Photographing Your Own Child: Paedophilia!

I’ve seen some crazy stories about police harassing photographers, but nothing which can match this one:

According to his blog, Kevin visited the Bridges Shopping Centre in Sunderland with his son to spend the £10 his father gave the boy on a family visit. While there, he seated his son on a coin-operated train ride and snapped a photo of him with his cameraphone. At this point, a Bridges security guard came by and ordered him to stop taking pictures. He said that it was mall policy, and implied that Kevin was taking pictures because he was a paedophile. Kevin told him that this was ridiculous and took his son to find his wife and get out of the mall. He also took a picture of the security guard “so that if I later wanted to make a complaint to the centre I would be able to identify him.”

Outside of the mall, Kevin was stopped by a police constable who had received a complaint from mall security that a suspicious potential paedophile had been taking pictures on its premises. The PC threatened to arrest Kevin “for creating a public disturbance” and ordered him to delete the photo of his son. The PC also averred that the Bridges Shopping Centre is a hotbed of paedophile assaults.

Has the world gone completely mad? Threatening a man with arrest for taking photographs of his own son? And in what way is the shopping centre a ‘hotbed of paedophile assaults’? Do those (whatever the plod meant) normally occur in the full glare of hundreds of busy shoppers? Where do the police think this wave of alleged paedophilia, which merits such interventions and indeed a whole Independent Safeguarding Authority, is coming from?!