Well, they've done it again.
It beggars belief, really. We do our best, really we do, to sympathise with our police, to give them our support, to bite our lips and say nowt when things go wrong for them. And they just keep on messing up.
A couple of weeks ago we all read newspaper reports about the bungling cops in Wester Ross who launched a full-scale raid on 79-year-old Lulu Matheson's house, handcuffed her grandson, held her son in his bedroom for two hours and locked the family's two dogs up. It was because the officers didn't know the difference between cannabis plants and the tomatoes she had growing on her windowsill, and also couldn't distinguish between a 79-year-old grandmother and a drug cartel.
Now police in Bristol have done the same thing. Pensioners Ivor and Margaret Wiltshire returned from holiday to find that police had smashed through the front door and ransacked the house because they couldn't tell cannabis from a four-inch high garden plant called moss flox.
The police have apologised for the mistake, and attempted to excuse themselves by saying that the flox growing in the Wiltshire's garden had a pungent smell not unlike that of cannabis. In their defence it mist be added that the Wiltshire's neighbours were burgled three nights before by a masked gang who demanded 'Give us the weed, man!' but you might reasonably expect a teensy bit more intelligence from policemen than from petty criminals … or perhaps not …
Retired engineer Ivor said he has no sense of smell following an operation 30 years ago and has no idea what cannabis smells like. "We bought the plant four years ago," he said, "and it multiplied so fast that it took over our front and back gardens - I was happy because it looked very nice. I haven't got any idea what cannabis would smell like. I have only seen a picture of it on the television". He has now pulled up the offending flowers, which is rather sad, really.
The GOS says: What is more sinister is the neighbour, David Difford, who said "You could smell the plants all the way up the road. It was a really powerful smell and exactly the same as cannabis".
How did he know?
either on this site or on the World Wide Web.
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