Parents arrested after making 'disparaging' comments about school in WhatsApp chat

Transcript

00:00I opened it up to see six officers standing there and my first thought was they can only be here to

00:06tell me that my daughter's dead. I couldn't imagine why else six officers would be standing there.

00:12And my first question to them was, is everybody okay? And they didn't respond. They just told

00:18me that I had to go into the house. And I asked again, is everybody okay? And they told me I have

00:21to go into the living room. And by this point, because they weren't confirming that no one was

00:25dead, I believed that they were about to tell me that my daughter had died. And I thought I was

00:32about to collapse. And then they said to me, you're under arrest. And I was just stunned.

00:38Maxie Allen and his partner, Rosalind Levine, were shocked when six police officers turned up

00:43at their home to arrest and question them on suspicion of harassment, malicious communication,

00:48and causing a nuisance on school property. After a five-week investigation, police concluded there

00:54should be no further action. Maxie and Rosalind are with us this morning. Good morning, both.

01:00Morning. Morning, Callum. It's really great to be speaking with you on the air, Maxie,

01:05for the first time ever, I think. And great to speak to you, Rosalind. Shall we start first with

01:09just understanding a bit of the story? What actually happened here? Maxie, can you explain

01:14to us how this escalated? Well, in one sense, it started in this room where I'm speaking now,

01:20a little side office. You'll see on the video clip later. I was on a Zoom call about a quarter

01:26to 12 in the morning for a work project. And in my little Zoom screen, where I should have seen just

01:31my face, I saw two police officers standing behind me in this room. I saw their high-vis jackets.

01:38They'd entered the house without me hearing. And a few moments, I awkwardly said goodbye to

01:44people on my Zoom. And a few moments later, they arrested me, as you mentioned, on suspicion of

01:50harassment and communications. It had started quite a few months earlier when, as you mentioned

01:58in your summary, I used to be a governor of the school. And there was a bit of contention around

02:04recruiting a new headteacher. The incumbent was retiring. And the governors didn't advertise the

02:09vacancy. They didn't provide a timeline. So I made a few inquiries to the chair of governors.

02:14And you might think I was being a bit of a busybody, but it's a state school, my daughter's

02:19school. I thought it was a fair question about what their plan was. And I was just after some

02:23transparency. And I wrote to the governors. And I posted that letter to the governors on our

02:30parents' WhatsApp group, which is a group that we set up, about 12 to 15 parents on it, a private

02:36group. There's no members of staff on there. And we sort of chanted about it. And we chanted about

02:42another subject, which was, they'd, the school had also written a few weeks earlier to all parents

02:48saying, please don't talk negatively about us on social media, WhatsApp, Facebook. If you do,

02:54we'll take action. And we thought, as parents, it was a bit heavy handed. And we chanted about that

03:00on the WhatsApp group. Now, importantly, at no point has the school ever or the police ever

03:06provided any actual examples or quotes of supposedly terrible messages that we're responsible

03:13for. We don't know why we were arrested. We were told what the charges were, but we were never told

03:20exactly what we'd done, why we were being arrested. And also, bear in mind, we'd left the school by

03:23this point. We'd been gone almost a week. We thought we'd put the whole saga behind us of

03:29being banned from the school. So it was a complete shock and completely out of the blue

03:34that we were arrested. And to this day, we don't know why.