Parents Arrested for Complaining About Their Kid’s School in WhatsApp Group
You got a license for that… criticism?
This article originally appeared on m o d e r n i t y and was republished with permission.
Guest post by @ModernityNews
The parents of a nine year old British girl were arrested by police who came to their home after they complained about their child’s school in a WhatsApp chat group.
Yes, really.
The Times reports that Police arrested Maxie Allen and Rosalind Levin in front of their daughter on suspicion of malicious communications, harassment, and causing a nuisance on school property.
The pair were thrown in a jail cell over comments they made about the Cowley Hill Primary School in Borehamwood,
The report notes that the parents had taken issue with the school’s process of hiring a new head teacher, with school governors stepping in and issuing them with a warning for causing “disharmony”.
The school later completely banned the parents from the premises and were told they could only communicate via email.
The parents were then allegedly accused by the school of making “disparaging” remarks about the institution and “casting aspersions” in a parents’ group on WhatsApp, prompting the school to contact police.
The police then ordered the parents to remove their child’s from the school, which they did, yet they were still arrested a week later on their own doorstep and kept in jail for 11 hours.
Here is footage of the arrest:
Watch:
The parents have accused school of using aggressive tactics to “silence awkward parents” and accused the police of a “massive overreach” owing to the arrest.
“We’d never used abusive or threatening language, even in private, and always followed due process,” mr Allen, who works for Times Radio said.
He added, “Yet we have never even been told what these communications were that were supposedly criminal, which is completely Kafkaesque.”
Ms Levin noted that her initial thought when police approached her door was that her daughter had died, saying that she “could not think of any other reason why six police officers would be at my door”.
Following the arrest, Police decided not to take any further action, with a spokesman commenting “The arrests were necessary to fully investigate the allegations as is routine in these types of matters. Following further investigations, officers deemed that no further action should be taken due to insufficient evidence.”
A Cowley Hill Primary school spokesman told The Times “We sought advice from the police following a high volume of direct correspondence and public social media posts from two parents, as this was becoming upsetting for staff, parents and governors.”
Contrary to what some busy body school officials might believe, having and sharing a negative opinion of a public institution is not a crime, it’s called freedom of speech.
Remember when the British Prime Minister Kier Starmer recently got into an aggravated exchange with JD Vance, denying that freedom of speech was under attack by the authorities in the UK?
Vance was right.
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