myAIPMCoronavirus: Why we must tackle hard questions about police power
Professor Ian Loader - University of Oxford
"With some daily headlines in Britain focused on the use of police powers in response to the Covid-19 pandemic, Professor Ian Loader from the University of Oxford considers the role of the police and how effective the current police response has been.
The COVID-19 crisis has – in a most dramatic and unexpected way – brought policing back to the forefront of the public mind. As police forces grapple with how to secure adherence to new public health regulations while sustaining legitimacy, social media is a battleground of tales of petty police officiousness towards “law-abiding” citizens or urgent calls for the police to stop selfish gatherers putting lives at risk.
Lord Sumption, a former Supreme Court judge, took to the airwaves to berate Derbyshire Police for using drones to shame walkers in the Peak District, muttering darkly about a police state. The “lockdown”, and its uncertain duration and effects, calls on us to confront some enduring but vital questions about police power and its limits, and about the fragile relation between the exercise of those powers and public consent. This means thinking again – and hard – about the police mission: what it is we expect the police to do, and how should they go about doing it?
In a paper published by the Strategic Review of Policing in England and Wales, I argue that in a liberal democracy these questions demand constant attention: what is policing for? Are the police crime fighters or a social service? Should they be reactive or proactive? Are they the thin blue line between order and chaos or a constant threat to precious liberties?
It’s easy to grow weary of the repetitive back and forth of these, and this can prompt the police to claim they simply do whatever is asked of them, or to wheel out the Peelian principles of policing by consent as a source of timeless wisdom rather than complacent self-legitimacy. Neither will do. What’s at stake must be clearer when deciding how, for what purpose, and against whom, police authority is deployed. And we need to understand and revise that purpose for the changed world we actually inhabit."
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Professor Ian Loader, Policing Insight, 2020