999: What's Your Emergency?

This episode explores what it's like for parents bringing up children in Wiltshire in 2017 and the difficulties in deciding just how much freedom is safe to give young people in the modern world. Police are dispatched when a member of the public finds a four-year-old boy wandering alone in the street. A mother, who is letting her eight-year-old son get his first taste of freedom, is horrified when he's bought home by police who have found him building a camp in an area of woodland littered with hypodermic syringes and human excrement left behind by local drug users. For the police officers, many of whom are yet to become parents themselves, there are difficult judgement calls to be made. How do you apply something as black and white as the law to something as individual and nuanced as parenting? PC Geoff Biddall says: 'I don't like telling a parent how to raise their child.