Vanessa Brown
Credit: X/@TheWorldVoices
Vanessa Brown, a 50-year-old History teacher from the UK, confiscated her daughters’ iPads during a disagreement about parenting and was arrested under the charge of “theft”.
She was held in a police cell for seven-and-a-half hours on March 26. She was shortly released on bail but was forbidden from contacting anyone involved in the case, including her own children, according to a report by The Guardian.
Expressing her “unspeakable devastation and trauma”, she explained to LBC news that she had taken the iPads to motivate her daughters to concentrate more on their studies. Police officers arrested her after a claim was made that she had stolen two iPads which were traced to her mother’s house in Cobham, Surrey.
“At no point did they [the officers] think to themselves, ‘Oh, this is a little bit of an overreaction for a moment, confiscating temporarily her iPads and popping over to her mum's to have a coffee’. It was just a complete overreaction.” Brown told LBC.
She was also concerned by the fact that police officers visited her daughters’ school to discuss the crime and her daughters were pulled out of class to talk about the incident.
Brown also commented on the injudicious use of police resources by stating, “They were able to send a police car with police officers to my children’s school, they were able to send another police car or two to arrest me … I know people are making reports of thefts, of assaults and very violent crimes in and around our neighbourhood – and they’re not getting a response for days.”
Despite facing severe criticism from the public and also the former police and crime commissioner Anthony Stansfeld, the Surrey police force has decided to not issue an apology.