He said the officers were shouting at him to “drop the knife”.

“I said I didn’t have a knife and they told me to drop the knife again,” he said.

"So I dropped my Japanese hand gardening sickle and a handful of privet that I just cut off the hedge.

“They turned me around, pushed me up against my house, handcuffed me, then put me in the back of a van.”

Mr Rowe was carrying a Japanese-made trowel in its sheath, a small Japanese gardener’s sickle and a peeling knife, along with a trug of vegetables.

He said the peeling knife was his late grandmother’s, the sickle had been purchased a decade ago and the trowel, which has a short blade and wooden handle, was a present.

He added that he had not been aware of any warnings about carrying the tools in public.

However, since his arrest, a warning has appeared on the trowel manufacturer’s website.

It said customers needed “to familiarise themselves with offensive weapons law before carrying the tool in public”.

    • Zombie@feddit.uk
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      2 days ago

      Yeah, it’s fair enough that they were called and showed up.

      Their conduct after realising it’s not a knife though is what’s wrong. They know now, for a fact, that it is not a dagger and yet in their public statement they say it is, and they coerced a caution out of an innocent person.

    • Obinice@lemmy.world
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      1 day ago

      Exactly, that’s absolutely a knife. A huge one.

      It may also be used as a trowel, but looks at it, that looks like something crocodile dundee would throw at someone.

      A guy walking around in public with that strapped to his belt in a tactical looking holster is just asking for trouble. He was probably looking forward to the day the cops got him for it. He can’t have been so stupid to have that on and think “this is totally fine, nobody would ever be concerned by this”.

      • Wolf314159@startrek.website
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        10 hours ago

        He wasn’t “walking around in public”. He was a gardener, walking around with gardening tools, gardening. I have one of those tools. It’s fucking amazing at digging small precise holes under difficult conditions, but as a weapon it wouldn’t be any more dangerous than any of my other tools. It’s absolutely not a knife. It’s just a narrow trowel with edges necessary to cut through roots. Most gardening tools have a sharp edge somewhere. Context fucking matters. And the fantasy your spinning about this scenario is just more pathetic nanny state authoritarian nonsense.