SCHOOLGIRL Amy Hodges was arrested and cautioned for throwing a snowball which struck an off-duty policeman’s car and broke its rear window.

Amy, 13, had been having fun with a few handfuls of snow scraped up from the roadside. But she ended up being DNA-swabbed, fingerprinted and photographed.

The incident happened in Britannia Lane, Ashford. Amy and her mother, Theresa, spent more than four hours sitting in a cell while police deliberated about whether or not to charge her.

The special constable detained the Christchurch pupil in his car until uniformed officers arrived to take her in to custody in Tufton Street where she was joined by her mother.

There, Amy was told that if she did not accept a reprimand in custody, which stays on her record for five years, she would be charged with criminal damage and taken to court.

Mrs Hodges, of Ashford Road, Hamstreet, near Ashford, said: "So my daughter now has a criminal record for throwing a snowball. What is the world coming to?

"She’s not a bad girl. She didn’t mean to break a window. This officer should have established who she was and contacted us and we would have paid for the damage and punished her ourselves.

All this fuss for a snowball? It defies belief. Have they nothing better to do?

Amy had to sit in the man’s car and frankly he could have been anybody. At the police station they laughingly call it a custody suite but we sat in a cell for more than four hours."

Police spokesman Rosy Alexander said: "This might be a nice girl from a fine upstanding family but she broke the law. She committed criminal damage. The law is for everyone and we are there to uphold it.

"The rear window shattered and glass fell into the back of the car. If someone had been sitting in the back of the car they would have been injured.

"We followed procedure and the girl’s mother was with her at all times and readily accepted the reprimand."