COVID-19 Police state

[nezumi]

The Metropolitan police says that 31 of its officers broke lockdown rules to have a haircut in a police station while on duty.

This reality was brought to you by Monty Python.

[Martin_B]

The Metropolitan police says that 31 of its officers broke lockdown rules to have a haircut in a police station while on duty.

This reality was brought to you by Monty Python.

Although police officers can also be fined for not having hair cuts. I have family who used to be in the police and male officers could be fined for having long hair, with female officers fined if their hair wasn't tidy. I don't know if these rules are still in force, but police officers are (or were) supposed to maintain a presentable appearance.

[Bird on a Fire]

The Metropolitan police says that 31 of its officers broke lockdown rules to have a haircut in a police station while on duty.

This reality was brought to you by Monty Python.

Although police officers can also be fined for not having hair cuts. I have family who used to be in the police and male officers could be fined for having long hair, with female officers fined if their hair wasn't tidy. I don't know if these rules are still in force, but police officers are (or were) supposed to maintain a presentable appearance.

Here's the current rules, AFAICT:

Hair
Uniformed staff
Wear your hair so that it is cut or secured above the collar and ears and is neat and tidy. It should not present a health and safety hazard. Any hair accessory must be plain in design and black or navy blue in colour. Extreme and vivid hair colouring is not permitted. Do not dye it in conspicuously unnatural colours.
For police officers and other operational uniformed staff, pigtails and ponytails are unacceptable due to officer safety implications.
Non-uniformed staff
Ensure your appearance reflects the same high standard required of all other members of the force, dependent on working environment (if the role is not one which requires face-to-face contact with the public, there is room for discretion).

Facial hair
Facial hair should be neat and tidy. Do not dye it in conspicuously unnatural colours.
An unshaven/stubbly appearance is unacceptable unless you are growing a beard or moustache. This does not apply where there is a genuine medical reason not to shave.

From https://recruit.college.police.uk/Offic ... ument.docx (nb - word doc)

So they've got rid of the gender-based discrimination, and now there is no need for any cops to break rules during lockdown to get a haircut.

[shpalman]

No you can't drive 140 miles to "walk your dogs"

[shpalman]

OTOH if some people really really really can't not meet their friends it's much better that they do so walking around in the countryside than sneakily in each another's houses.

The actual risk of transmission from a countryside stroll is still pretty close to 0 unless you're holding hands and snogging while you do it, so it depends on whether cracking down on walkers would result in (a) closer obedience to the spirit of the law or (b) riskier forms of rule-breaking.

They're now going for walks nearer where they live, and that's allowed, and in the photo it looks pleasant enough and there's nobody else there.

They weren't originally stopped when they were walking around, they were stopped when they'd got out of their cars having driven to a place.

One thing to ask yourself is always "what if everyone else also did this?" i.e. you can't drive to a place which is quiet because everyone else knows they're not allowed to drive to it.

You don't want that the law ends up having to be increasingly specific and cock-sh.tty because the public and the police are in a race to see who can arrive at zero common sense first.

I can't go to the park anymore because everyone else also goes to the park, there needs to be new rules to stop me* going to the park

[Millennie Al]

We should be getting to the point where the restrictions can be supported by specific evidence, and discarding those lacking in evidence. It seems that outdoor transmission is so unlikely that it is not appropriate to restrict people going outdoors and doing most things there. The only danger that has much support at all is getting close to people and speaking to them.

Outdoor Transmission of SARS-CoV-2 and Other Respiratory Viruses: A Systematic Review (https://doi.org/10.1093/infdis/jiaa742) suggests that "outdoor" transmission cases tend to occur very rarely and even then some such cases may not be really outdoor at all - they might be causes by getting to the outdoor location or some other similar factor (e.g. the outdoor transmission at a holiday camp where people travelled there together and slept in the shared cabins).

[shpalman]

how about people just stay the f.ck at home

[shpalman]

A wanted man handed himself in to police in West Sussex to avoid having to spend any more time in lockdown with the people he lives with.

[Grumble]

A wanted man handed himself in to police in West Sussex to avoid having to spend any more time in lockdown with the people he lives with.

Makes you wonder if some people turn to crime in order to get away from their family in the first place.

[lpm]

I've known quite a few people who work late at the office, presenting themselves as workaholics. When really they can't stand bath time and story time and all that.

[Gfamily]

I've known quite a few men who work late at the office, presenting themselves as workaholics. When really they can't stand bath time and story time and all that.

FIFwhatIassumeyoumeant

[shpalman]

turns out that everyone going to the beach wasn't such an issue after all

[Lew Dolby]

turns out that everyone going to the beach wasn't such an issue after all

but they didn't know that at the time !!

