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news
Met PoliceEnforcement “a last resort” – police chiefs agree “common sense” approach to applying emergency coronavirus law
The body representing senior police officers in the UK says that enforcement of government rules regarding restrictions on movement during the coronavirus pandemic should only be undertaken as “a last resort.”
Confirmation of the approach police forces should adopt follows media coverage in recent days of inconsistent application of the rules, with Derbyshire Police in particular coming under strong criticism after it shared a video on social media aimed at discouraging people from visiting the Peak District National Park.
The force was also criticised for suggesting that “Lycra-clad cycling” was unacceptable in the current environment.
> Daily exercise rules: current cycling dos and don'ts
In a statement shared on Twitter this morning, the National Police Chiefs Council (NPCC) and College of Policing said that a four-phase approach is being adopted. The statement reads:
Coronavirus (COVID-19) new police regulations
Engage – officers will initially encourage voluntary compliance.
Explain – Officers will stress the risks to public health and to the NHS. Educate people about the risks and the wider social factors.
Encourage – officers will seek compliance and emphasise the benefits to the NHS by staying at home, how this can save lives and reduce risk for more vulnerable people in society.
Enforce – officers will direct individuals to return to the place where they live. This may include providing reasonable instruction of the route by which the person is required to return. Officers may also remove that person to the place where they live, using reasonable force where it is a necessary and proportionate means of ensuring compliance.
Officers will make sensible decisions, employ their judgement and continue to use other powers.
Enforcement will be a last resort.
Police have been given an unprecedented role in enforcing new regulations for #covid19UK.
Our approach is engage, explain, encourage, &, only as a last resort, enforce.
With @CollegeofPolice we'll continue to support officers & staff to use these regs working with the public pic.twitter.com/tmzGKeWbUw
— NPCC #StayHomeSaveLives (@PoliceChiefs) March 31, 2020
The guidance comes a week after Prime Minister Boris Johnson announced that the country was going into lockdown to try and contain the spread of coronavirus, with people allowed to leave their homes for a limited number of reasons.
Those are to do essential shopping, to care for a vulnerable person, to travel to work so long as it could not be undertaken from home, and to undertake one form of exercise a day, including walking, cycling or running, so long as it is done alone or with members of the household.
> Warning that cycling could be banned if people don’t ride responsibly
However, there has been inconsistency in the approach of different police forces in how to interpret and enforce those rules, with confusion over what constitutes “essential” shopping as well as just how long people should be allowed to exercise outdoors.
Ahead of the new guidance being issued, former supreme court judge Lord Sumption told BBC News that the UK risked becoming a “police state,” singling out Derbyshire Police which besides posting the Peak District drone footage mentioned above also dyed the water in the national park’s Blue Lagoon black to discourage people from swimming there.
He said: “The behaviour of the Derbyshire Police in trying to shame people in using their undoubted right to take exercise in the country and wrecking beauty spots in the fells so people don’t want to go there is frankly disgraceful.
“This is what a police state is like, it is a state in which a government can issue orders or express preferences with no legal authority and the police will enforce ministers’ wishes.”
According to the Guardian, the new guidance was drawn up after NPCC chair Martin Hewitt, who took up his role last year having previously been Assistant Commissioner Frontline Policing at the Metropolitan Police, contacted colleagues across forces in England and Wales at the weekend to discuss consistency in enforcing government rules.
The newspaper said that issues covered in detailed guidance to officers include that there are no restrictions on driving to undertake exercise, nor on people only being able to leave their homes once a day to exercise.
> Updated: How to cycle responsibly in a time of pandemic
Emergency legislation was introduced and rushed through parliament to become law on Thursday in a bid to enforce physical distancing and slow the spread and death toll from Covid-19.
Andy Marsh, chief constable of Avon & Somerset Police, told BBC Newsnight: “I had a conversation with other chiefs and Martin Hewitt and we talked about the style of our enforcement and the engagement and explanation that went before and we all agreed that we wanted to see this done with the consent of the public.
“We’re not going to enforce our way out of this problem.”
