Policing the COVID-19 Pandemic: Exploratory Study of the Types of Organizational Changes and Police Activities Across the Globe

Abstract

The COVID-19 pandemic upended major facets of global society, including policing. This study describes three types of changes that police agencies in counties worldwide made. First, how have various domains of policing changed and how much did they change? Second, were these changes regulated by the official policy? Third, what are the potential consequences of the changes made during the pandemic? Taking a mixed-methods approach, our quantitative survey data from 27 countries, buttressed by qualitative responses, enable us to examine changes in these three areas. Our results suggest there is a great deal of heterogeneity in the degree of change, the use of policy to make the changes, and the perceived effects of the changes. Some changes (i.e., the use of personal protective equipment) are relatively ubiquitous and common sense based on the pandemic. Other organizational changes show a great deal more variation, especially when considering the valence of the change. Finally, the police executives from these countries express a highly optimistic—and potentially overly rosy—view of the potential longer term consequences of the pandemic or the operational changes made because of it. Overall, the results paint a more complicated picture of the responses to the pandemic made by the police organizations included in our sample. We conclude by discussing the implications of these findings for future research, police practice, and the development of policy.

Drug markets and COVID-19: A spatiotemporal study of drug offence detection rates in Brisbane, Australia

“…In sum, we think that in most places across Brisbane drug users and drug sellers became increasingly visible and vulnerable to detection, although we credit this to a number of competing and intersecting mechanisms. First, we know that police are likely to have had more time to dedicate to street-based operational activities since all other crime types were in considerable decline (Langfield et al, 2021;Payne et al, 2020) and since policing priorities during COVID-19 were focused on public health and regulatory compliance (Maskály et al, 2021). This will have likely increased police attention on unusual or suspicious conduct, thus increasing the frequency of direct contact between the police and those members of the community who were not staying at home as directed.…”

Cops and COVID: an examination of California officers' perceptions and experiences while policing during a pandemic

“…Topics include the impact on calls for service (Ashby, 2020), how trends in domestic/intimate partner violence have changed (e.g. Piquero et al , 2021) and whether shelter-at-home orders play a role (Nix and Richards, 2021) as well as cross-national trends in police agencies (Maskály et al ., in press). In the interest of brevity, only the most relevant COVID-19 policing studies are discussed and cited in the literature review.…”

The response of law enforcement agencies and police officers' experiences under the Covid-19 state of alarm in Catalonia, Spain

“…Other published studies have paid more attention to policing measures and to the demand changes and adaptation of the organization to the pandemic. Overall, the conclusions emphasized the use of mixed strategies to get over the pandemic, for example: increasing communication and information within the organization, increasing online work, diminishing traffic controls and other similar activities and suspending training activities, among other impacts (Luong et al, 2020;Mask aly et al, 2021).…”