He said the officers were shouting at him to “drop the knife”.
“I said I didn’t have a knife and they told me to drop the knife again,” he said.
"So I dropped my Japanese hand gardening sickle and a handful of privet that I just cut off the hedge.
“They turned me around, pushed me up against my house, handcuffed me, then put me in the back of a van.”
Mr Rowe was carrying a Japanese-made trowel in its sheath, a small Japanese gardener’s sickle and a peeling knife, along with a trug of vegetables.
He said the peeling knife was his late grandmother’s, the sickle had been purchased a decade ago and the trowel, which has a short blade and wooden handle, was a present.
He added that he had not been aware of any warnings about carrying the tools in public.
However, since his arrest, a warning has appeared on the trowel manufacturer’s website.
It said customers needed “to familiarise themselves with offensive weapons law before carrying the tool in public”.
I mean, to be fair… Those Japanese trowels do look like a big fuck off knife:
Yeah, it’s fair enough that they were called and showed up.
Their conduct after realising it’s not a knife though is what’s wrong. They know now, for a fact, that it is not a dagger and yet in their public statement they say it is, and they coerced a caution out of an innocent person.
Im a condo super and always have a knife on me, it’s fucked that police could just arrest me at work for having work tools
Exactly, that’s absolutely a knife. A huge one.
It may also be used as a trowel, but looks at it, that looks like something crocodile dundee would throw at someone.
A guy walking around in public with that strapped to his belt in a tactical looking holster is just asking for trouble. He was probably looking forward to the day the cops got him for it. He can’t have been so stupid to have that on and think “this is totally fine, nobody would ever be concerned by this”.
He wasn’t in public. Read the god damned article. He was at his own house and even had other gardening shit with him including vegetables.
So because the trowel doesn’t look like a white mans trowel, it’s a knife?
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