Lancashire Police have suspended an officer who threatened to fabricate an offence in order to arrest a man during the coronavirus lockdown.
The incident took place on Friday and was filmed by the friend of the man threatened with arrest. The unnamed Briton had just purchased a quad bike for a relative when the police officer pulled him over in Accrington, Lancashire. The officer then demanded his car keys, prompting the man to respond that he had done nothing wrong.
The footage recorded by the man’s friend revealed the officer to have said: “I’ll make something up. Public order. Squaring up to a police officer. Shall I do that?”
“Who are they going to believe me or you? Who are they going to believe me or you?” the officer added.
Later posting on social media, the man said that while the officer was making the threats, he was “not keeping his two-metre distance, spitting at me while he was shouting”.
The footage went viral, and after a massive public backlash, Lancashire Police was forced to announce that the officer in question had been suspended from duty. The force said in a statement reported by The Guardian: “We absolutely recognise the impact this footage has had on public confidence and following an initial review by our professional standards department the officer involved has… been suspended from duty.
“We have also taken the decision to voluntarily refer the matter to the Independent Office of Police Conduct. We hope these matters go some way to reassuring the public how seriously we are treating this matter.
“We will be speaking to the man in the footage to keep him fully informed regarding the actions we are taking.”
British police have come under increasing criticism for their heavy-handed approach to Britons freely moving about their country during the coronavirus lockdown.
Warrington Police proudly boasted in late March that it had “summoned for offences” those who went “out for a drive due to boredom” and “multiple people from the same household going to the shops for non-essential items”.
Before Easter, convenience stores had complained that officers had told them to stop selling Easter eggs because they are not considered “essential” items. At the beginning of April, Northamptonshire Police was criticised for suggesting that their officers were going to check shopping trolleys in supermarkets to make sure people were only buying “essential” items during the lockdown.
Police had taken drastic measures to dissuade Britons from visiting some of the country’s beauty spots, including Derbyshire Police pouring black dye into the usually clear ‘Blue Lagoon’ in Harpur Hill, Buxton, “to make the water look less appealing”. In another instance, Derbyshire officers had used a drone to follow dog-walkers in the Peak District and tell them to go home because exercising in the nature reserve with their pet was deemed “not essential”.
Public rights organisation Big Brother Watch said of the drone incident: “Police filming innocent members of the public with drones & putting it online is frankly sinister.”
Police have sought to widen their powers even further than those granted by the emergency coronavirus laws, with the Police Federation of England and Wales pushing for the right to forcibly enter private homes without a warrant to see if people are having parties.
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