Take Picture Of Your 4-Year-Old Daughter Eating Ice Cream… Get Investigated Under Terrorism Act [Updated]

from the the-new-face-of-terror dept

We’ve covered plenty of ridiculous stories concerning police going after photographers lately, but this one is a bit different. As a whole bunch of you have sent in, at a mall in Scotland, Chris White took a photograph of his 4-year-old daughter eating ice cream at an ice cream stand.

However, the mall apparently has a “no photographs” law, and workers at the ice cream stand were supposedly “suspicious,” and called security… who called the police, after White refused to delete the photos on his phone (and noted that they’d already been uploaded to Facebook). The police then questioned him under the UK Terrorism Act, saying that they could confiscate his mobile phone. To everyone’s credit, the situation didn’t escalate and he was left alone (and not made to turn over the phone). But, just the fact that it went that far seems crazy. How difficult is it to recognize a common scene of a father taking a photo of his daughter eating ice cream?

Of course, the attention that this has received resulted in the mall changing its official policy

Update: Important update to this story. While the mall has apologized, the police are hinting very strongly that White’s account is not accurate, and that there was some other (unnamed) activity that was the reason he was investigated…

It is because Mr White chose to seek publicity for his account of events and because of the planned demonstration that we feel compelled to take the unusual step of making our findings public.

?In reaching our conclusions, officers took statements from a number of independent witnesses and viewed the substantial amount of CCTV that was available in the centre.

?On reviewing all of this objective evidence, I have to tell you that we can find no basis to support the complaint which MrWhite has elected to make.

?The members of the public who asked for the security staff to become involved have told us that they did so for reasons which had absolutely nothing to do with him taking photographs of his daughter. They had a very specific concern, which I am not in a position to discuss publicly, that they felt the need to report. It was because of this very specific concern that security staff became involved. They were right to raise their concern and we are glad that they did so.

?The security staff were the ones who asked for police involvement. Again, this was not because Mr White said he had been photographing his daughter, but was due to the concerns that they themselves had regarding this particular incident.

Filed Under: photos, terrorism, uk