Policing and Society

An International Journal of Research and Policy

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The policing and public health interface: insights

from the COVID-19 pandemic

Jennifer D. Wood & Patricia M. Griffin

To cite this article: Jennifer D. Wood & Patricia M. Griffin (2021) The policing and public health
interface: insights from the COVID-19 pandemic, Policing and Society, 31:5, 503-511, DOI:
10.1080/10439463.2021.1946058

To link to this article: https://doi.org/10.1080/10439463.2021.1946058

Published online: 14 Jul 2021.

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POLICING AND SOCIETY
2021, VOL. 31, NO. 5, 503–511
https://doi.org/10.1080/10439463.2021.1946058

INTRODUCTION

The policing and public health interface: insights from

the COVID-19 pandemic
Jennifer D. Wooda and Patricia M. Griffinb
a
Department of Criminal Justice, Temple University, Philadelphia, PA, USA; bSchool of Arts and Sciences, Holy
Family University, Newtown, PA, USA
ARTICLE HISTORY Received 16 June 2021; Accepted 17 June 2021
KEYWORDS Policing; public health; regulation; COVID-19

Introduction
The term ‘interface’ has at least two meanings. It refers to ‘the place at which interdependent and
often unrelated systems meet and act on or communicate with each other’ and it also denotes
the act of joining, as in ‘to connect by means of an interface’ (Merriam-Webster 2021). In both
senses, the interface between policing and public health is steadily gaining attention as the
subject of study, scrutiny, and innovation. A new collection of essays (Bartkowiak-Théron et al. in
press) signals global interest in this topic, as have a series of articles designed to encourage
shared thinking and practice in the many spaces where these systems meet (Burris and Koester
2013, Wood et al. 2015, Anderson and Burris 2017, Bartkowiak-Théron and Asquith 2017, Punch
and James 2017, Van Dijk and Crofts 2017, van Dijk et al. 2019, Goulka et al. 2021).
This special issue on the policing and public health interface is meant to propel our journey
toward better inter-disciplinary understanding and deeper normative engagement, with an empha-
sis on views from around the world, complementary theoretical ideas, and shared points of action.
Taken together, the papers in the collection provide insight into the nature of vulnerability and harm
and the ways in which policing functions on landscapes of plural regulation.

The policing and public health interface: some signposts

Examining the policing and public health interface is important because it is well known that our
most prevalent social problems, including violence, mental illness, substance abuse, and infectious
diseases defy institutional boundaries (see Punch 2019). The fields of public safety and public health
find themselves in crisis response mode far too often (Anderson and Burris 2017) – reacting when
people are shot by guns, experiencing a mental health crisis, suffering from the grips of addiction,
or navigating the deadly risks of a global pandemic. No doubt, those working on the front lines wish
such social ills could be prevented to forestall the harm and trauma experienced by people, those
who care for them, and their communities. Tragically, the COVID-19 pandemic has laid bare the fail-
ures of prevention (Todorovic et al. 2020) and the urgency of finding better ways for policing and
public health agents to work in harmony, both in strategy and in operations (Richards et al. 2006).
Strengthening the policing and public health interface has been a practical goal for the Global
Law Enforcement and Public Health Association (GLEPHA), whose mission is to advance ‘research,
understanding and practice at the intersection of law enforcement and public health’ (Global Law
Enforcement and Public Health Association 2021). Foundational to this agenda is working across
geographic, theoretical, methodological, and institutional vantage points. In Braithwaite’s terms,

CONTACT Jennifer D. Wood woodj@temple.edu, jennifer.wood@temple.edu

© 2021 Informa UK Limited, trading as Taylor & Francis Group
504 J. D. WOOD AND P. M. GRIFFIN

