Policing Protest in a Pandemic

According to theDaily Mail, just before the move to a much fuller national lockdown in early November, and re-introduction of bans on outside gatherings of more than two, the Home Secretary Priti Patel ‘briefed chief constables over the weekend to tell officers to enforce the rules’. That is hard to square with longstanding notions of constabulary independence, most notably the well-known dicta in Blackburn. It illustrates well the rather strange, unchartered constitutional waters that we have been in these past six or so months when we consider the topic of protest and the way it is policed. This paper seeks to sketch out some of the terrain—if waters can have a terrain?— and to offer a few insights. It is in three main parts: an outline of the legal restrictions on ‘gatherings’—covering large-scale, staged protest events such as marches, rallies, demos, sit-ins and occupations—in the various Coronavirus Regulations, then a critique of those rules, followed by a discussion about some of the key policing aspects. This raises the immediate observation of a misplaced focus: ‘Protest as socio-political activity requires an appreciation and comprehension of the small-scale and everyday, a reclaiming of protest from below, to paraphrase E.P. Thompson’. Nonetheless, let us consider how the law has treated mass protests this year.