Manchester police arrested and charged a gardener for possessing an “offensive weapon”, with interrogating officers refusing to accept his tools had a purpose and even asking to have what an allotment garden is explained to them.

35-year-old Theatre worker Samuel Rowe of Manchester, England says he is seeking a legal means to have a police caution removed from his criminal record because he believes it will harm his ability to find work in future after he was arrested and interrogated while gardening in his own garden.

Rowe told The Guardian that he’d walked home from his allotment on a community garden in July with a trug of vegetables and had got to work trimming his domestic garden hedge when officers arrived, pushed him up against the wall of his home, and then bundled him into a police van.

It is stated a member of the public had spotted Rowe walking home while carrying tools and wearing earthen coloured clothes and called the police on him. He told the paper: “I just heard shouting behind me, and then two armed officers shouting at me to drop the knife… And then they turned me around, pushed me up against my house, cuffed me, and then they arrested me, put me in the back of the van.”

At the time of his arrest, Rowe was using a small gardeners’ sickle to cut the hedge and had a sheathed Japanese weeding trowel, known as a Hori Hori, on his belt. Officers are claimed to have refused to believe the trowel was a gardening tool, and in a statement on the arrest referred to it as a “large dagger”, and another item as a “peeling knife”.

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