Covid rules and regulations need to be policed evenly, to ensure public trust

The chair of the Police Federation in Northern Ireland has spoken about the challenge of policing Covid restrictions.

Mark Lindsay said that it had brought officers into conflict with normally law-abiding citizens.

That is clearly so. Lawmakers were suddenly faced with the challenge of introducing fundamental restrictions on everyday activities and the police had to enforce it.

Here, and across the UK, officers seemed too zealous at times. In NI they were criticised for overstepping their powers (the former Presbyterian moderator Rev Norman Hamilton warned the PSNI against allowing “a perception to develop that ordinary citizens going about their ordinary business are to be regarded as potential ordinary criminals”).

But police were also accused (with good reason) of being too soft at times. Their handling of the massive IRA funeral breach of social distancing in west Belfast in 2020 was particularly poor, although there were other culprits in that scandal, including Belfast City Council.

However, the facilitation of the Bobby Storey funeral was the decision of the PSNI high command, not lowly officers. The latter were abandoned on other occasions, such as by their superiors when, with justification, they queried an Ormeau Road gathering to remember a loyalist massacre.

The police were also criticised by the Police Ombudsman after their apt decision to issue fines at the calculated mass distancing breaches in the later Black Lives Matter rallies.

All of those events, and events like them, impact on the “normally law-abiding citizens” to whom Mr Lindsay refers. It is a duty of policing not only to uphold the law fairly but to be seen to do so. This was particularly important after hundreds of thousands of people in Northern Ireland abided by the coronavirus guidance and restrictions.

Instead, they saw an IRA funeral get special treatment.

The PSNI leadership must police breaches evenly, however much it might upset some politicians or activists.

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