So, the Derbyshire police reveal in dramatic fashion what I’ve suspected for a while. The cops have put surveillance tech into the air via the ubiquitous drone. It’s less expensive than a chopper but it can still read a car number plate or spot a person from miles out. It might even be able to read your face. And when the cops read a car number plate of course, they know who you are and where you live. The bad guys should look out then, except the cameras aren’t always used for catching the bad-guys.
I’ve been critical of people resisting this “lockdown” (hate that word), exasperated when I see people taking to the hills en-mass when we’re told to stay at home, except for “essential” journeys. But it has never been made clear what is and is not an essential journey. And now to see this tech unleashed on sparse numbers of non-criminal members of the public in order to “shame” them for taking a walk, well,.. it’s pulled me up short. More, it will be one of my abiding memories of this crisis, along with others that are starting to leave a bad taste, like how only the rich and famous are able to get a Covid-19 test. And all the while the usual sycophantic organs of the fourth estate are drumming up the Dunkirk spirit, assuring us we’re all in this together when we’re clearly not.
Freedom in the hills has always been a fundamental necessity for many. A journey to the hills might therefore be interpreted by such folk as essential for one’s sanity. Me too. And we’re confused. Many of us are still expected to travel to work when we’d rather not, given the risk to which it exposes our selves and our families. But employers are thinking about longer term business viability and profits. That’s another interpretation of what’s essential. What’s the difference here?
So,.. the Derbyshire police shame members of the public for taking a walk away from home. But it didn’t look to me like they were risking increasing the spread of this contagion very much. They might have fallen, yes. They might have crashed their cars and needed the emergency services, tying up already overstretched resources. I get that. But something doesn’t feel right here. This feels like a distraction from other issues.
The real risks are what our health workers are exposed to daily on account of the shocking inadequacy of their protective equipment, also commuters being forced to share public transport, still travelling to jobs that employers are allowed to interpret as essential. Essential for whom? Where are the police drones shaming the slashed NHS budgets? Where are the police drones shaming employers for making people go to work, when they could and should be working from home?
If the Derbyshire cops have this technology, all the constabularies have it, and they’ve been trialling it for years. But its deployment in the midst of this crisis is both crass and high-handed, and it exposes far more than was intended. Yes, it might scare people off the hills for fear of that sinister eye in the sky, scare them back to their homes, but it also tells me we should be very careful of our freedoms in the future. We should beware allowing others to define, in the longer term, what is and is not a necessary action. Near martial measures such as these are quickly imposed and accepted by the public as necessary for our protection, but how quickly will they be eased?
When, in the coming weeks, the death toll from coronavirus escalates, be careful of who gets the blame. Yes, we should all be exercising close to home now, not driving out to the hills like we used to do. But the height of the death-curve will not be the result of that handful of walkers in Derbyshire interpreting their own essential needs as they have been left to do. Nor will it be the occasional lovers gone out to watch the sunset or post Instagram selfies. It’ll be the result of millions forced to work and commute in the name of profit, and our health workers having to improvise their own protective gear from bin bags.
I shall bear this period of isolation as best I can. I will stay at home, because I understand it’s necessary. But I’m not stupid either, and I know a curve ball when I see it.
The Rivendale Review 
Oh dear, I was already feeling a little paranoid.
You’re not alone.
I think this is a case of the horse having well and truly bolted.
Covid is highly infectious, has a very long incubation period, and as we are not testing and haven’t been closing roads we can only assume it is everywhere.
If the police were battling to keep a dangerous disease out of Derbyshire then any means would be acceptable, but we will soon need to accept that our response was to slow.
China put up road blocks, not checks, blocks.
The virus has been found in hospitals and nursing homes local to where I work, I have heard one account of an elderly patient given a test and sent to the care of the elderly ward before the result came back positive.
I believe this is the inevitable price of a very low death rate over the last two or three years, and not something that needs to lead to the house arrest of the whole country.
Stephen
Hera Hear! Well said!
👍
Can’t really ‘like’ this, but thank you for bringing it to my/our attention
From BBC 30 March. On Monday, Lord Sumption, a former Justice of the Supreme Court, told Radio 4’s World At One the actions of Derbyshire Police – which also included uploading drone footage of walkers to social media – had “shamed our policing traditions”.
“The tradition of policing in this country is that policemen are citizens in uniform, they are not members of a disciplined hierarchy operating just at the government’s command,” he said.
“The police have no power to enforce ministers’ preferences but only legal regulations which don’t go anything like as far as the government’s guidance.”