Just spoke to the police Sgt. for about 20 minutes, he seemed slightly miffed at my 'plastic police' comments and particularly that I said they didn't have anything better to do, and seemed to think I should have called them rather than getting on twitter etc.
I said I was annoyed at being approached and being told that what I was doing was illegal when it wasn't, and that they had not been receptive to my objections. He said I should speak to Woking Council about the signage, to which I pointed out that the police are the ones enforcing these signs and that it's a police issue.
He then claimed that there isn't a blanket ban on drinking in the town centre, but that basically there were so many factors that might cause them to ask me to stop e.g., things happening in the area, known offenders nearby, other people having been told the same, reports from the public/CCTV. So basically if you were ever told to stop, there would undoubtedly be a good evidence-based reason, even if you didn't know what it was.
I pointed out that the PCSOs told me there was a blanket ban and seemed to be enforcing on this basis, to which I think he repeated the stuff about there being other reasons why they might ask me to stop. He did try to argue that 'illegal if you are told not to' is almost identical to 'illegal', but I said that I did not appreciate being told that I was breaking the law. He didn't apologise for them which I guess is understandable as he hasn't heard their side of it.
I didn't have much of a description of the two PCSOs but he said he should be able to find out who they were and speak to them.
He said something about if you had seen people on CCTV drinking on a bench that you might not be able to tell if it was alcohol or energy drink, and if you found it was an energy drink they wouldn't do anything about it. I asked if that meant there was a blanket ban since it seemed a bit odd to be using CCTV to look at people sitting on the bench, and he said no, and said that when the Tour Series (bike race) comes to town they have people with picnics and half a bottle of wine and that's fine. (That however is only 1 day a year, so it's not much use the other 364 days.) He said if you saw someone sitting there with a six pack of Tennent's Super that would be a different matter.
I think their thinking is that Woking town centre is such a hole ('vibrant' was the word used) that you have to be a tramp to want to drink there.
There seems to be a presumption that anyone drinking off premises is problematic. This is discriminatory against me, since I'm hardly going to drag my kids into one of the local pubs, which are all downmarket, lacking beer gardens and several banning children altogether. He said that they take action against pubs serving drunken people, but the disparity is obvious, that I can't drink a bottle of beer with my kids outside if there is a scrote sitting on the next bench/a fight in the next street/a report from the CCTV operator/whatever else, whereas you've got to be blind drunk, or barred, to be declined service in a pub.
He gave the expected statistic about reduced anti-social behaviour/disorder in the last x months/years/whatever it was, so that obviously justifies any curtailment of people's liberties.
