Coronavirus Has Created A Crisis Of Over-Policing. Parliament Must Act Now – Before It's Too Late

Alarm bells started to ring when one police force described themselves as “like kids at Christmas” when given new coronavirus detention powers.

In the name of public health, police officers have been handed some of the most draconian and excessive powers in modern history over the past six months.

But while policing powers grow by the day, infection rates are rising. We cannot police our way out of this.

Since March, stories of over-policing have been non-stop. Some have been almost laughable, with officers trying to ban people from buying custard tarts or stopping the sale of Easter eggs. But many others have been tragic.

Stop and searches of young black men have sky-rocketed, homeless people have been arrested for not being in homes they don’t have, peaceful protesters have faced prosecutions and unsurprisingly, it is BAME people who have borne the brunt of lockdown fines.

Didn’t we learn in the post-9/11 years the dangers of retaining dangerous, arbitrary and discriminatory “useful tools” on the statute books.

Police have been equipped with the most breathtaking powers in a generation. The most alarming of those powers is Schedule 21 of the Coronavirus Act, which allows police to forcibly detain anyone who is “potentially infectious”, potentially indefinitely and in undisclosed locations – even children.

In a pandemic, this could be any one of us.

The College of Policing has had to start a consultation on the powers, with one telling line in the consultation paper reading: “Police officers are not medically trained.”

But what the government has lacked in provision of tests and PPE, it has attempted to make up for in police powers, criminal sanctions and blame piled on the public. These arbitrary police powers, unsupported by a functioning testing regime, only deepen injustice and degrade public health measures.

Take the example of Marie Dinou, a 41-year-old black woman who was held in police cells for two days after refusing to give police...

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