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Having spent ten years as a Metropolitan Police officer, author Alice Vinten has carried out her fair share of arrests.
But in February last year, she experienced it from the 'wrong' side of the front door, when she was arrested at 7.30am at her home in Essex.
'I wasn't quite in my pyjamas,' she recalls. 'I'd thrown on some clothes, but – and this is so embarrassing, in the moment – but I didn't have a bra on.
'I remember the excruciating shame of having to say to the two officers, both male: "Yes, I will come with you, but can I please put a bra on first?"'
A decade on from leaving the Met, Alice, 44, is an author who writes about policing, particularly from a woman's perspective.
Her last book was called The Real Happy Valley, and featured interviews with the sort of female police officers who inspired writer Sally Wainwright to create the iconic character of Sergeant Catherine Cawood, played so memorably by Sarah Lancashire.
Like the fictional Catherine, Alice is also not afraid to speak truth to power.
She is active on social media, particularly X, formerly Twitter, where in recent times she has 'called out police bullying and misogyny'. But it has, she says, made her enemies in the force.
On the morning of her arrest, Alice remembers trying to stay calm to avoid panicking her teenage sons, then aged 16 and 13, who had been getting ready for school.
The officers told her she was being arrested on suspicion of stalking and harassment. They needed her to hand over her phone and her laptop. She did so.
'I even offered to give them my password. The officers didn't handcuff me, but my kids had to watch as they led me to the car.'
The sense of outrage was there, even then.
'I wanted to shout: "This is a f***ing joke. How dare you come to my house and do this in front of my children", but I knew it was important to stay calm and cooperate.'
The shame, though.
'Getting arrested is awful for anyone, but for someone who was so proud to be a police officer, it was just devastating. I am a law-abiding citizen, but I'm also someone who knows the law, and I knew I hadn't done anything wrong.
'The laws around stalking and harassment were introduced primarily to protect women from dangerous men. This was a complete subversion. Outrageous.'
What on earth had Alice done? She says that even describing it as 'becoming involved in a social media spat', as I do, is overstating what happened.
'Quite simply, I'd called out poor behaviour from police officers by drawing attention to the officers' own tweets. I'd said: "You might want to look at this person because I don't think this is acceptable."'
Specifically, it was a series of social media exchanges with a female detective who had, under a pseudonym, tweeted in support of a male officer convicted of ABH, which led to Alice's arrest.
Alice discovered – from friends within the force – the woman's identity and made a formal complaint to the Metropolitan Police, tweeting that she found it outrageous that a serving officer could publicly support a colleague whose behaviour had been found to be criminal.
However, the female officer made a counter complaint, claiming that she was being stalked and harassed by Alice, whom she accused of being 'nasty' and pursuing a personal vendetta, even while the detective was on honeymoon.
'It was extraordinary. I hadn't ever messaged her directly. She would have had to go looking for the tweets that referred to her. And I didn't even know she was married,' Alice says, talking exclusively to the Daily Mail.
'There had been nothing underhand about it. In most tweets that referenced her I copied in the Met Police Twitter handle.
'Who in their right mind would stalk and harass someone and copy the police in on the message! It's insane.
'I actually think the police should have thanked me for doing their job.
'The next thing I knew, the police were arresting me, trying to silence me, criminalise me.'
Alice was held in a cell for more than 14 hours, but never charged.
She later discovered that at least two senior officers had looked at the allegations against her and concluded that there was no evidence that a crime had been committed. They did not feel that the complaint even warranted investigation.
'And yet, someone higher up gave the order that I should be arrested. Valuable police resources were used, and I maintain that the purpose was to intimidate me.'
Alice remained on bail for six months, 'with the absolute horror of this hanging over me'.
She says she suffered distress and trauma, and was prescribed medication to help her sleep. Her writing career went on hold.
She took legal action against Essex Police, alleging wrongful arrest and battery, and earlier this month she agreed to accept a financial settlement.
There is no admission of wrongdoing from Essex Police, but Alice is claiming victory – 'my good name has finally been cleared' – and is now determined to speak out, not least because it is taxpayers' money that will have funded the payment from the force.
'I think it's important that members of the public know that we live in a country where calling out questionable police behaviour online can get you arrested,' she says.
The whole debacle raises worrying questions, not just about police abuse of power but about the number of officers using social media to, as Alice puts it, 'settle scores and pursue vendettas'.
She explains: 'There is a whole community on X which I call Police Twitter.
'While some officers openly post under their own name, others operate anonymously, sometimes breaking the rules of their own force about social media use.
'There is something of a pack mentality about it, and I seem to have fallen foul of it. Over the years, I haven't shied away from calling out police behaviour that I feel is worrying, but it's made me enemies.
'It's led to death threats. I've been told I should be "deep-sixed", which means getting rid of somebody. I didn't even know the term. I had to Google it.
'My address has been put on social media. I've been told I should be careful when I cross the road. I've been called a vile harridan, a failed copper, a disgrace to the force.
'Some of these accounts are operated by serving or retired police officers who have tried to ruin my reputation and my career.
'And yet I was the one who was arrested here.'
Alice says she has been targeted on different fronts, and claims there are double-standards over which complaints the police investigate.
