The postcode lottery of safety: COVID-19 guidance and shortages of personal protective equipment (PPE) for UK police officers
| Author | Camilla De Camargo |
| DOI | http://doi.org/10.1177/0032258X211018768 |
| Published date | 01 September 2022 |
| Date | 01 September 2022 |
| Subject Matter | Articles |
Article
The postcode lottery of
safety: COVID-19 guidance
and shortages of personal
protective equipment
(PPE) for UK police officers
Camilla De Camargo
Department of Criminology and Sociology, Kingston University,
Kingston-Upon-Thames, UK
Abstract
The COVID-19 pandemic has caused significant changes to police working practices
involving the enhanced wearing of personal protective equipment (PPE), and ways of
working inside and outside of police stations. The safety guidance released by the various
government agencies has been conflicting, confusing and unhelpfully flexible, and there
are significant discrepancies between some of the 43 forces of England and Wales. This
article draws on primary interview data with 18 police officers from 11 UK police forces
to explore the problems that officers faced in accessing appropriate PPE and the diffi-
culties in obtaining and understanding accurate coronavirus health and safety
information.
Keywords
Coronavirus, COVID-19, policing, police, personal protective equipment (PPE)
Introduction
On the 31 December 2019, Chinese officials alerted the World Health Organisation
(WHO) about an unknown illness that had infected 40 citizens in Wuhan, China. On
the 7 January 2020, the coronavirus was genetically sequenced and became known as the
respiratory disease ‘COVID-19’ (WHO, 06/03/20). At the time of publication, there
Corresponding author:
Camilla De Camargo, Department of Criminology and Sociology, Kingston University, Penrhyn Road,
Kingston-Upon-Thames KT1 1LQ, UK.
Email: c.decamargo@kingston.ac.uk
The Police Journal:
Theory, Practice and Principles
ªThe Author(s) 2021
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DOI: 10.1177/0032258X211018768
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2022, Vol. 95(3) 537–561
538 The Police Journal: Theory, Practice and Principles 95(3)
were 128 million active COVID-19 cases and over 2.8 million deaths worldwide, and the
daily figures are rising sharply. Many police officers have died from coronavirus (Hider,
03/09/20), increasing fear and anxiety for officers. Although reporting practices differ
and we are yet to see the true number of deaths in policing, there are at least four police
officers dead in the UK from the coronavirus (The Independent 30/03/20), 17 in Peru, 95
in China (The Federal, 04/04/20) and 80 in the USA (18 in New York alone) (Police
One, 2020), and all of these figures bar the latter have not been updated since April
2020.
1
The use of contamination prevention practices has always been important to the
police (De Camargo, 2019a), but even more so now. Until recently, personal protective
equipment (PPE) for police officers received little attention short of the usual ‘standard
precautions’ of gloves, surgical masks and hand sanitiser. PPE, as a vital tool in disaster
response, garnered raised awareness following events such as the 1995 Tokyo subway
sarin attack, the 1995 Murrah Federal Building bombing, the 2003 SARS pandemic, and
the 9/11 terrorist attacks. These events demonstrated how a lack of appropriate PPE can
result in adverse health effects for front-line workers.
The relationship between policing and public health is an important one; the work of
policing impacts directly and indirectly on health; and health conversely impacts both
directly and indirectly on policing (see Anders et al., 2017; Gilmour, 2018). In early
2018, The College of Policing (CoP), Public Health England (PHE), and the National
Police Chief’s Council (NPCC) signed up to the Policing, Social Care and Health
consensus to provide a focus for partnerships to work together to focus on people’s
health and well-being, prevent crime and protect the vulnerable (CoP, 2020). This was
part of The Policing Vision 2025 (NPCC, 2016), a 10-year plan requiring a more
scholarly and multi-faceted approach to tackle new challeng es to policing, although
no one could have predicted the worldwide challenge and devastating impact of the
novel coronavirus COVID-19. The consensus is currently only used in England and there
is no single agreed national or international definition of public health approaches in
policing (Christmas and Scrivastava, 2019), but public health priorities are ‘clearly
aligned’ with police forces in England and establishes the ‘joint commitment [ ...]to
make a real difference to improving health and wellbeing outcomes’ (NPCC, 2018).
PPE is defined as equipment and clothing designed to protect against an identified
hazard, and when the hazard cannot be eliminated or controlled to a safe working level,
PPE is used to bring the risk down to a minimum (HSE, 2020). The Health and Safety at
Work Act (1974) is the primary legislation regarding occupational health and safety in
the UK and requires the employer to ensure, so far as is reasonably practicable, the
health, safety and welfare of all its employees (see Section 2 of the Act). PPE procedures
for some forces are publicly available online (designated as uniform standards, policies
or similar). West Yorkshire police (2018: 3–4) for example advise that individuals are
responsible for ‘wearing PPE where appropriate and in compliance with the training
received and notifying their supervisor of any issues that impact on the effectiveness of
wearing their PPE’. On the other hand, supervisors are responsible for ‘ensuring PPE is
worn where appropriate by staff, providing staff with relevant information, instructions
and training, [ ...] and the manner in which PPE works and should be used’. Others such
as Wiltshire police (2017: 7) advise that it is ‘essential’ that users of PPE be instructed on
why and when PPE is to be used, and ‘practice in putting on, wearing and removing
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