Police Powers During the Pandemic in Spain: Some Commonalities and Differences

This chapter examines some characteristics of the Spanish policing model of the 2020 pandemic. It aims at contributing to the international body of literature on police responses to the COVID crisis, and the development of pandemic police states as opportunities of expansion of state coercive powers. Four main aspects will be analysed: (a) the spectacularization of police operations, (b) the competition between different state actors for the exercise of police powers, (c) the extension of police discretion to practices that could be considered forms of ‘police lawmaking’ or ‘police jurisprudence’ -policeprudence- and (d) the exercise of police powers against protest and activism. Although all four phenomena have a temporal scope that is mainly limited to 2020, I will also address some of their impacts up to the present.