This Hobby and Police Harassment :wacko:

[grouser]

I'm thinkin the lady saw the other guy show up, in a truck, and it made her nervous. Maybe you were gonna rob her? She felt threatened and called the cops. No excuse for the way the cop acted thou. But nowadays we are seeing the cops are a bit out of hand IMHO...

 

[AngelicStorm]

-- moved topic --

 

[Furious T]

This sounds like a situation of mixed messages, and confusion coming from, and caused by, an elderly person.

Firstly, the old lady: When you approached her, she must have thought that you were ok, and was happly enough to let you detect...the fact that she limited you to the front yard indicates she was not totally comfortable with you being there. With some elderly people, it is not unusual to have second thoughts, and if she was living alone, then it's probable that she probably started feeling very vulnerable with a stranger in her front yard. Feeling vulnerable, it is not surprising that she did not approach you herself and ask you to leave, but called for help to do that.

The cop: Presuming he got a call over his radio about a man in an old lady's yard, detecting, he finds the place and there are two men there, not one. He has been given limited information of the situation, and most likely doesn't know that you initially had been given permission to detect there. If he's a reasonable sort of guy, then his first priority is to protect the owner of the premises, who is an old lady. Whether or not he had an ulterior motive in telling you to get out of town, I dont know. That seemed a bit heavy handed, particularly when he learned that she had initially given you permission to detect. Maybe he was just protecting his own (people).

It sounds as if you handled the situation well, and it must have been a disappointing way for your detecting to finish.

 

[ironsight]

I agree with those that indicated a paranoid elderly woman as the root cause of this whole incident.

I don't know, but if i gave permission to someone to detect on my property and all of a sudden another person shows up in another vehicle a little later, that would sort of raise a red flag for me also.
All of a sudden out of nowhere a 2nd man shows up, this woman has to be concerned as to whats really going on. Now afraid of confronting two strangers of whom she probably fears the worse calls the police instead.

An unfortunate string of events.