Thinking about hosting a summer BBQ? Fine. Thinking about inviting 15 friends? That’s cool. Put up an announcement on Facebook? Here come the SWAT teams.

Brit Andrew Poole organised a simple barbeque to celebrate his 30th birthday party. He expected a total of 17 guests, so he bought a lot of burgers, rented a marquee and put some batteries into the portable MP3 player, as anyone with an impending significant birthday and an unused BBQ stove would. But his first mistake was to create an events page on Facebook. His second was to send out invitations to join the BBQ in a Devon field owned by a friend.

However, Minority Report became real when when eight police officers, some dressed in body armour, swooped in via a helicopter and a riot van. Police claimed they received reports a “large-scale” dance rave organised via something called the Internet. Police said local residents had tipped them off about a possible rave, which suggests that the “red ball” in this case was the people Poole is connected to on Facebook who tipped off the authorities.

Said Poole: “The thing (the helicopter) hovered over us for about 25 minutes, watching 15 people eat. They told us to take down the sound system and said everybody has got to leave. It was 4pm and we had not plugged in the music. What effectively police did was to stop 15 people eating burgers.”

More on this ridiculous story of police “anticipating crime” here.

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