The London Borough of Harrow's official motto 'Salus populi suprema lex' adorns civic buildings, litter bins, lamp posts and street signs across 20 square miles of our capital city's north-western outskirts.

Translated as 'The welfare of the people is the highest law', it supposedly reflects the noble spirit in which the council treats its 270,000 tax-paying residents.

That spirit was, however, in very short supply on May 18 when two of Harrow's 'environmental enforcement officers' confronted a local man named Alvin outside the Asian Pearl Seafood shop on Northolt Road.

Alvin, a heating engineer on his way home from work, had intervened to comfort a teenage girl who had been collared by the duo for allegedly spitting at a bus stop.

The girl, who seemed confused and tearful, was in the process of being slapped with a £100 fine. Alvin asked what concrete evidence the officers had to support the charge. When it emerged that they had none, he advised the child to simply walk away.

There followed a frank exchange of views. Then the two officers, who wore gangster-style hooded tops under their official vests, decided to deliberately turn off their body-worn cameras before inviting Alvin to step into a nearby alley.

'We're going to make sure you can't work no more and earn no money,' said one. 'I swear, when I'm not in uniform, I'm going to knock you the f*** out and rip your teeth out. Do you know that? If I give you one punch, I'll knock all your teeth out.'

The second officer interjected: 'Don't butt in my business. We've got people to feed.' Then his colleague added: 'If I call a police officer for you, he'll f*** you up, you know, because we work with them and you didn't know that, did you? So come across the road now because I'm going to show you what time it is.'

Alvin declined the request, and the aggressive duo eventually backed off. But sadly – for their reputation, at least – the exchange had been caught on camera.

For while Harrow's men on the street had switched off their official cameras, in a cynical bid to destroy evidence of their thuggish behaviour, Alvin turned out to be wearing a pair of £200 Meta spectacles.

These devices link to a smartphone and are capable of recording video. When he began to feel threatened, it had been turned on.

Alvin sent the video to Harrow Council shortly afterwards, as part of an official complaint. But in a response which speaks volumes for the local authority's real attitude towards the 'welfare of the people', Alvin heard absolutely nothing back.

So last weekend he decided to upload a one-minute clip to both X and TikTok.

The clip went viral (on X alone, it has been viewed three million times). And this time, Harrow Council's reaction was instant.

Within hours, the authority had put out a statement claiming that both men's behaviour had been 'wholly unacceptable', adding that their employment had therefore been 'terminated in May, immediately following the complaint'.

By Thursday, the Tory-run authority had announced the 'suspension' of its lucrative contract with Kingdom Services, an outsourcing company from Merseyside which ran Harrow's team of environmental enforcement officers (EEOs).

In a statement, council leader Paul Osborn added that both men had been reported to the police.

That is unlikely to silence critics, however. For the menacing behaviour of these uniformed thugs – who the Daily Mail has identified as Umar Siddiq, 30, and Joseph Fernandes, 38 – lays bare a wider scandal unfolding not just in Harrow, but across the land.

At its centre is an important fact: this London borough is one of scores of local authorities which have, in recent years, hired companies such as Kingdom to run teams of EEOs.

Such workers, who have no formal qualifications, are then sent out on daily foot patrols to catch people carrying out low-level offences such as littering and spitting. In some cases, they also seek out drivers committing parking offences.

Culprits are then hit with on-the-spot fines of up to £500 under the Environmental Protection Act of 1990.

On paper, these workers (who are widely nicknamed the 'Fake Fuzz') are supposed to protect high streets from the blight of litter and anti-social behaviour. In other words, to serve the public.

In practice, many go about their business with a zeal and sense of entitlement that resembles the former East German Stasi. They slap draconian fines on citizens who have committed very minor indiscretions or, in some cases, done nothing wrong at all.

On Thursday, to cite one of several high-profile recent examples, a jobsworth employed by Gedling Borough Council in Nottinghamshire slapped a £150 ticket on a 42-year-old woman who'd left a single kale leaf in a trolley while loading groceries into her vehicle outside Sainsbury's.

