From: uklm@permabulator.33mail.com 
  
 On 14:33  4 Sep 2025, Mark Goodge said: 
 > On Thu, 4 Sep 2025 12:06:24 +0100, Clive Page  
 >> 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 is irregular is Graham Linehan was held in a police cell at 
 Heathrow for 14 hours and it would have been longer .... but he had to 
 be taken to hospital as his blood pressure had risen dangerously high 
 (systolic above 200 mmHg) creating a significant risk of heart attack or 
 stroke. This doesn't seem appropriate for a tweet made six months earlier. 
  
 > 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 
  
 I am clear about all the circumstances but it appears Graham Linehan 
 travelled to London to attend a scheduled court case (about his encounter 
 with trans activists at a conference last year). If that is the case then 
 why was there any need to detail him at all, as he could be found at the 
 court? 
  
 --- SoupGate-Win32 v1.05 
  * Origin: you cannot sedate... all the things you hate (1:229/2)