Hi, this is my article. I know it's a long read, but I presume you didn't read the whole article.

We certainly didn't skip notifying the police. The whole point of the article is that we did the opposite - gathered enough evidence so that the police could do their job.

The police were never going to do a stake out like we did.

Citizen's arrest is not such a unusual thing to do. We would not have messed with him if he produced a knife.

I note that when I published this article a week or two ago, much of the feedback (mostly from Americans I think) was that they would have skipped the police and just kicked the guy in! I would say we were quite sensible overall.