How some police have so far enforced new regulations about the coronavirus-lockdown has made them a laughing stock, among for example the elderly, the sort who still get their news foremost from newspapers, and who never see a police officer, and if they are ever burgled, don’t get a visit and get the feeling that when reporting a crime that they are the problem; which they are, given the cynical jargon in the 2010s of ‘demand management’.
All because of Derbyshire Police’s reported use of a drone in the Dales.
Derbyshire Police’s website, in fairness, shows that they are aware of the main crime risks; online scams during what one IT man has called ‘the IT zoo’ of people in the mass suddenly working from home. People are still taking and dealing in drugs. Burglars will take the opportunity to break into empty commercial and any other property worth entering. And the vulnerable such as the elderly are preyed upon by the parasitic.
However the notion, however unfair, sticks, of the police giving attention not to actual criminals but to the otherwise law-abiding; because it has a basis in reality not only during the coronavirus outbreak. Or was that drone in the Dales an aberration? Consider the number one volume crime in Britain, for years, although only in recent years has it been acknowledged in the official British Crime Survey; online and other fraud. Action Fraud, on its website, says that it is running at ‘reduced capacity’; at a time when consumer rights campaigners Which! warned of ‘a perfect breeding ground‘ for cyber attacks, because the fraudsters sense an opportunity during the public anxiety over the virus and a readiness to click on links as they have to do more business online and not face-to-face.
Police Scotland, as the Action Fraud website acknowledges, no longer uses the Action Fraud service; Action Fraud does not admit that’s due to the scandalous shortcomings of the service as revealed by The Times last summer. The November 2019 print edition of Professional Security magazine reported that a senior retired cop described Action Fraud as wholly under-funded, and it ‘always has been’. This although police have known about computers and computer crime for at least 20 years. If they wanted to take fraud on properly, they would have by now.
In this new light we should see police embrace of new tech such as drones. As featured in the April 2020 print edition of Professional Security magazine, Lincolnshire Police having taken delivery of new and more powerful drones are looking to extend their use from searches for missing people and fugitive suspects, to surveillance for example of football crowds. Why are the police not satisfied with using tech that saves lives and catches criminals, but want at the first sign the tech works, to use it to do surveillance on the mass law-abiding?
To return to the virus. The authorities showed themselves in many ways unprepared; for example the lack of face masks and other PPE. The appeal for NHS volunteers and the response by hundreds of thousands of people, was much trumpeted. You have not heard much about it lately, and nor will we for while, because if you go to the website today and actually click on ‘join us today’, you cannot join, because they have reached their (arbitrary?) target of 750,000 and the ‘team is now working flat out to process the many thousands of applications we’ve received, so we can get volunteers up and running as soon as possible’. Anyone who is still interested in volunteering to wait a few weeks for the application process to reopen. A ‘pause’ in recruitment is reasonable if the work is now to vet those 750,000; but could not the authorities have done it all a few weeks sooner, so that the volunteers are doing things now?
Contrast those delayed actions with how quickly, smoothly and naturally the authorities gave themselves coercive powers. It’s a reflex action of the British state; the new Churchill coalition government in May 1940 did the same in the Defence of the Realm Act, whereby the state could direct anyone to do anything, including anything to do with their property. At the time that was widely welcomed by public opinion as necessary for the war effort against Hitler.
Less well known – in fact, in May 1940, secret – were War Office notes, passed down as far as for example council clerks. Exceptional powers in an emergency, such as a Nazi invasion, would not depend on a proclamation of martial law; ‘the real consideration is that in an emergency which threatens the safety of the State the preservation of that safety is the supreme consideration’. Soldiers and police could do whatever they felt it would take to resist the enemy; make people leave their houses, demolish houses, requisition food (‘on the giving of a receipt’). Likewise in the 1950s and 1960s civil defence planners in case of a third, nuclear world war assumed that police and other representatives of the state could and would do whatever they thought was best; such as (to take one paper deposited at Wiltshire county archives) shave offenders’ heads.
In March 2020, as in May 1940 and in that nuclear war that never happened in between, in each case the British state’s reflex action was to give itself coercive powers. That is not the same as saying that the state has turned into a dictatorship; merely that it has given itself the option. The Nigerian writer Chinua Achebe made the profound point about dictators, the all-powerful ‘strong man’; if only! For a dictator and his lackeys, in so many countries, don’t get things done. Instead they get nothing done except corruptly look after their own interests, including crush opposition.
But back to Britain. The Sussex Police and Crime Commissioner and Association of Police and Crime Commissioners (APCC) Chair, Katy Bourne correctly spoke yesterday of balance and of ‘our policing by consent model in this country’. The civil liberties campaigners Big Brother Watch have asked for ‘utmost caution‘. As Director of Big Brother Watch, Silkie Carlo, put it, ‘this crisis requires the public’s courage and co-operation, not our criminalisation’.
Police have acknowledged that they can ‘shuffle their pack’; police are better placed than hospitals as they have no football crowds or Friday night pubs to police. Are they looking out for commercial and other empty property, student lodgings and university campuses, shuttered shops and shopping centres, rather than patrolling aimlessly in cars? Let us hope so, because to do so police will have to reverse their years of leaving such places to hired private security (or none).
As in May 1940 the British people have put their trust in the authorities and their only power is what the chief constable of West Midlands Police acknowledged yesterday; if they don’t want to be persuaded, the police can hardly give them all a penalty fine and jail the lot of them.
