Private security guards hired to monitor asylum seekers sparked controversy after handcuffing two teenage girls for alleged shoplifting.
A Labour councillor accused the two watchmen in Colchester, Essex, of ‘overstepping the mark’ and said the power of a uniform had ‘gone to their heads’.
A former mayor of Colchester, he claimed the incident was so serious it would have stopped the entire patrol operation ‘in its tracks’, had it been disclosed at the time.
But a councillor from Reform UK, which runs Essex County Council and set up Operation Vanguard, insisted the girls had been detained because they were ‘deemed criminals’.
The two guards, who
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