Following successful trials by Northumbria Police, the rest of the UK’s police forces have agreed to replace their ‘Stop and Search’ policy with the forward thinking ‘Tap and Tickle’. The new method uses a mixture of a surprising tap on the shoulder, followed by a lengthy tickle to extract information about crime.
‘I initially came up with the idea after I tickled my daughter to the point where she surrendered the remote control’ DI Garside, the man responsible for the new ‘non-violent’ approach told the launch press conference. ‘After that first successful deployment of the tactic, I continued to use it to extract information about her day at school, what her friends had been up to, and how to delete browsing history on the laptop. Not only did she give me all the information I was after, but she laughed hysterically in the process, something she never did when I used the tazer’.
‘Tap and Tickle’ has been used on a trial basis in Northumbria and has seen some surprising results. One well known offender told the judge at his recent trial ‘no matter how much I tried not to, I just had to tell the officer the exact address of the house I had just robbed. I couldn’t stop laughing as the 2 Policemen got to work under my armpits.’ Worryingly, he continued on to reveal that it was the first time he had been ‘arrested with an erection’
The trial has been so successful, the tickle technique has been extended to other parts of the police service. Riot police were recently armed with 8 foot tickle sticks during a disturbance on a local housing estate. The unrest happened as the police tried to arrest a local youth. A witness told us ‘The lad told the copper he looked ‘gay’. That’s when they charged with their shields and feather dusters. They tickled him to the ground, but could not catch his mate who taunted them by shouting ‘chase me, chase me’’.
Despite the overall success of the trial, police forces have decided to stick to 'traditional' tactics in certain circumstances. This follows Avon and Somerset police's announcement they saw a ten-fold increase in arrests at the recent Bristol Pride march
DI Garside continued to take questions from the media, but was forced into denying reports that this technique could have prevented the death of Raoul Moat. ‘No amount of tickling could have stopped Mr Moat pulling the trigger on himself, not after being publicly outed as a friend of Gazza.’
