Children Arrested, DNA Tested for Playing in a Tree?

skelator2821 wrote in with another account of a police action gone way overboard. From the article: "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 into cells for up to two hours." skelator2821's basic question in all of this: "What is this World coming to? Do you think they went to far?" Well? Do you?

Comments

Unbelievable

[Frag-A-Muffin]

FTFA (bolded text was done by me):

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.

Officers considered charging the children with criminal damage but eventually decided a reprimand - the equivalent of a caution for juveniles - was sufficient.

I can think of many other people to be arresting for criminal damage.

What the heck is this world coming to? Kids playing in a tree, break a few branches and get arrested (and DNA tested!? WTF?). Meanwhile, corporations are allowed to get away with this garbage. Yeah, there's nothing wrong with world ... civilized my ass.

Re:Lucky kids

[Anonymous Coward]

Jean Charles de Menezes was not wearing a winter coat, but a normal denim jacket ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jean_Charles_de_Menez es ); false "eyewitness" reports are the source for the misinformation about his "suspicious" clothing. Despite his normal appearance and behavior, he was still gunned down in cold blood by men who face no consequences. War is peace.

Re:So in the UK

[MrMickS]

Yup. We are rapidly approaching George Orwell's vision over here. We have more CCTV cameras than anywhere else. We are implementing systems that the police will be able to use to track all vehicle movements around the country, records kept for five years, regardless of whether any crime was committed by the driver. There are moves to gather biometric data from all of the population and hold it on file. "If you don't do anything wrong what have you got to hide?".

One current scheme is to setup fingerprint access to schools, this is funded by the DfE (Department for Education) and comes from a special budget. The DfE are reluctant to discuss what is done with the data and how long it will be kept. However, given the present administrations desire to collect biometric data and centralise it, its not too big a step to believe that this too will be centralised. It would mean that the government would have biometrics on the population from when it enters the state education system. Initially this will be fingerprint only but once that has been proven possible to defeat other data will be stored, DNA etc.

There is an argument that all of this will help the authorities prosecute offenders. It smacks too much of a police state for me. This action by the police is merely following the trend that has been established. The police can do no wrong at the moment.