"What is liberty without wisdom and without virtue? It is the greatest of all possible evils, for it is folly, vice, and madness without restraint" -

I am sure there are many decent-minded people who feel nothing but outrage and shame at the behaviour of the police in the recent arrest of the two young men at Forest Gate in London.

The police would appear to have got everything wrong yet again.

The deployment of 150 officers was an over-reaction, if not crass stupidity in the circumstances, where an innocent man was again gunned down.

The police could not have thought they were in any danger, as those they intended to arrest were facing an overwhelming body of police officers. They are rapidly gaining a reputation for madness bereft of method.

There seems to be a lot of confusion about the meanings of terms such as intelligence, information and tip-offs.

These expressions are not interchangeable. In fact, each term has a unique and separate specific meaning.

Intelligence is a deduction from data, whereas information may be merely malicious as well as possibly quite wrong.

What is termed a tip-off may be rumour or hearsay - nothing more than idle speculation or gossip.

The great fictional consulting detective, Sherlock Holmes, who operated until 1914 from premises in Baker Street, only ever employed data, from which he made his deductions.

The result was intelligence for, after you have eliminated the impossible, whatever remains, no matter how improbable, must be correct. Has Scotland Yard learned nothing from this great detective?

repeated malicious gossip.

Sherlock Holmes was often called in from his retirement hobby of bee-keeping in Sussex, not far from where I myself now reside, to give his advice and guidance on difficult cases of the day.

Oh, to see his like again. Recent years have seen case after case of wrongful convictions leading to innocent people being imprisoned for crimes they never committed.

This situation continues and shows no indication of improving.

Indeed, heavy-handed police blundering and the shooting of innocent suspects continues at an alarming rate - and, it seems, no one is ever brought to account for such actions.

The police can only be perceived as acting, if not outside the law, certainly above it.

This is how they are seen both by the public at large in this country and in most of the world.

It is now possible to be shot not for what you have done but for what you might do. Some free society - some democracy.

-Richard March, Hove