I visited my God Daughter for the first time in a good year or so yesterday on my way back from East London ruining good friendships and being a public idiot. They are a poor family, a single mother with four beautiful children who lives on benefits, but gives everything she can to the children. As more people know from the news, council estates in South London are rife with gang culture and the eldest has fallen in with a gang, largely because on the estates in London, not to be in a gang can be equally as dangerous as being in one.
She told me that at 4 am a couple of weeks ago, a group of armed police smashed in her front door and turned her flat upside down looking for drugs which they suspected would be in the possession of her eldest son. Having found nothing, they left.
It begs the question, just how dangerous and intimidating can a single mother and her eldest son of 15, a younger one of 12 and two younger girls be, that the police need to smash down her door and perform as if they are dealing with the lead character from Scarface? The mother, and I expect the children who were awoken by these armed buffoons were left shaken and traumatised.
As St Francis said, "What is power in the hands of the reckless but the sword in the hands of a madman?" It seems to me that the more power is given to police to 'protect' the more at risk we all are from having our rights ripped away from us. Why could they not have knocked on the door, during the day and say, "We have a search warrant for this house, please may we come in and make some investigations?" But no, they just barged in, ripped the door from the hinges and terrorised a poor family in the dead of night! We are living in very worrying times.
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