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

Fatsis, L. ORCID: 0000-0002-3082-951X (2024). When the Exception Makes the Rules: Public Order Policing in the Aftermath of COVID-19. In: Di Ronco, A & Selmini, R (Eds.), Criminalisation of Dissent in Times of Crisis. (pp. 113-136). London, UK: Palgrave Macmillan. doi: 10.1007/978-3-031-75376-3

Abstract

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 an apolitical arbiter of justice, 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.

Publication Type: Book Section
Subjects: H Social Sciences > HN Social history and conditions. Social problems. Social reform
H Social Sciences > HV Social pathology. Social and public welfare
R Medicine > RA Public aspects of medicine > RA0421 Public health. Hygiene. Preventive Medicine
Departments: School of Policy & Global Affairs
School of Policy & Global Affairs > Sociology & Criminology
SWORD Depositor:
[thumbnail of LFatsis_Chapter.pdf] Text - Accepted Version
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