By Richard Shrubb

South Yorkshire Police (SYP) it seems need to train their doggies as to what weed exactly gets them their ball. Last week SYP proudly announced they had busted a man for what appears to be a bag of tree cuttings as part of their Operation Sceptre knife crime crackdown.

Police dog training

Sniffer dogs have some pretty cool skills. They can find all sorts of things – and only do it in return for a game of ‘Fetch’. It is clear that this old dog hadn’t sniffed out some of the good stuff recently and was after a game of Fetch under any circumstance so thought to give Daddy a bag that was either the worst deal in the country or was not in fact weed.

What’s worse is that the PR team of SYP clearly hadn’t had a game of Fetch themselves for a while so thought to announce their findings, no doubt wagging their tails and panting excitedly, on Facebook.

Social media bites back

A message for all police forces’ PR teams is that you may get a pat on the head and a game of Fetch every time you show a ‘quantity of cannabis’ on your Facebook pages from your happy bosses, but the locals may not respond too kindly.

The Daily Star – not the most respectable newspaper by any means – reported how it backfired:

“Rather than congratulating police on their good work, the majority of the comments were left by people questioning the authenticity of the cannabis. Some likened it more to seaweed while others said it resembled parsley or kale.”

Some 300 comments hit the Facebook page, no doubt leaving the poor social media team rather more tired than several hours running around the park chasing an Olympic javelin thrower’s ball. The post has since been deleted due to humiliation.

Let’s go after the real problem

The wider Operation Sceptre operation wasn’t too well received by the public either. After announcing they had found some fake guns, one local said: “Oh thank god you got rid of fake guns. Doing so much. Never mind the knife and acid attacks or rape gangs. You got rid of toys and you’re trying to get attention.”

At Feed the Birds’ we tend to view the real problems that need to be fixed tend to be legal and acceptable in society. Theresa May is the most corrupt Prime Minister in history, allowing children to die by not making cannabis legal because her husband’s company has its own special loophole in the law to grow and process the stuff.

In Sheffield, the local council is cutting down trees so they can finance their friends and people are being arrested for opposing the tree cutting (some of which no doubt ended up in the baggy of ‘cannabis’).

Our message is clear: please just put good sense before mindless state repression. Using the dog metaphor, your local residents may respect you more than your police dogs do lamp posts.

Richard is a marijuana, water sports and electric vehicles writer based in Dorchester, Dorset. Living in Prince Charles model housing estate, Poundbury, he is an avowed republican, community and Labour Party activist. Visit his website at www.richardshrubb.com for more about what he does.