This Twitter thread links to a number of resources about this very peculiar example of police over-reach.
Family of five (father, mother, daughters 14 & 12, son 9) live on a small farm. They're High Catholic and have a private chapel in their home. They like to invite a priest to celebrate Latin mass about once a month, but these days it's not easy to find priests who will do this. They were given a recommendation for a priest whom they contacted (I think "they" in this context is the father) and despite some odd conditions attached they invited him to come. While he was there red flags were going off all over the place (exact nature of concerning behaviour not detailed) and after the priest had gone the father decided to follow him up.
He discovered the priest had worked in Mauritius and contacted the diocese there. Eventually he got a reply - the priest had been defrocked for kiddy-fiddling and should absolutely not be celebrating mass anywhere or indeed be allowed access to children. The father then tried to alert the clergyman who had recommended this priest in the first place, only to get an instablock. He sent some more emails to relevant people, including to the priest himself, confronting him with what he had discovered. No response.
Then suddenly, one afternoon, two police cars and a police van, with six policemen, drove up to his house. He and his wife were both handcuffed. His house was searched from floor to rafter, and all the family's electronic devices were seized. The father had to remonstrate loud and long to prevent both parents being driven away in the police van, leaving the three children alone at home and unaware of what had happened. Eventually the kids were rounded up and some arrangements made.
The parents were charged with harrassment against the defrocked priest. Two months later they were informed that all charges had been dropped.
There are wrinkles here I'm not really party to. The father has a massive Twitter following and styles himself a "free speech activist". Also, I'm getting some "Popular Front of Judea" vibes about all this Catholic in-fighting. Nevertheless. This keeps happening. Police arrive mob-handed to arrest someone for something mindnumbingly trivial, cause massive amounts of stress and confiscate all computers, phones, tablets and so on, leaving the family electronically blind and deaf and having to buy new equipment simply to continue to function in the modern world. Eventually charges are dropped. (It happened to a friend of mine some years ago, on account of a tweet in which he called a journalist an "absolute disgrace".)
Sometimes one feels that a trivial complaint is being used by the police to harrass someone they have their knife into for some unrelated reason. That might be the case here. Other times one feels that there are serial complainers who seem to be able to get the police to spring into action repeatedly against different people, as if the police were their personal enforcement squad. What exactly is going on here? How far up the chain is the authorisation given for these raids? Who thinks its even remotely justifiable to use so much police time and resources over a matter that could be dealt with in a far less confrontational manner?
