Jeweller Michael Plant believes that his shop has been targeted for the past eighteen months by a group of East European thieves who regularly remove items from his shop without paying for them.
Like any law-abiding citizen, he left matters with the local constabulary but, as the raids continued and there were no signs of arrests being made, he decided to put a notice in his shop window. In an apparent fit of anger he wrote:
Sorry, we don’t serve Rumanian or East European Gypsies.
That was it. The forces of law were on him in no time as such action is taken ‘very seriously’ by the police. More so than the real crimes, it would seem.
Mr Plant was definitely in the wrong about the wording of his sign, regardless of this being a politically correct era, and presumably what he should have written was something along the lines of ‘The management reserves the right to refuse admission’, although these days one wouldn’t be surprised to find that such a statement ‘implies’ some sort of slur on some ethnic minority or the other. It would probably be alright if it referred to refusing the right of admission to members of the indigenous population, after all, they have very few rights remaining.
Had Mr Plant not removed the sign, he would have been charged, convicted and would have a criminal record for the rest of his life. On the other hand, if the thieves were caught, they would probably receive an on-the-spot fine, at most, and therefore have no criminal record. Particularly if they belonged to a recognised ‘ethnic group’, the numbers of which are ever-increasing it seems.