You will notice that the little girl pictured here is a) in a park and b) skipping merrily through the daffodils. Being a well-brought-up type she is not c) pulling up daffodils just for fun. She is not, that is to say, one of Jane Errington’s children.
Miss Errington, a resident of Poole, is most aggrieved that her children – aged four, six and ten – were cautioned by police and warned that destroying daffodils in a public park could be construed as criminal damage and, were said flowers then removed from the park, theft. The Daily Mail uses the story to have a go at the Peelers who, we are meant to presume, should be doing more important things than policing this kind of juvenile vandalism. I must say that it’s odd to see the Mail so relaxed about this sort of anti-social behaviour.
And it is anti-social behaviour as well as being an obvious commons issue. If more children destroyed fields of daffodils there’d be no daffodils for anyone to enjoy come the spring*.
They said basically we had committed a crime. They said, “We have been really nice and let you off, but if you don’t leave it we will have to arrest you for theft”.
‘The little ones were really upset and started crying. It was quite frightening for them.
They did have daffodils in their hands, I’d say about 20 between them, and they had been picking them up and sorting them out like children do.’
She continued: ‘If we’d seen it we would have stopped them, but all it needed was for whoever complained to have approached us and made us aware.’ Afterwards, the girls were worried we were going to be taken away from them by the police and the youngest said, “Daddy, I don’t want to go back to the park”. ‘I just felt it was unnecessary and upsetting. Surely the police have better ways to spend their time and taxpayers’ money?’
Well, yes, it would certainly have been better if someone had had a quiet word with Miss Errington, her partner and her plant-hating children. Though I have relatively little experience of monitoring children in parks, I believe it’s likely I’d notice if the brutes were hell-bent on destroying any flowers within reach of their malicious little paws. If Miss Errington did not notice this then her parenting skills seem to be, shall we say, somewhat lacking
Moreover, I suspect that her admission that her brood had destroyed 20 flowers is most probably a considerable under-estimate of the damage done, not least since the witness who alerted the police suggests that the little bastards had worked their way through as many as 70 plants. (But who knows?)
This might be thought a tiny matter but, as Heresy Corner rightly notes, it’s also a depressing commentary on contemporary culture:
The story doesn’t say much for the Big Society, though, does it? Neglectful parents, disrespect for public amenities, police who sit around “observing” the daffodil massacre before plucking up the courage to intervene. The press, quick to decry or ridicule the “daffodil police” rather than ask what sort of society it is where parents don’t, pre-emptively and as a matter of course, instill in their children that in a public park you DO NOT PICK THE FLOWERS. Even Cllr Adams, proud as he is of his council’s floral display, and in a position of some authority, preferred to wait for the police to show up instead of complaining to the family himself. As a man of mature years, he was perhaps afraid the mother might accuse him of having some improper motive in noticing the behaviour of her daughters.
Alas so. But if we must have police – and we must – I’d much rather they spent their time protecting public spaces from vandalism, loutishness and anti-social behaviour than on many of the things that do occupy so much of their time. Even better, of course, would be a society – and a culture – in which the police had no need to monitor these things. Best of all might be a place in which the perpetrators of this sort of stuff didn’t consider themselves victims when the facts and consequences of their misbehaviour are, however belatedly, pointed out. Better still might be a place in which individuals were keener to act on their own initiative and police public spaces themselves without recourse to the law.
UPDATE: Fiona Melville has more.
*Some way off here, alas. It will be some time before any daffodils flower in these parts.
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