A friend of mine was once a police officer, and a good example springs to mind.
You may be aware that there is no law of trespass in this country, except for British rail and HM dockyard where there are statutes that cover trespass.
In other words, if someone enders your land or house for that matter (without criminal intent) you the owner of said land have the common law right to ask them to leave, and if they refuse,to use minimum force,(take them by the arm and eject them off your land).
To relate this to this situation, when a police officer is called to a restaurant where some drunken yobs are causing trouble but not commiting any offence, he uses his uniform and the sure fact that the said yobs do not know the law of trespass, to tell them to leave, after asking the owner to also ask them to leave.
If they refuse, the officer will usually assist the owner in ejecting them, What happens on the street in a public place is then up to the officer, the police and criminal evidence act 1984 and public order offences will give him further options, (In the interest of the public).
My point is this, the septic tanks were probably the ones who were over the top about a helicopter based nearby, the secret service distrust everyone, they demanded to our spooks that you did not fly.
That was eventually pased to Gold (senior officer IC and responsible for the TRA)
Gold who has much more to worry about than a little helicopter near his TRA, passes it down to the local senior officer, who would not know a TRA if it bit him in the neck,passes it to his inspector.
Eventually two beat officers get told to tell Mr X not to fly, everybody knows they have no right to do this, so the best course of action is to relate it to the yobs in the restaurant.
They would have driven away, snorting "he fell for that one" and the message would have got back to the spooks that everything was sorted.
This is unacceptable, TRA's are a power that the police can abuse, and the CAA won't stick up for us against them.
But in this case, they had absolutely no right to intimidate you into letting some area commander off the hook.
They would have sort the advise of the Air Support Unit, who would or should have told him that you were well within your rights to fly, but that would not have been good enough!
I had an incident at a hotel landing site where on landing,the manager produced a special branch form for the passenger names,where we are going etc.
When I asked him why,he informed me that SB had told him that as he had helicopter movements from time to time they needed a record of who was flying where with whom.
I advised him of when these forms were needed to be completed and that what they told him was a load of b%*!&^$t.
But there you have it, the old trespass chestnut again.
We need to complain otherwise the freedoms we enjoy in the uk helicopter world will slowly but surely be eroded.
Although you may not be a member of the HAB, they represent our industry and at least have the power to raise issues with the CAA, who usually reply to these issues.
Posting it here was probably the best thing you could have done, believe me, police pilots read this stuff and so does the CAA!
Before the negative comments come flooding in, I am in general pro police and think overall they carry out a good and difficult job.