[shpalman]

turns out that everyone going to the beach wasn't such an issue after all

but they didn't know that at the time !!

and we wouldn't know it know, had the British public not decided to conduct a mass experiment.

[Fishnut]

turns out that everyone going to the beach wasn't such an issue after all

but they didn't know that at the time !!

Er, but they did.

We had a lot of existing knowledge even when the pandemic began about respiratory viruses and how they transmit in general, and everything directs us to the conditions in people’s homes and workplaces.” [said Dr Müge Çevik, a lecturer in infectious diseases and medical virology at the University of St Andrews]...

“This is not a subtle picture,” he said. “The published studies were already quite clear at the time … but after the reaction to my comment I am now concerned that this is not fully understood and maybe this is something the politicians do need to factor more into their thinking. As they make their plans to get us out of this, maybe they do need to be reappraised of where the risks really lie.” [my emphasis]

[Lew Dolby]

but I'd be prepared to wager a small amount that the people actually on the beaches didn't know that and only knew the government advice to stay distanced.

[Fishnut]

but I'd be prepared to wager a small amount that the people actually on the beaches didn't know that and only knew the government advice to stay distanced.

Maybe, but the government had every opportunity to know their advice was unnecessarily draconian in outdoor situations. So either they hadn't bothered to listen to the experts and read the evidence, or they had but decided that they would ignore it. Neither option paints them in a particularly good light.

I have no problem with the government advising people against travelling far or visiting popular spots. I can understand why they'd choose to shut amenities like public toilets. But calling people going to the beach a "superspreader event" is fearmongering. And given how little they care about the people actually at risk it feels more like an attempt to deflect attention than actually caring about whether or not people get sick.

[shpalman]

If a group of people who live together anyway all go to the beach, and there are lots of other family groups there, I think it's relatively unlikely that someone in one group will catch it from another group. The groups just don't interact that closely.

However, going outside to meet up with someone who isn't from your household would be a different thing. Especially if you spend the time e.g. sitting at a pub garden table with them.

[Turdly]

Jonesing is not a legitimate reason to travel

[Martin Y]

... Similarly, people go around with a radio device that can be used to track them. Currently, this is used reactively to check up on individuals, but there is no technical reason why it shouldn't provide law enforcement with a continuous, real-time feed of the current location of nearly everyone in the country. Then, for example, if you attend a protest that turns nasty there will be no need for police to publish video stills and appeal for information about people - they can check who was there and compare the stills with their passport or driving licence photos. The few not covered can be manually checked.

And eventually it's not just the police who can do it. Yesterday's rather chilling episode of The Digital Human https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/m000tml8 interleaved and contrasted a fun story about a 14-year internet puzzle to identify a man from a single photo captioned "My name is Satoshi" (eventually solved out of the blue with a reverse image search) and the re-voiced story of a woman in witness protection whose family have to plan their lives around never being photographed, not even by accident in the background of someone else's social media snaps, otherwise they might be tracked down.

[raven]

Yeah, Big Brother is here and most of us haven't even noticed.

China has so much surveillance going on that in places they can monitor which door a citizen leaves their house by and whether there's any change in that. I suppose that's great for making sure people self-isolate in a plague, but it's not great for many, many other, mostly deeply scary reasons.

[Woodchopper]

I moved the ID card discussion over to a new thread of its own
viewtopic.php?f=10&t=2345&p=76332#p76348

[lpm]

This thread is alive again. Tomorrow's Telegraph says Hancock and the cabinet pressurised the police to crack down.

[Grumble]

This thread is alive again. Tomorrow's Telegraph says Hancock and the cabinet pressurised the police to crack down.

Pressured rather than pressurised, surely? Maybe this is an English usage stylistic issue, but as an engineer I mean something quite different by pressurised.

[IvanV]

This thread is alive again. Tomorrow's Telegraph says Hancock and the cabinet pressurised the police to crack down.

Pressured rather than pressurised, surely? Maybe this is an English usage stylistic issue, but as an engineer I mean something quite different by pressurised.

[derail]
I've checked in a couple of dictionaries, and they both think both words equally have the meaning "put pressure on". Only pressurise has the technical engineering meaning. You would like separate the meanings and the words for greater clarity of expression. But unfortunately you can't control how other people use words. My suspicion is that pressurise was used with the alternative meaning before pressure was verbed to have that meaning.

This is a common situation, that we deprecate a usage that turns out to be well-established or longstanding. For example, "refute" has been used on and off to mean "deny" for at least 400 years, inconvenient as it is for those of us used to reserving to it the meaning "utterly disprove". Equally, we might we might deprecate an "Americanism", only to find out it is an even older "Englishism" that just happened to fall out of usage in England.
[/derail]