Police encourage neighbours to inform on those who break rules

A POLICE chief has urged people to snitch on their neighbours if they see them having friends over during lockdown

Ian Hopkins, Chief Constable of Greater Manchester Police, said the public should text or use police hotlines to tell forces if people were illegally mixing in households and officers would follow it up.

Asked if he would welcome alerts to such apparently less serious breaches of the regulations, he said: “The point with this is that people are recognising that we all want to be safe and we all want to get out of this.

“‘They say: ‘We are trying our hardest and these people over there are not and we want you as the police to check it out.’ It is important that people do tell us, and we will follow it up.”

The move could see a huge spike in the number of people being prosecuted under coronavirus laws in the coming weeks and comes after Priti Patel, the Home Secretary, told police chiefs she expected them to take a more robust approach than in the first lockdown.

Police will also not warn people twice before fining them for breaching lockdown rules. Under the national guidance for officers published yesterday, they have been told to avoid giving repeated cautions.

Speaking on the BBC, Mr Hopkins said people in groups outside who refused to obey police requests to disperse would face fines.

“We will be talking to people to ascertain why they are there. Are they there as a single family or a bubble. If not we will advise and engage, and if they understand that and walk away we won’t issue a fine,” he said. “But if they don’t or we catch people repeatedly behaving like that, we will move much more quickly to issuing fines.”

Some senior officers have expressed concern that the large number of exemptions allowed under the latest rules, means lockdown will be difficult to enforce. A senior police source said: “With all the exceptions that exist this is nothing like the first lockdown and will prove a real headache to navigate.”