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A history teacher has said she was arrested and barred from seeing her own daughters after she confiscated their iPads.
Vanessa Brown, 50, told LBC that she spent over seven hours in a cell last month as Surrey police investigated a claim that she had stolen the tablets.
She says she was then released on bail conditions which barred her from speaking to her own children - as they were connected to the investigation.
The case was later dropped as police confirmed the iPads belonged to her children.
She told LBC of her “unspeakable devastation and trauma” which has followed after she confiscated the iPads to encourage her daughters to focus on their school work.
She told LBC: “At no point did [the officers] think to themselves, ‘Oh, this is a little bit of an overreaction for a moment, confiscating temporarily her [own] iPads and popping over to her mum’s to have a coffee’. It was just a complete overreaction.”
She added: “It was thoroughly unprofessional. They were speaking to my mother, who is in her 80s, like she was a criminal.”
Surrey police told LBC that they begun a search operation on March 26 after receiving a report of theft from a man in his 40s, having already been called out to a “concern for safety”.
Officers tracked the location of the iPads to Ms Brown’s mother’s house, where they asked her where the devices were.
When she said she did not know where they were, police arrested her on suspicion of theft before searching and finding the iPads.
A police spokesperson told LBC: “The woman was subsequently released on conditional bail while further enquiries were carried out. The police bail conditions included not speaking to her daughters, who were connected to the investigation, while officers carried out their enquiries.
“Following these enquiries, officers discovered that the iPads belonged to the woman’s children and that she was entitled to confiscate items from her own children.”
Ms Brown also said her child was pulled out of school by the police - who told The Guardian this was done in relation to the initial concern for safety.
Ms Brown said: “They were able to send a police car with police officers to my children’s school, they were able to send another police car or two to arrest me… I know people are making reports of thefts, of assaults and very violent crimes in and around our neighbourhood - and they’re not getting a response for days.
“I cannot get to the bottom of why [my arrest] was done in such a quick turnaround - maybe less than an hour. All these police cars and police officers going into address over a completely false report of a theft.”
The Independent has tried to contact Surrey Police for a comment.
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