“Parents ‘vindicated’ after police admit unlawful arrest over WhatsApp row”, the Guardian reports. The subheading is “Hertfordshire police agree to pay £20,000 to Rosalind Levine and Maxie Allen, who were held for 11 hours after complaining about daughter’s school”.
I posted about this couple’s experience last April: Boiling frogs in Salem and Hertfordshire.
One aspect of the story that the Free Speech Union’s Frederick Attenborough highlighted at the time was that Hertfordshire Police didn’t just put the frighteners on Rosalind Levine and Maxie Allen, they also threatened – in writing – their local county councillor, Michelle Vince, that if she continued to advocate on their behalf she too might find herself “liable to being recorded as a suspect in a harassment investigation”. And they told Michelle Vince to pass on that warning to the local MP, Sir Oliver Dowden.
As Sir Oliver said in the Times, “Police risk ‘curtailing democracy’ by stopping MPs doing their job”.
Today’s Guardian article continues,
Allen claimed he and Levine were not abusive and were never told which communications were criminal, saying it was “completely Kafkaesque”.
A Hertfordshire police spokesperson said: “Whilst there are no issues of misconduct involving any officer in relation to this matter, Hertfordshire Constabulary has accepted liability solely on the basis that the legal test around necessity of arrest was not met in this instance.
“Therefore Mr Haddow-Allen and Ms Levine were wrongfully arrested and detained in January 2025. It would be inappropriate to make further comment at this stage.”
You wish. Further comment is both appropriate and necessary. There bloody well are issues of misconduct involving at least one officer in relation to this matter: whichever officer tried to frighten off both a local councillor and an MP from representing their constituents.
You are absolutely right, Natalie, but the English legal system seems entirely unable to address these issues.
Are the coppers or the chief constable going to cough for the £20,000 from their own pocketses?
No. Though not. It’s the chumps who pay the council tax that foot the bill as usual.
I don’t know the operational setup of Brit police. Would any individual officer be making such decisions, or would something like this need to have been driven by someone higher-up?
I ask because this payoff seems to effectively end any pursuit upstream.
The purpose of this, and pretty much anything else in the british legal and political system, is fairly obviously to intimidate the mass of the brit population and to demonstrate that those in power, and those non-brits favored by those in power, are above any and all law. As Dan Souter above said, it is that mass of brits who will pay the fine and the officers and their superiors who ordered this will not pay any penalty. In fact I expect them to be rewarded for what they have done a little bit down the line.
Today I read a rumor [just a rumor with nothing to confirm it] that we here in the US might start accepting refugees from britain the way we used to take in refugees from the China, the USSR or Cuba. With the appropriate screening process, I could see it.
Subotai Bahadur
Anyone who has ever wondered if the British would have collaborated if Germany had won the war now knows the answer. These coppers would have loaded the cattle trucks bound for Auschwitz without a second thought.