He added that the rapidly evolving situation, and the fact that emergency legislation was only approved by Parliament last Thursday, inevitably meant that police forces were “figuring out some of this stuff as we go along.”
Durham’s police and crime commissioner, Stephen White, police and crime commissioner in Durham, commented: “I think policing is confused about what it is being asked to do.
“Police officers have no power to stop people going to the Lake District. It takes a long time to build up trust and a short time to destroy it.”
Meanwhile, Metropolitan Police Chief Commissioner Cressida Dick highlighted that some people were unaware of the restrictions on movement that the government had introduced.
She told LBC: “Already we have had examples of people who simply hadn’t quite heard all the messages – and, only as a very last resort with the current restrictions, using firm direction or even enforcement.
“We’re not doing what you might call road blocks or anything like that,” she added. “Yes, we stop motorists sometimes, we have a conversation with them.”
The law itself makes no mention of only being allowed to undertake one form of exercise outside the home per day, and in his address to the nation last Monday evening the Prime Minister made no reference to how long such exercise should last.
The emergency legislation – The Health Protection (Coronavirus, Restrictions) (England) Regulations 2020 – makes just a brief reference to exercise, as an exception to section 6 (1), namely: “During the emergency period, no person may leave the place where they are living without reasonable excuse” covered by Section 6. (2) “For the purposes of paragraph (1), a reasonable excuse includes the need—” (b) “to take exercise either alone or with other members of their household.”
> How much distance should you leave to the cyclist ahead in a time of pandemic?
Simon joined road.cc as news editor in 2009 and is now the site’s community editor, acting as a link between the team producing the content and our readers. A law and languages graduate, published translator and former retail analyst, he has reported on issues as diverse as cycling-related court cases, anti-doping investigations, the latest developments in the bike industry and the sport’s biggest races. Now back in London full-time after 15 years living in Oxford and Cambridge, he loves cycling along the Thames but misses having his former riding buddy, Elodie the miniature schnauzer, in the basket in front of him.
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32 comments
i still dont fully get it, maybe im just a tad dumb. But i dont have coronavirus, not that im aware of. I dont feel ill and havent for months. So if i go out cycling to other areas, how can i give vulnerable people out there a virus i dont have? if i pick up the virus from someone in another area then cycle home and feel ill, illl stay in bed as i would if i got a bad cold. Can anyone explain why we need to stay inside then? surely if people are elderly or vulnerable, they could stay indoors and have things delivered to them? but if younger fitter people get the virus then beat it off like a cold, why do we have to stay in still? genuinely dont get this reasoning. If only what, 2000 people out of 65 million brits have died from it, surely that means its not that much of a killer anyway? more like a bad cold?
Because... IT'S NOT ABOUT YOU
You could be asymptomatic.
It doesn't just affect the old.
It is not just about deaths, but about people getting ill and requiring hospital treatment. Where this happens, hospitals can be overwhelmed.
If there is too much social intermingling, the virus will grow at an exponential rate. Reducing contact will have a large impact in the rate of spread.
The virus has a 5-11 day incubation period, during which you have no symptoms but can easily pass the virus on to others. As has already been said a highly infectious virus like this one can overwhelm health services with sheer numbers, the lockdown measures are designed to try to prevent that from happening.
And, whilst the elderly and those with underlying medical conditions are most at risk it is not the case that younger, fitter people simply beat it off like a cold, and there have been several instances reported just in the last few days of young, healthy people dying from it in spite of having no underlying health problems.
David - I agree with all the comments to your post. My cousin, a doctor in Italy, told me the same when Italy went into lockdown - it's to ensure the health service doesn't collapse. With a huge amount of people suddenly requiring intensive care, health services around the world are not equipped. Hence the lock downs - to manage the spread.
This is what we were told initially in the UK, illustrated with a graph to show the curve flattened out. "Herd immunity" was also mentioned as the exit strategy, then all of a sudden that notion was squashed. Since then we have been beaten into compliance with daily death totals climbing ever higher, images of death stalking the land.
