arrested for playing in a tree

Nobody seems to have really picked this one up, and I only found it on Slashdot (not your normal place for UK politics), btu it really is a damning inditement of the current state of the country. Children arrested, DNA tested, interrogated and locked up for playing in a tree. Children havign harmless fun, but somebody obviously worried that it wasn't government approved harmless fun somebody phones the Stasi police complaining according to the spokesman:

Superintendent Stuart Johnson, operations manager at Halesowen police station, said: 'I support the actions of my officers who responded to complaints from the public about "kids destroying" an ornamental cherry tree by stripping every branch from it, in an area where there have been reports of anti-social behaviour.

Perhaps once the person in question would have been willing to ask them to find another tree in which to play. But not anymore, and so a situtation that should have been resolved by social preasure is transformed into one requiring to full force of the state as the state has for the last 50 years been trying to destroy these social alternatives to it's own overwhelming power.