British parents say they were arrested in front of their children for private WhatsApp messages
A British couple said last week that they were arrested in front of their children in January for messages they sent in a private WhatsApp group.
Maxie Allen and Rosalind Levine live in Borehamwood where their nine-year-old daughter Sascha, who has special needs and epilepsy, attends Cowley Hill Primary School. After becoming unhappy with the school’s recruitment process for a new head teacher, Allen sent a letter to school administrators expressing his dissatisfaction and posted a copy of the letter in a private parents’ WhatsApp group.
Jackie Spriggs, the school’s chair of governors, then issued a letter threatening parents who criticize staff.
“It has come to my attention that social media, including WhatsApp groups and Facebook, have been used to make inflammatory and defamatory comments about senior leaders in the school,” wrote Spriggs. “I would like to remind all parents that the school will take action where comments are aimed at individuals within the school community or as a result, cause disharmony within the school or distress to members within the school community.”
In a video describing the incident, Allen said his co-parent Rosalind wrote “a handful of vaguely spicy comments” about school staff in the WhatsApp group following the letter. She referred to one administrator as a “control freak” and criticized leadership for threatening to “take action” against parents who expressed their disapproval, mockingly suggesting that the school might call the police on such parents.
But that’s exactly what the school did. On January 29th, six Hertfordshire Police officers arrived at Allen’s and Levine’s home. Allen said he was on a work Zoom call at the time and saw on his webcam two police officers standing behind him. He also saw Levine being hauled away by other officers in front of their three-year-old daughter, Francesca. The parents were handcuffed and detained for 12 hours for “harassment” and “harmful communications,” including eight hours in a jail cell.
The parents had also been banned from the school, which Allen said “had really serious implications” for Sascha, and were restricted to communicating by email about their disabled daughter’s health and education.
“It was Kafkaesque. It was surreal. It was bizarre. It was horrific,” Allen recalled about the arrest. After a few days, he said, he and Levine began to have “a kind of PTSD” and feared arrest every time they saw police pass by. “I shudder, I think: Are they coming back for us again?”
"We cannot fathom what happened, it doesn't make any sense,” said Levine. “We made a few inquiries, we had a bit of banter on a WhatsApp group, and then we were arrested.”
Police eventually notified Allen and Levine that they were dropping the investigation.
“Following reports of harassment and malicious communications, which are criminal offences, a man and a woman from Borehamwood, both aged in their 40s, were arrested on Wednesday 29 January,” Hertfordshire Police said in a statement. "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.”
Two-tier policing
The arrest drew criticism not only for serving as another assault on free speech in the UK but also for reflecting two-tier policing. Last week, Turning Point UK posted a video of a migrant threatening to kill British police as they looked on, making no move to arrest him.
The Labour government has been accused of implementing a two-tier justice system, even earning Prime Minister Keir Starmer the nickname “Two-Tier Kier.” This week, the UK Sentencing Council reluctantly shelved its controversial new guidance that would see minorities receive lighter criminal sentences than White, Christian men.
Last year, 37-year-old Shaun Tuck was jailed for 15 weeks for a social media post that police considered racist. Thirty-four-year-old Sam Melia was sentenced to two years in prison for selling anti-immigration stickers. But twenty-one-year-old Hamoud Al Soaimi, a Syrian Muslim who participated in the repeated gangrape of a 13-year-old girl while in his teens, was sentenced to just 180 hours of community service. Similarly, in 2023, a 20-year-old woman named Husina Hussain who drunkenly assaulted a bowling alley employee and shouted racial slurs in public avoided having to wear a sobriety ankle monitor because she was Muslim.
Last year, the Labour government drew criticism for cracking down on anti-immigration riots while allowing Muslim rioters to rampage freely. The anti-immigration riots were triggered after a Rwandan migrant stabbed three young British girls to death, and the rioters, who were primarily White British taxpayers, were imprisoned. Prime Minister Starmer promised to increase surveillance and censorship to clamp down on the “far-Right.”
Meanwhile, police were noticeably absent when hundreds of migrants, mostly Muslim men, attacked a bar, destroyed cars, and chased down journalists. In a similar incident last year, West Yorkshire Police fled from a 2,000-strong mob of Muslim and Romanian rioters who destroyed a police vehicle and set a bus aflame. Police officers on the scene took flight, saying afterward they had been met with “a barrage of bricks and missiles.” The police remained largely absent for several hours as the rioters set fire to the neighborhood. Firefighters refused to enter the area, fearing for their own safety.
A “number of people” were arrested in connection with the riot. According to independent journalists, one of those was a British woman who was arrested on the spot after making “racially insensitive” remarks about the rioters.