Now, finally, the BBC has dared to question the numbers. They are deaths "with" coronavirus, not "from". That's a massive difference.
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/health-51979654
Only time will tell but it's looking increasingly likely that, once we are able to calculate the excess deaths, this will be judged as a disastrous overreaction.
I suspect I'll get flamed, called heartless, possibly evil, for stating this opinion, but here goes:
It is not worth throwing the entire economy (which, remember, isn't just a bunch of numbers, it's people's livelihoods) under the bus and empowering jobsworths to curtail our essential liberties, in order to prolong the largely poor quality lives of the already elderly and frail. The average age of someone to die with (note, not from) coronavirus in the UK is 79.5. Our average life expectancy is 80 and a bit. Yes, every individual death is a tragedy for someone and their loved ones, and there will be outliers who aren't already at death's door. But it seems we have decided that we'd rather live through an economic and social catastrophe than see granny leave the care home a few months early.
To those who think the current lockdown is the best course of action: take a look at the USA's weekly death stats. Lockdown has seen the weekly death rate drop significantly, because nobody's driving, or exercising, or doing anything much at all in fact. In fact, lockdown already seems likely to save more lives than we'll lose due to CV. So, let's stay in lockdown forever! Look at the stats, it saves lives. It's worth it. Thought not.
Maybe heartless in the way you express it. However the idea of whether the cure is worse than the disease will have to be addressed. In the BBC article I linked above they put numbers to the equation:
"Meanwhile, University of Bristol researchers say the benefit of a long-term lockdown in reducing premature deaths could be outweighed by the lost life expectancy from a prolonged economic dip.
"And the tipping point, they say, is a 6.4% decline in the size of the economy - on a par with what happened following the 2008 financial crash."
So there is the context - if this lockdown proves to be a bigger economic hit than 2008, we will have caused more harm than good.
And the liklihood is that the lives saved will suffer little of the economic consequences, living out their days on their pension whilst the following generations wonder where their livelihoods went.
The thing is, it's not just about the old, seasonal flu leads to the death of mostly the old too, often by secondary infection, and this in turn affects the health services. Now we have vaccinations, which reduce risk, and of which bizarely take up is quite low in frontline NHS staff. But Covid massively overwhelmes health services, and makes the health care workers very ill, especially with inadequete PPE. Now, apparently a 1/4 of our frontline docters are self isolating, with proper testing that could be reduced, so forget about seeing your GP about any other reason. Your chances of being killed when when hit by a motorist goes up, because ambulances are busy and A&Es are packed, emergency surgery is affected and no room in the ICU if it's serious. Forget about cancer diagnosis and treatment, mental health, hip replacements, in fact all orthapedics. So all other deaths start to rise.
These are epidemilogical experiments, lockdown has had a massive effect in China, where we all think it started, and the disease seems to be running rampent in the US, whose measures seemed late and innafective. If Sweden continues down it's present course we might see what happens, but we are all different and out of the cities I believe Sweden is a very big country with a relatively sparse population.
The lack of pollution may indeed help and save more lives. And if it wasn't for the increase in speeding the roads may become safer.
One of the reasons Spanish Flu killed so many and took such a hold was because of wartime secrecy, and that's one of the resons it's called quite wrongly Spanish Flu.
I wouldn't say it is heartless. It does concern me too that the cure could be worse than the problem.
I don't think the situation is much different from one of those basic moral dilemmas about whether sacrifcing a few lives for the many is justified - there is a group of you in a flooding cave. Your only way out is to use explosives but in doing so 2 people will be killed. Do you detonate the explosives?
Isn't there a similar one about diverting a runaway train. One direction, the passengers on the train will all die; the other, they will all live but the (fewer) people on the platform will die instead. Do the needs of the many outweight those of the few (or the one)?
Yep, it's a real-life trolley experiment, and we're getting more new information every day. Do you pull the lever or not? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trolley_problem
This will be sobering reading for those watching their businesses disappear down the pan, and the employees of those businesses: https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2020-03-18/99-of-those-who-died-...
