You raise important issues.
1. If the highly trained Metropolitan Police in Hackney - the same people who appear to
have been responsible for intimately strip-searching a 15 year-old menstruating schoolgirl - are concerned whether plastic water pistols that children are playing with on warm summer days are water pistols or firearms, one wonders if the emission of
water, rather than bullets from the plastic water pistols concerned might give them a clue?
2. Are there many cases where the highly trained Metropolitan Police in Hackney - or anywhere else in the Metropolitan Police District for that matter - have seen children
from Britain's ethnic majority playing with plastic water pistols and have consequently found it necessary to surround them with armed police officers from two different police forces, after knocking them to the ground with motor vehicles in order to determine whether plastic water pistols are plastic water pistols?
No doubt, these and other issues will be included in
the Independent Office for Police Conduct's belated investigation into the incident.
The
actual cases to which attention have already been drawn on this thread arguably provide considerably more insight into what is really going on than the anecdotes and opinions.