Arrested for honesty

The relationship between police and public relies a lot on the public seeing the police as behaving reasonably and therefore being willing to help the police, but this been getting a battering as the police, either encouraged by government or on their own initiative, do more and more to piss the public off. The latest example of police fuckwittery is arresting someone for handing in a lost mobile phone he'd found.

A college student who found a mobile phone while out celebrating his 18th birthday was arrested after handing it in to police.
Teenager Paul Leicester was arrested for 'theft by finding' and detained for four hours....
The teenager was kept by Merseyside Police in Southport police station for four hours and had his fingerprints taken, along with a DNA swab and a photo for police records.
Officers then grilled him for 15 minutes about the alleged 'theft'.

Please be an April Fool's joke. Please!

A police spokesman explained the complaint of theft was subsequently withdrawn and Paul was released without charge.

Complaint? Who complained? As far as I can see there was never any complaint of theft made to the police. They just took it upon themselves to believe, bizarrely, that someone entering a police station of their own free will and handing over a phone they said they'd found was actually more likely to have nicked it.

Sefton Area Commander, Chief Supt Ian Pilling, said: 'Merseyside Police has contacted Mr Leicester in relation to the incident and he does not wish to make a complaint against the police. As a matter of course we are reviewing the circumstances of the arrest.'

A Google search for "Chief Supt Ian Pilling" and "Chief Superintendent Ian Pilling" shows that this is a real person and currently the Sefton Area Commander, which makes the possibility of it being an April Fool prank much less likely. And even if it was a joke the fact that it's just so fucking plausible says everything you need to know about the state of the police-public relationship, i.e. it's in tatters.

Meanwhile Paul Leicester goes free but will no doubt have his DNA retained by the police just in case. Just another one of the millions arrested but never charged whose DNA has been retained. Whether there really is a conspiracy to nick as many people on the flimsiest and most trumped up of charges so that slowly but surely the whole fucking country ends up on the DNA database, or whether the police have simply employed too many fuckwits as officers is irrelevant. The results come out much the same.

Cunts,