From the Bloomberg article: "The median age of the infected is 63 but most of those who die are older."
Given that by definition the median age would be the age of a person smack in the middle of a line-up ordered by age, I'd question the author's understanding of his source material.
Quick question - why's that ? The median age of deaths is just over 80, the median age of the infected is 63 ish - it would be a pretty wonky distribution if there weren't more dying who were older than the middle of the infection age curve.
Doh! Yes, my bad. The median age refers to the infected. Then he compares with the age of fatalities. Mea culpa.
No worries, thought that might be the case
But this is kind of similar to saying that no-one dies of HIV, it not the HIV that gets you in the end (or did before the many drug therapies that were developed and indeed continue to be developed) it's the thrush, the non hodgekins lymphoma, the skin cancer, the pnuemonia caused by colds and 'flu, which is why it's called AIDS, it's the Syndrome. No one wants to die of thrush.
I think even with seasonal 'flu, it's the secondary infections that tends to get people, especially of those with underlying conditions.
With HIV, that is the primary cause. It pre-existed the secondary infection (eg thrush) and allows the secondary infection to prove fatal where otherwise it would not. So the patient's death is attributable to HIV.
With covid, it would appear that very often there is likewise a pre-existing condition which enables the covid to prove fatal. Had covid not come along something else would have finished them off.
So whilst I appreciate your analogy with HIV, I think you have applied it the wrong way about to the case of covid.
You are dumb - at least you have that insight.
Thing about "common sense" is that it is so open to massive amounts of interpretation.
It has no place in any logical and rational thought process.
Experience and evidence, that should drive things, not so called "common sense"
If we kept going with "common sense" there would have been no need for Galileo, Newton and Einstein.
A very common argument with my wife is that I do something, it goes wrong, and she tells me I should have done it like *this* instead "because it's common sense!". Except if it was common sense, I would have done it her way in the first place, wouldn't I?
The problem is not whether enforcement is their first or their last resort, the problem is what they enforce.
The role of the police is to enforce the law, not the well meaning sound-bites of politicians. And the law has nothing to say on where, how or for how long people take their exercise. Neither does it say anything about wearing lycra.
Common sense prevails. I would, hoever, like clarification on how far we could cycle and not be seen as being unreasonable. For example, my usual Saturday route involves a trip over the border into North Yorkshire, a round trip of about 80 miles. I am not going to do that, I think that is taking the piss a little, but is 50 miles too long? I want to do what is reasonable.
On another note, anyone else pissed off with the adverts on the bottom of the screen which continually pop up? I know adverts fund the website, I get that, but the adverts are now covering most of the screen. Too much, road.cc I am sorry but I will have to find another cycling website to visit.
The ads are driving me crazy. They now take up more screen than the actual content. There are no up to Five different blocks of ads all changing regularly and distracting form reading the article. This is overkill. I have now installed and adblocker and, of course, this defeats Road CC's income. Ease back on the ads and I'll turn off the adblocker.
I have just installed adblock, the difference is amazing. Sorry road.cc, I know you generate revenue from the ads, but this is way too much. I can put up with adverts, but not which covers three quarters of the page.
There is no other cycling website like this.
I too find the new adverts a bit annoying, but we get quite a bit from this fine free website.
I have ad blocker installed, ads are one thing but they were so intrusive and annoying, mind you have you taken a look at Cycling Weekly recently, awful.
I leave the ads showing in the office (vanilla MS Edge browser), but I use the Brave Browser on all my mobile devices.
I don't think 50 miles is excessive, I did 60km this morning before work, only put a foot down twice, stationary for 40 seconds total (at traffic lights) never within 2m of anyone. didn't even see that many people. The fact is meeting people is more likely in the km nearest home at either end of the ride.
1) do you need to stop en route for provisions? I think that would be unreasonable as it falls in to uneccesary contact
2) if you have mechanical can you deal with it? (tools/split link/tubes/pump/maybe even spare cable)
3) if you can't are you reliant on public transport? again uneccesary social contact
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