Police should try solving actual crimes instead of arresting parents

Yahoo

14-04-2025

I have lost track of the number of times I have stomped downstairs, unplugged the PlayStation, collected up any device I can see and bundled everything into a drawer, declaring that my children will not have access to them for the rest of the day/week/month/term due to the intolerable aggro they cause, especially now, during the school holidays.
My youngest son recently spent at least an hour searching for the old iPhone he uses to listen to music before we eventually discovered it in a bag where I'd put it last time I did a device confiscation session. This follows one of my most pleasing memories of recent years, which was the time when my husband and I banned all screens – including the TV – for the entirety of the summer term after a particularly egregious fight between my two elder sons. After the initial outrage, and once they realised we weren't going to back down, all three of my children got on with it – and there was far less bickering and much more contented playing that summer than any other in living memory. My conclusion: taking away screens when your children are being horrible works, even if you're only banning them for 24 hours.
So I was horrified to hear about what happened to Vanessa Brown last month. In March, Ms Brown, 50, was arrested on suspicion of theft and then detained, searched and banged up by Surrey Police for nearly eight hours after she took her daughters' iPads away in an effort to get her 16-year-old eldest daughter to focus on revision. She went to visit her mother in Cobham for a coffee, took the tablets with her and a couple of hours later had the plod knocking on the door to conduct a 'welfare check', before arresting her. There but for the grace of God, etc.
Surrey Police has since apologised, and acknowledged its error.
Yet this is not the first time police have massively overreached into somebody's private life lately: just weeks ago, a couple in Hertfordshire were arrested after complaining about the recruitment process for a new headteacher at their children's primary school in a class WhatsApp group. Last year, the Telegraph columnist Allison Pearson was investigated by Essex Police over a social media post; they later dropped the investigation. Meanwhile, police take up to 28 hours to respond to actual burglaries, with an average wait time of nine hours and eight minutes and response times delayed by 25 per cent on the previous year, according to the most recent data from 2022/23.
In a truly Kafkaesque twist, four of the most senior policemen in England have just called for children under 16 to be banned from social media to protect them from the online violence, misogyny and extremism that is 'fuelling and enabling' crime. Take away the devices that give access to these platforms however, and it appears you might get arrested. Huh?
Every parent I know grapples with the screen dichotomy of modern life. On the one hand, modern mobile technology is a useful tool: in phones, tablets and laptops we can access almost any information we need at the click of a button; we can connect to people around the world; we can listen to music, learn a language, practise for a test or heck, even – as I am doing right now on a train – write a newspaper column.
On the other, mobile technology – and what it facilitates – is like crack for young developing minds. Limiting it is a no-brainer. A lot of parents go to desperate lengths to do this: confiscating devices like I did (and do); locking phones and tablets away in drawers; holding off as long as they can before giving their child a smartphone (my 14-year old still doesn't have one – an increasing source of tension in our house). The TV presenter Kirstie Allsopp went one further a couple of years ago and smashed her children's iPads after they broke her rules about screen time.
And yet all we get from on high are hysterical responses to a TV drama that the PM keeps calling a documentary and Education Secretary Bridget Phillipson calling for more male teachers to fix all of society's problems while seemingly unwilling to confront the deeper questions of why nobody – male or female – wants to go into teaching in the first place. The only thing they won't actually do is ban smartphones in schools – something that the leader of the country's largest teaching union called for this month – or devote grown-up, level-headed time and resources to analysing the real dangers of new tech on our children's brains. In a public health campaign, for example, that might help parents come up with a rational plan as to how to manage the tightrope walk of preparing our children sensibly for the adult world while not letting them run riot online.
Instead, this Government recently watered down a private member's Bill that sought to introduce tougher controls on smartphone and social media use by children, and continues to prevaricate on an outright school phone ban.
Grappling with this stuff is hard. It requires nuance and thought and time. And it shouldn't be just the Government's responsibility either – as parents we also need to learn to say no.
But when we do, we need backup, not arresting.
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