Coronavirus (COVID-19): international policing responses - part 2 - easing of lockdown

Introduction

In order to prevent the spread of COVID-19, police forces across the world have been given new emergency powers to ensure the public adhere to their country's lockdown rules. Justice Analytical Services wrote International comparisons of policing approaches and responses to the COVID-19 lockdown (7 May), which describes how national police forces were policing and responding to the early COVID-19 lockdown across a number of jurisdictions. This follow-on paper considers how select jurisdictions have been policing the subsequent phases of lockdown in order to provide an early assessment of considerations around policing for planning purposes.

While the focus of this paper is on the stages of lockdown easing in respective countries, information from the earlier lockdown period is included where this is considered useful or significant. Many of the same challenges remain from the initial lockdown which were explored in the first paper. Some of these are expanded on here whilst others are newer challenges specific to this phase of the lockdown.

The countries included are: England, Northern Ireland, Republic of Ireland, New Zealand, Netherlands, Norway and France (see Annex 2 for country selection criteria). For each country we sought to collect information on a number of research questions (Annex 3). In order to avoid duplication of work, this paper does not explore the policing approach in Scotland, or public perceptions of the police's approach to enforcing the lockdown in Scotland. This is being addressed by John Scott QC's Independent Advisory Group (IAG). Instead the purpose of this paper is to identify any useful learning for Scotland.

There is variation in the detail presented for each country and for each of the research questions. This is due to differing availability of material and time constraints. The lack of information on some research questions does not necessarily mean that this does not exist, but that it was not found within the timeframe allocated to writing this paper.

Lastly, there are sections on good and innovative practice - please note that these are what appear to be good and innovative practice based on the literature considered, and are unlikely to have been evaluated.