When the Exception Makes the Rules: Public Order Policing in the Aftermath of COVID-19

In England, COVID-19 was treated at the outset as a public order threat rather than a public health priority through emergency legislation that targeted people as suspects in need of policing, rather than as patients in need of protection. Trawling through policing legislation in the aftermath of COVID-19, this chapter demonstrates how a pandemic disease paved the way for law-making practices that contradict dominant conceptions of “the law” as an apolitical arbiter of justice. What is revealed instead, is the normalisation of exceptional legislative powers which threaten to transform human rights and civil liberties into criminal offences. This chapter therefore challenges dominant conceptions of “the law” as a neutral entity, reintroducing it instead as an instrument of state violence, coercion and social control—in ways that raise urgent ontological and epistemological questions for criminology and legal studies.