Context:
A romani family had all their children taken away, and quite physically violently so. Police officers can be seen being rough with the children while the children are crying. Leading to an outcry in the local community saying that this was an unfair decision based on them being roma.
It is being reported that one of the children suffered a head injury due to the lack of care for the child causing social services to take all of their kids for safety reasons for the children. The father tells about it here, and he also talks about it on a tiktok here. The father mentioned that it was due to people not being at home as they’ve been working, and the babies head didn’t become swollen tell the next day, indicating they weren’t aware of the injury. To which they did go the hospital the next day, the police were called, but refused to investigate the parents, to which the parents actually willingly asked to cooperate with.
A roma community leader in this article is saying that this was systemically racist and as romani people face their kids being taken away at high systemic rates, this was a child whom sustained an bad head injury, but it didn’t warrant the taking away of all his children and deeming him unfit to take care of them. This can be seen as validly systemically racist due to the negative views of the roma gyspy people.
This led to a breakout of riots against the police naturally, leading to the the british population and the far right as usual deciding to put the blame on immigrants and muslims.
While elected muslim community councillors here actually tried to stop the situation, and here, oh and here too with fire extinguishers.
My understanding here is that the problem is with the way they went about this rather than the fact that it occurred. The kids (10 years old and under) were left at home alone with a 1 year old baby, the baby was dangled out a window and dropped suffering a head injury (reported as a cracked skull).
The hospital dealt with the kids and called social services who called the police to have the children removed. The video of their removal with the huge street issue is occurring with no parents home, and occurred because the children fought against their removal from the property.
What I speculate probably occurred:
A couple social workers and one police car shows up to remove kids.
Kids fight removal. It fails. Starts drawing neighbourhood. Kids tell others they’re trying to take them away but leave out things like the baby.
More police arrive. And even more to deal with the very large crowd attracted because the extracting police feel very unsafe.
Shitstorm due to tensions strained by racial policing in the past.
I’ll be honest I don’t think social services were wrong here. But I think you probably need to find a better approach to dealing with a house full of kids that are non-compliant and willing to fight because the approach of breaking in and using the force they did caused the following shitstorm with other people not knowing exactly why the police were involved in removing them.
That’ll do it.
Yeah I had a feeling it could be someone like this, my mom is a social worker (not in the uk) and she tells me that it’s really complicated to do stuff like this even when the parents are obviously negligent.
Big ups to the people stopping others from burning shit in their own neighbourhood though, I remember seeing on twitter that it was muslims being blamed for causing the riots and destroying shit but then a bunch of videos came out of them actually stopping others from setting things on fire.
Tangentially related but now that
wants to expand the police’s ability to “curtail anti social behaviour” (which seems to include everything from street drinking to people having mental health crises) I worry you’re gonna see a lot of cases of the police brute forcing their way through situations that would be better handled by medical professionals and social workers.
Sorry why would they “remove kids”? It sounds like they were hanging out at home? But they hurt a child thry were supposed to take care of?
In the UK there’s no legal age requirement for leaving kids at home. But it’s an offence to leave children at home alone if it places them at risk. This allows leeway and individual judgement in the matter.
Given that the kids were running rampant so much that they dangled a baby out a window I don’t think they had the maturity for being left home alone like that. I don’t really blame the hospital or social services in determining they were at risk.
What I do think went wrong here was the method of handling it, in particular the way in which it clearly escalated with neighbours and the local community. The biggest issue here is that these kids probably told the worst possible story to the audience they were attracting, and police did a shit job of explaining what was really the cause.
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