Last week a woman in Ealing was fined £150 for tossing a small piece of bread to a pigeon, while a man in Poole was issued with a £200 fine when a biodegradable teabag from a McDonald's cup accidentally dropped out of the pocket in his car door.

To understand these incidents, and the thuggery which passed for public service in Harrow, we simply have to follow the money.

Councils, and the outsourcing firms they work with, have discovered that sending out the Fake Fuzz goons can be lucrative.

Not only are they cheap to hire (positions being advertised in three London boroughs pay £14 to £16 an hour) but the fines such employees then hand out can generate huge amounts of cash.

Last year, to this end, British councils issued a record 200,000 littering fines, bringing in £48million. Crucially, the 78 (out of 382) councils that used private companies to run enforcement teams issued an average of 1,441 tickets each, while the figure was a mere 117 for those which didn't.

Many outsourcing deals are designed to maximise this discrepancy, with a portion of the revenue from fines passed directly on to the outsourcing firms.

Meanwhile, the officers can be incentivised via bonus schemes. The Daily Mail has been told that Kingdom staff are given a target to each issue one ticket per hour, or eight per shift.

That would generate roughly £1,200 in revenue, about ten times each officer's wage.

An undercover BBC Panorama investigation in 2017 found that they were offered bonuses for exceeding the target. Which raises fears that the system is being abused, with disreputable officers choosing to harass vulnerable people over frivolous (and in some cases fictitious) offences.

Harrow Council is a case in point. For the Daily Mail has established that its Fake Fuzz patrols have been at the centre of controversy for months. This has led to a series of confrontations, with victims claiming that over-zealous Kingdom staff have been 'acting like gangsters'.

Kingdom's employees are also accused of inflaming racial tensions, with one community leader accusing Fernandes and Siddiq, who is Muslim, of deliberately targeting the Hindu and Sikh community with spurious fines.

It's not as if the council wasn't warned. In January 2025, the BBC raised concerns over Harrow's environmental enforcement teams. It revealed that an officer employed by a different firm, APCOA, had issued a fixed-penalty notice to a local resident claiming she had been 'witnessed by a uniformed officer… committing the offence of fly-tipping'.

There was one problem: the resident was a five-year-old girl. What's more, she had not actually been witnessed fly-tipping.

The 'evidence' of wrongdoing amounted to an envelope with her name on it which had been found several streets from her flat. Soon after, a YouTube channel named The Fool Catcher began broadcasting footage of alleged abuses of authority by Harrow's enforcement teams.

In January this year, a clip of a woman in her 40s being arrested by a dozen police officers on Harrow's Wealdstone High Street went viral.

It emerged that she'd been collared for throwing a breadcrumb to a pigeon and refused to give her name to the Fake Fuzz team who attempted to fine her, prompting them to call the police.

In March, the BBC shared yet another cautionary tale from Harrow about Kamal Shah, a 63-year-old community leader who chairs the North Harrow Community Library. He was issued with two £100 fines by Kingdom officers for allegedly spitting in public.

When Mr Shah disputed the charge, it emerged that body-worn camera footage taken from the officers involved showed him doing no such thing. After the fine was overturned, he alleged that he'd been targeted because he seemed old and infirm, and was therefore unlikely to argue back.

'I feel like I was stereotyped. On the day my leg was hurting, I was limping a bit. I looked older, an easy target,' Mr Shah said. It was around this time that Siddiq, a resident of Southgate whose family arrived in Britain from Afghanistan 25 years ago, and Fernandes, who lives in the same borough, began walking the local streets.

They quickly became notorious for issuing large numbers of often spurious tickets, featuring in a number of bizarre incidents which were shared on either The Fool Catcher's YouTube channel or local Facebook pages.

One such video shows Fernandes telling a motorist he has illegally parked in a bicycle lane. No such lane is visible. When the cameraman starts arguing, the officer declares: 'Now you is spitting. That's a penalty right there.'

In another, he can be seen writing out a ticket for an old man with a disabled badge who has stopped in a loading bay because the nearby disabled space is apparently being used by a supermarket delivery lorry.

