Police & Trading Standards

[bobby47]

During the past few years I've noticed a worrying increase in the use of children by the Police and the Local Authority, who are recruiting kids, giving them money and tasking them to enter a licensed premises store and purchase alcohol in order to gain evidence to support either a Licence being revoked or a criminal prosecution.

These Test Purchases are conducted under the control of the Police and the Trading Standards and at some point following a successful Test Purchase of alcohol, these kids must presumably provide witness statements and their personal details or false names must be incorporated into a file of evidence that will support a criminal prosecution.

For all intents and purposes these kids become Covert Intelligence Sources and I suppose, must be filed and logged as Police Informants.

Now I ain't no expert on any of this but I do ask myself, 'is this entirely necessary' given that the Police and Trading Standards could quite easily carry out a successful prosecution by simply carrying out observations on the shop and catching a few kids who have purchased alcohol from the Licencee.

My worry is that to save the Police and Council a lot of man hours doing these observations, they are taking the easy option and using children.

My personal view is that we shouldn't be exploiting children in this way. I accept that some would say the kids are volunteers but when they are that age, do they really know and understand what is being asked of them?

I felt this for a long time and I'd bet anybody that one day the wheel is going to come off and this will become a major Policing issue and will be something that we will, with hindsight regret ever doing.

I say, leave the kids out of it and get your evidence in another way.

[Alex]

You would not get away with this is some countries, it's called "Entrapment"