Covid and the role of the police

During the pandemic, the police were expected to assume a role more suited to security forces in authoritarian societies. People were banned from mixing socially. Sexual relations between individuals living in different households were made illegal. Tens of thousands of people were issued with fixed penalty notices for breaking lockdown rules, often for engaging in activities that most of us would consider not just perfectly legitimate in normal times but essential to our humanity.

Lord Sumption, the judge and historian, went so far as to say that Britain had become a “police state”. The lockdown regulations, he said, conferred “powers of enforcement which no policeman should have in a society with even the most basic standards of governance”. Quite often, forces got the law wrong.

Was this the police’s fault? The lockdown regulations were, of course, drawn up by politicians who had taken it upon themselves to determine what constituted acceptable behaviour in a pandemic, supposedly to control the spread of the Covid-19 virus and to “protect the NHS”. Officers regularly faced difficulties because they were operating in the opaque space between law and guidance.

Today, new revelations in this newspaper suggest that forces may also have faced unacceptable pressure from politicians. “I think we are going to have to get heavy with the police,” Matt Hancock, then health secretary, messaged Simon Case, Britain’s most senior civil servant, amid concerns about the public not quarantining on return from holiday. The next year, Mr Hancock messaged approvingly that “plod got their marching orders” after the number of fines issued to the public rose.

It remains to be seen what precisely happened. But the remarks suggest a worrying erosion of the police’s operational independence, enshrined in law as a “fundamental principle of British policing”. This is meant to protect both the public and the police from officers being used to achieve political aims, outside the bounds of the rule of law.

Too often during the pandemic, established norms were treated as disposable because the ends were judged to justify the means. Ensuring compliance with the lockdown rules became the Government’s defining objective, whatever the cost to our society and democracy.