In regard to breaching the peace, this is also a reasonably confused piece of law, as the peace is not the general peace it's not the public peace, it's the Queens peace. The entire area around breach of the peace is pretty poorly defined in law, the leading case is R v Howell (1982). The reasoning given in that case was:
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(1) that a constable or a private citizen had a power of arrest without warrant where a breach of the peace was
committed in the presence of the person making the arrest; where there was a threat of a breach of the peace being renewed; and where, although no breach had been committed, the person making the arrest reasonably and honestly believed that such a breach would be committed in the immediate future (post, pp. 507H -- 508A, C).
(2) That the behaviour that caused a constable to believe that a breach of the peace had or would occur had to be related to violence and such a breach occurred whenever harm was actually done or was likely to be done to a person, or in his presence to his property, or a person was put in fear of being so harmed through an assault, affray, riot, unlawful assembly or other disturbance (post, p. 509B-C).
(3) That where an arrest was made for an anticipated breach of the peace it was sufficient that the constable stated that it was for "a breach of the peace" and, since the defendant either knew why he was being arrested or had prevented the constable from telling him the reason for the arrest, the arrest was valid (post, p. 509D-G); and since the recorder had correctly stated the ingredients of the offence of a breach of the peace in his ruling on the submission of no case and in his directions to the jury, it could not be said that the verdict of the jury was unsafe or unsatisfactory and the conviction for assaulting a police officer stoodThis means that the case law isn't going to be updated or challenged, the police don't want this, because it's rather helpful to them and getting more case law would only confuse the issue. They can argue against any lawsuits for false arrest on public policy grounds, as well as the fact that they simply need a statement from the arresting officer that they 'reasonably and honestly' believed a breach would happen, finally if a person is released without charge they wouldn't have suffered any significant damages and even if successful (which would be unlikely) would likely only attract nominal damages.
As for the change of hands of the Crawfords property, let's bear in mind that £93k bought the property AFTER the police had caved the roof in and had further dilapidated the bungalow because of the Rooftop Six. I still maintain that if Tom hadn't been led by the nose through all of these protests and in so doing had not destroyed his equity in the property, he would have been able to sell the place for a fair bit more (115 - 125k) and likely would have been able to pick up a good retirement property. Plus Betty wouldn't have gone missing. Of course pointing this out is much like when Jim Bowen used to tell those dart throwing folks to have a look at what they could have won. You could have had a nice life Tom. You'd worked hard for it, you deserved it, but you ruined it.