Perhaps the most concerning clip, given recent events, was posted to YouTube. It appears to show locals reacting to Fernandes asking someone he was arguing with 'to come to the park'.

The officer, who is accompanied by Siddiq, is seen arguing with an Asian man in a black tracksuit who repeatedly shouts: 'We're not going to fight!'

Another man, off-camera, is heard saying: 'You said, yeah, "Let's go to the park".'

Fernandes shakes his head, tuts and says: 'Right, now the guy's touched me three times. I've got a camera, I've evidence.'

On Northolt Road, locals this week told us how both men were notorious for lurking in alleyways to spy on the public, claiming that they would deliberately target non-Muslim residents of the area, a cultural melting pot with immigrant communities from across South Asia. An Indian man who works in a supermarket on the Northolt Road told the Daily Mail how he blew off a piece of fluff from his top lip – and was fined £100 by Siddiq for spitting.

The man, who asked not to be named, said: 'He was 50 metres [away] on the opposite side of the road, with buses and heavy traffic in between me and him. How could he have seen properly? I didn't spit, I had something on my top lip and I blew it away. There was nothing on the floor in front of me.

'He asked me my name and I believe because I'm a Hindu and have an Indian name he issued a fine.' Amid fears that their behaviour was stoking sectarian tensions, Kumarasamy Indrachith, a prospective Conservative councillor, invited Siddiq to explain himself via a videotaped interview.

Siddiq told him: 'I'm an Asian. I'm from Afghanistan. You guys are from Sri Lanka.

'This is a Sri Lankan community mainly so the offences will be caused by the Sri Lankans.'

Indrachith told the Daily Mail that Fernandes and Siddiq had been abusing their authority for months. 'I have seen the way he and his colleague interacted with people and it was aggressive and bullying at times,' he said.

'They were acting like gangsters, with hoods pulled over their heads. That's not how a council official should look or behave.

'I had countless complaints. One man said that his car key was snapped in the ignition as one of them tried to grab it and stop him from driving off. They falsely accused an elderly Sri Lankan woman of spitting and dropping litter and reduced her to tears by threatening to get the police.'

The duo 'could be loud and aggressive', he added. 'I believe they knew some residents didn't have a great grasp of English and I think they used to exploit that.'

Quite why Harrow Council took so long to act, when Indrachith and others were attempting to blow the whistle, is unclear. But its last budget, published in February, may give a clue.

It describes the 'financial challenges' facing UK councils as 'the worst in 30 years'. While this year's budget, in which it will chew through just over £200million, is balanced, next year there is a forecast gap of £7.5million.

Part of the problem, the document states, involves parking fines, where there has been 'a shortfall in PCN [penalty charge notices] income of £2.8million against the... target.'

In other words, Harrow wasn't levying enough fines. Did that contribute to this week's scandal? It's impossible to say.

The council's press office refuses to answer questions about its contract with Kingdom or the events before their departure.

Kingdom (which works with 35 British councils, including Haringey, Enfield, Sutton and Merton, and has issued more than 120,000 fines) is also keeping schtum: it did not return emails from the Daily Mail seeking comment.

Elsewhere, Harrow's Tory council leader Paul Osborn was similarly unwilling to explain himself, as was his deputy Marilyn Ashton, or Pritesh Patel, the councillor in charge of 'cleaner streets'.

Even their political opponents refused to comment: Labour leader David Perry and his deputy Peymana Assad were also unwilling to talk.

About the only people involved in the grubby affair who would speak to the Daily Mail were the sacked officers.

In a phone conversation, Umar Siddiq said: 'The video online was taken out of context. There's more to it than what people have seen.'

Joseph Fernandes sent a text message denying wrongdoing, before calling up pretending to be a solicitor named 'Paul' (he refused to give a surname) who claimed that if the Daily Mail named him we would be 'taken to the cleaners'.

The sad truth is that the only people being 'taken to the cleaners' by the Fake Fuzz are the blameless taxpayers getting hit by spurious fines.

Additional reporting James Fielding.