MIKE Priestley, North of Watford. The police can be more than a bit heavy-handed sometimes when dealing with non-criminal members of the public.

The latest example of this is the case of Mrs Victoria Adamson, who was pushing her twins through Torquay in their pram when she found a sealed package on the pavement and took it home.

She thought it contained a mail-order catalogue. What it did in fact contain was £20,000 in new notes stolen in a bungled bank robbery and dropped by the robbers.

Her husband took the package to the police station that very lunchtime. Far from being thanked, Mrs Adamson was questioned for hours and for the last nine months has had the threat of prosecution for theft hanging over her - not because she was suspected of bank robbery, but because she initially picked up the package and took it home.

This week, quite rightly, the Crown Prosecution Service decided to offer no evidence against her when the case came to court, and the judge entered a verdict of not guilty.

The police, though, surely ARE guilty - of misreading the situation badly, and of alienating a law-abiding member of the public who in future could be forgiven for thinking very carefully before co-operating with them over anything, and then deciding not to bother.

There are too many stories of people who have had a rough ride at the hands of the law over the most trivial of matters. A friend of mine (not in Bradford) was followed for miles by an unmarked police car and eventually pulled over. He was arrested and charged with stealing from a Council tip. His crime? To be an environmentally-aware person who picked up a swatch of discarded carpet samples thinking they would be more use as car mats than buried in an infill site.

For that heinous crime he was taken to court and fined.

A woman I read about was pulled up and warned after going through a red light in a distracted moment. Later that week a policeman arrived at her door to advise her, with sadistic glee, that she was going to be prosecuted. He was so unpleasant that after he left she was trembling with distress. Now she hardly dare drive anywhere. And, moreover, this woman who believed that she and the upholders of law were on the same side now despises the police and would do nothing at all to help to make their work easier.

There are a lot of crooked people in this world. And there are a lot of decent people who perhaps just once in their lives make a mistake and breach a minor regulation. Though most police officers can tell the difference between the two, some clearly can't and descend like the wrath of God on traffic-rules infringers as well as bank robbers.

They need to be advised to lighten up and realise that they must have the law-abiding public on their side if they are ever to stand a chance of winning the war against real criminals.

The more people they offend by their heavy-handedness, the less chance of getting the support they need. Which is bad news for all of us.

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