Policing under coronavirus: the real test is yet to come | Martin Kettle

As the pandemic wears on, how long will we allow ourselves to be policed by consent?

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At the end of The Long Goodbye, Raymond Chandler’s detective Philip Marlowe bids farewell to his readers and to the characters in the novel. “I never saw any of them again – except the cops,” muses Marlowe. “No way has yet been invented to say goodbye to them.” Chandler was expressing a wider truth. In the words of the British criminologist Robert Reiner: “Welcome or unwelcome, protectors, pigs or pariahs, the police are an inevitable fact of modern life.”

Especially, we are again learning, in a national emergency. The Coronavirus Act 2020 has given a ratchet to three of the most persistently controversial themes in British policing history: police powers, police discretion and police coordination. All three are back in the spotlight in the Covid-19 lockdown. But this week’s arguments, prompted in part by the former supreme court judge Jonathan Sumption’s warnings about the growth of a police state, are only the start. The real test for the policing of the pandemic is yet to come.

Today’s events are reminding a new generation of police that relations with the public are always contingent

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