For instance, she claims to have been a victim of the well-known trans rights activist, disgraced ex-police officer Lynsay Watson.
Watson, a trans woman, is infamous for making complaints to the police about high-profile women's rights campaigners, including Father Ted writer Graham Linehan who was arrested at Heathrow airport earlier this year. Watson was fired by Leicestershire Police for gross misconduct in 2023.
Alice, meanwhile, says she reported Watson to Essex Police over threatening emails and doxxing, where personal details are shared online.
But when she reported Watson, Essex Police said the behaviour did not constitute a criminal offence and they wouldn't be investigating it, she said.
'I asked to speak to a sergeant and one called and told me that I should have respected Watsons pronouns on Twitter.
'I believe that I was treated with disrespect because of who I am, and that I am seen by police as "anti-police".'
It wasn't always this way. Alice spent more than a decade in the Metropolitan Police, working as a uniformed officer, mainly in north London.
She resigned in 2015, however, when her children were little. She admits she felt disillusioned with the job, but stresses that she remained 'full of admiration for my former colleagues, because they do an amazing job'.
In 2018, Alice published a memoir of her time in the police called On The Line. Crime writer Ian Rankin describing it as 'fascinating stuff – a warts and all memoir from probationer days on'.
On social media, the reception from fellow officers was, 'at the time, really positive', even though she did go on TV to give a few interviews about misogyny and sexism she had experienced.
The longer she was out of the force, however, the more she started to realise how deep-rooted the sexism was.
The kidnap and murder of Sarah Everard, by police officer Wayne Couzens, in March 2019, was a watershed moment – for Alice as well as in a wider sense.
She says her interactions on social media – particularly with other serving officers – became more confrontational.
'I think after Sarah Everard, I started to realise that this behaviour needed to be called out because there were examples of it all over the place.
'My thinking was – and still is – that if a police officer is behaving like a sexist bully online, then the chances are he will be behaving like a sexist bully on the job, and if you are a bully you absolutely should not hold that police badge.'
So she started to 'call out the bullies'. 'I was polite. I'd say: "Do you think you should be saying this?" I know the law.'
There is no doubt that Alice became a thorn in the side of former police colleagues, using her own detective skills to try and ascertain the identity of serving officers who were posting anonymously.
'It often wasn't difficult,' she says. She also had allies on her 'side' of Police Twitter, and references informants who passed her information such as screenshots of private conversations.
One of the officers that Alice called out was PC Thomas Karlsen.
After publicly highlighting tweets she claimed were sexist and racist, she reported PC Karlsen to his bosses. She was told this would be investigated.
Events moved faster than any disciplinary process, however.
In 2023 Karlsen resigned from the force, ahead of a misconduct hearing after an incident where he was found to have used disproportionate force while detaining a suspect – a case that resulted in a conviction for ABH.
'If anyone had just looked at his social media, they would have seen that this man should not have been in the police,' Alice says. 'If they had acted earlier, he wouldn't have been allowed to commit ABH.'
The PC Karlsen incident, though, led to online harassment of Alice, all from accounts she believed to be police-associated.
Some were anonymous. Some used pseudonyms.
She claims there was a campaign to discredit her, with Twitter users being urged to leave her books unfavourable reviews.
She received death threats. 'I'd made the cardinal sin of turning against the team, the police "family".'
It was at this point that Alice's attention turned to the female detective tweeting in support of Karlsen and, ultimately, her arrest in Febuary 2024.
Alice describes her 14 hours in a police cell as 'terrifying'.
Once again, her knowledge of the system was not helpful.
'It was a CCTV cell, with a toilet in it, but I didn't eat anything because I did not want to have to use the toilet, knowing that there would be male officers watching.
'From my time in the force, I am aware of what the procedure is. When viewed on screen there is always a small square pixilated over the lap area, but it is still humiliating.'
She says that, as the hours dragged on, she asked if there was something she could read.
'And to my horror they brought me a novel which had blood splatters all over it. Dried blood. This is going to sound ridiculous but after so many hours in that cell I started to think: "Is this some sort of threat? Is it a warning?"'
It was 10.30pm before Alice was released.
'Even that seemed to have been done in a way that emphasised how little they cared. It was dark. They'd taken my phone and I had no money.
'I said to the front desk, "is there any way someone could call me a taxi, please?" and they refused. I was left to find my own way to a taxi rank. I find that disgusting.'
Alice says that her writing work has been on hold while she has been dealing with the fall-out from her arrest, although she has been working on children's stories – under the penname Trish Nolan – and her debut picture book recently won the illustrated children's book category at the 2025 Rubery Book Awards.
'The adult stuff is about police work, gritty stuff, and I just haven't been able to do it,' she says.
She hopes this will now change.
Alice is being considered for the BBC Writer's Voices Programme after being shortlisted in the corporation's Scripted competition for a TV pilot episode, and has wider ambitions to write a script for a series.
They say write about what you know, so it would be perfectly logical for her to use her own experience with this arrest. The material is ample.
'The trouble is that if you wrote this in a script, an editor would say it was too far-fetched, that it couldn't really happen,' she says. 'And yet it did.'