Event Details

Crime, Law & Justice Lunchtime Lectures: "We were the guinea pigs.." Policing during Covid-19

The regulations introduced under the UK’s Coronavirus Act 2020 to help curb the spread of COVID-19 caused much confusion for everyone due to conflation between what was regarded as ‘guidance’ and what was ‘law’. The fast-paced ever-changing nature of the pandemic meant that restrictions on public liberty and the powers given to the police to enforce the new ‘rules’ led to accusations of over-zealous enforcement behaviour of some officers, including a record number of Fixed Penalty Notices (FPNs) issued.

This lunchtime lecture will offer a summary of Camilla's latest paper which explores the experiences of police officers in a range of UK police forces, using 28 hours of qualitative interview data at two research points in time (2020 and 2022). The extracts presented here illuminate some of the challenges that officers faced in policing a pandemic using new rules and regulations that changed so often that they found policing at this time to be unachievable.