Manchester police arrested and charged a gardener for possessing an “offensive weapon”, with interrogating officers refusing to accept his tools had a purpose and even asking to have what an allotment garden is explained to them.
35-year-old Theatre worker Samuel Rowe of Manchester, England says he is seeking a legal means to have a police caution removed from his criminal record because he believes it will harm his ability to find work in future after he was arrested and interrogated while gardening in his own garden.
Rowe told The Guardian that he’d walked home from his allotment on a community garden in July with a trug of vegetables and had got to work trimming his domestic garden hedge when officers arrived, pushed him up against the wall of his home, and then bundled him into a police van.
It is stated a member of the public had spotted Rowe walking home while carrying tools and wearing earthen coloured clothes and called the police on him. He told the paper: “I just heard shouting behind me, and then two armed officers shouting at me to drop the knife… And then they turned me around, pushed me up against my house, cuffed me, and then they arrested me, put me in the back of the van.”
At the time of his arrest, Rowe was using a small gardeners’ sickle to cut the hedge and had a sheathed Japanese weeding trowel, known as a Hori Hori, on his belt. Officers are claimed to have refused to believe the trowel was a gardening tool, and in a statement on the arrest referred to it as a “large dagger”, and another item as a “peeling knife”.
The Hori Hori shot to prominence in the United Kingdom last year when it became a mini-viral sensation and was named a must-have Christmas present for keen gardeners, described in a gift guide from December: “…it becomes your most used item – brilliant for weeding, chopping, digging holes for planting, and super comfortable to handle”.
Rowe was interviewed without a lawyer present as officers told him they’d been unable to find one. He reported having been asked some bizarre and probing questions when he was held, stating: “They started asking questions, like if I was autistic or anything like that, asking me whether I’d ever been in the army, whether I told people I was in the army”.
He was asked whether he was planning on “doing something” with what the police claimed were weapons and was required to explain “in very basic terms” what a community garden allotment is.
Eventually, Rowe accepted a caution from police in order to be allowed to go home. He is now worried that will remain on his criminal record and make finding work difficult.
While laws on “offensive weapons” in the United Kingdom are strict, with carrying even very basic items like pepper spray for self defence strictly outlawed, there are very clear exceptions in the legislation for carrying things like knives in public for work. This allows, for instance, a carpenter to carry chisels on his way to a job, or a farmer or fisherman to carry a knife when they have “reasonable grounds or expecting to need a knife while pursuing a lawful activity”.
The UK government also allows a knife to be carried “for religious reasons, such as the kirpan some Sikhs carry” and “as part of any national costume”.
As previously reported, the garden trowel arrest isn’t the only instance of British police going above and beyond the call of duty with questionably dangerous “weapons”. London police faced mockery online and eventually deleted a tweet where they boasted of getting a round-tipped butter knife off the streets. A spokesman said the sheer volume of notifications from the post was distracting officers from their work.
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