Moment heavily-armed cops swoop on group of kids playing with gel blasters in Maidstone town centre and make arrests: Horrified passerby shrieks ‘they’re laying on the floor’

13 comments

  1. Oh no not the floor.

    Armed police arrive on scene.

    Meaning someone has called 999 and said either the keywords gun or knife…

    Armed police subdue suspects, no excessive force applied.

    Suspects are arrested, no one’s dead, injured or worse off because the polices actions.

    Time and a place for playing with those, th highstreet in the middle of the day is not one of them.

    Don’t think the police could be criticised for much here.

  3. Police were given reports of people with guns and responded.

    No-one was assaulted or mistreated as far as I can tell.

    A bit rich for a paper that wants a police state – particularly in relation to benefits recipients or immigrants – painting this story as an outrage…

  4. Surely after you’ve arrived, talked to the group and ascertained that they are using legal gel blasters, you would use some critical thinking and warn them, ask them to go elsewhere and move on.

    Great interaction with the police for these kids, I’m sure the overreaction won’t affect their opinion of them…

  5. I live in maidstone and many many years ago when realistic bb guns were easily available to buy as children we used to go to odeon lockmeadow and run around shooting each other, with people everywhere, no one cared or called the police, all we ever got was the odd security guard telling us to piss off, when the police were eventually called it was just two again telling us to basically piss off, if we had done that now chances are one of us would have got shot, crazy how times change.

  7. Nah, this is way too harsh. Anyone in here arguing that its fair they grabbed a couple of kids playing with toys, then knelt over there backs whilst they were face down and handcuffed need to realise the optics of this. Actually look at the photos/video. Think how this would of been national news if there was a racial element to it, would those police have performed the same way in that situation?

  8. I think it should be said: Even toy guns have the capacity to injure someone. Shot into someone’s eyes and that’s a kid who can’t see for the rest of his life, and another in prison.

    The police were in their right to shut this down.

  9. When I was the kids age you could go to a couple big markets at the weekend and get sprung loaded bbq guns starting at a fiver which were all black and looked real, even at that age I knew to never take them in public, one time me and friends took them into a wooded area to have a bb fight and a dog walker looked shocked but noticed we had containers of white bb’s so I guess didn’t do anything. The guns snapped and fell apart quickly and I remember by the time I was about 18 you couldn’t buy those anymore from markets as I think they were used as fake fire arms.. but looking st the ones these kids have, their ones look like toys… the few I bought looked like actual handguns..

  11. I dont quite get what people in the comments think the police are meant to do here. If it looks at all like a real gun the police kind of have to assume it is until told otherwise. The alternative is inviting an incident where an actual gun crime occurs and the police send one unarmed bobby to investigate whether its just a kid with a BB first.

  12. With all the youth knife and gun crime being reported?

    Just because they were carrying water pistols doesn’t mean one of them didn’t have a real gun. The police had to act that way

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