From: usenet@listmail.good-stuff.co.uk 
  
 On Thu, 4 Sep 2025 12:06:24 +0100, Clive Page  wrote: 
  
 >On 04/09/2025 11:45, Jon Ribbens wrote: 
 >> On 2025-09-04, Clive Page  wrote: 
 >>> One can see that if you are police officer it's a much more exciting way 
 >>> to spend your day dashing onto the runway at Heathrow in a car with blue 
 >>> lights flashing along with four colleagues all brandishing guns than 
 >>> trying to investigating a real crime, which might, for example, involve 
 >>> watching a lot of boring CCTV footage.  So one can see their point of 
 >>> view, it's just not something that most of the public would support. 
 >> 
 >> Did any of that actually happen, or did you make it up? 
 >> 
 >News reports said he was arrested by five armed police.  Perhaps that's 
 >explainable if all police at Heathrow are armed, but even so to waste 
 >the time of five of them seems to me a bit over the top. 
  
 All airside police at airports are armed. So anyone being arrested as they 
 step off a plane will be arrested by armed police, simply because there are 
 no unarmed police there. But there's no suggestion that they were 
 "brandishing" their guns, and the Met has since made it clear that their 
 guns remained holstered throughout. 
  
 So I don't think there's anything particularly newsworthy about the 
 circumstances of the arrest per se, if it was in line with normal 
 procedures. What I do question is whether it was necessary to arrest him at 
 the airport at all. It's not like he was a flight risk, or his subsequent 
 movements would be hard to determine. They could just as easily have waited 
 until he got home, then sent a constable round to knock on his door. And I'm 
 not even sure he needed to be arrested up front. He could have been invited 
 to voluntarily attend for an interview, and then only arrested if the police 
 felt it necessary to take things further - what used to called "helping 
 police with their inquiries". The modern preference to arrest first, and 
 question later, seems to me to be a suboptimal use of police resources as 
 well as unnecessarily melodramatic. 
  
 Mark 
  
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