-zealous.”
http://www.schnews.org.uk/archive/news588.htm