this agenda is concerned with fostering ‘hybridity’ (Braithwaite 2014a) – that is, forming bridges in
pursuit of ‘theory and discovery’ (Braithwaite 2014a) that transcend our institutions and disciplines.
By ‘discovery’ we refer both to empirical research that describes and explains phenomena as well as
solutions-focused work devoted to practical, equitable and fair interventions.
In the spirit of hybridity, perspectives from across the disciplines have produced different theor-
etical lenses and framing language that help us make sense of the interface, and interfacing efforts,
that have animated our work so far. One conceptual pillar of the LEPH agenda is the practice of ‘law
enforcement’ in its varied institutional forms. A focus on law enforcement has several benefits. It is a
broad term that encapsulates laws, law-making and the many institutions of law enforcement. To
date, the concept has been applied in ways that foreground public police agencies but is inclusive
of other ‘downstream’ criminal legal agents including prosecutors (Davis 2018, Fair and Just Prose-
cution 2018). The law enforcement pillar also connects naturally with the agenda of legal epidemiol-
ogy (Burris 2002, Burris et al. 2016, Burris et al. 2018), devoted to ‘the scientific study and deployment
of law as a factor in the cause, distribution, and prevention of disease and injury in a population’
(Burris et al. 2016). Of particular interest to the LEPH movement is the relationships between criminal
laws, law enforcement practices and the public’s health. Although criminal laws are not explicitly
designed to achieve public health benefits, there is no doubt that such laws, on the books, or in prac-
tice, can and do have consequences for the public’s health (Burris 2006). Criminal law is therefore
recognised as an ‘incidental’ (Burris et al. 2010) form of public health law due to its effects on popu-
lation health.
Public health researchers and practitioners, beyond those working in legal epidemiology, have
long been concerned about the deleterious consequences of law enforcement practices on the
public’s health (Simckes et al. 2021). For instance, it is now well documented that certain kinds of
police encounters – especially ones that are aggressive or stigmatising – can result in bad outcomes
for physical and mental health (Geller et al. 2014, Sewell and Jefferson 2016, Duarte et al. 2020). Like
medicine, policing can have ‘iatrogenic’ effects (Anderson and Burris 2017, Goulka et al. 2021), pro-
ducing harm and deepening inequalities (Rafla-Yuan et al. 2021). Police violence has been framed as
a public health issue (American Public Health Association 2018).
Given that ‘law is a ubiquitous treatment’ (Burris et al. 2021), inquiries into the policing and public
health interface are therefore strengthened by a lens that homes in on the direct and indirect effects
of laws and law enforcement practices on population health. The power of this lens is even more
apparent in the context of the COVID-19 pandemic. Across the globe, we have seen officers
playing roles in the enforcement of laws and public health orders designed to stop the spread of
the virus, such as stay-at-home orders, social distancing requirements, travel restrictions and
mask-wearing mandates (Mazerolle and Ransley 2021). In this capacity, police agencies have
stepped in, with varying degrees of apprehension (Chan 2020), as deliberate health interventionists
rather than incidental ones.
As we continue to map both the direct and indirect roles of policing in shaping public health out-
comes, a lens focused on the ‘regulatory craft’ (Sparrow 2000) is informative. This lens invites a broad
of view of policing that considers the range of mechanisms and techniques designed to foster com-
pliance with rules and directives. One part of the regulatory craft involves police in their role as ‘pur-
veyors of force and law’ (Friedman 2020). Police do ‘govern through force’ (Wood and Shearing
2007), or ‘by command’ (Ayling and Grabosky 2006), and coercion in its many forms has generated
the iatrogenic harms that have deeply troubled public health academics and practitioners. Thinking
normatively, the prospect of strengthening the connections at the interface of policing and public
health can therefore seem ill-advised and dangerous.
Current policy debates, especially in the United States, are fuelled by this worry about governing
through force, expressed most powerfully by Kaba who regards policing as one of several ‘death-
making institutions’ (in Taylor 2021). Some have argued for a ‘de-centring’ of the police institution
(DC Police Reform Commission 2021), with a view that they ‘should serve as one force among
many who provide and maintain public safety’ (DC Police Reform Commission 2021). In a similar
 POLICING AND SOCIETY 505

vein, others argue for a ‘decoupling’ (Rafla-Yuan et al. 2021) of policing from public health, especially
in responding to mental health (Rafla-Yuan et al. 2021).
This notion of decentring is not new to scholars of regulation (Black 2000), who have worked to
describe and explain the plurality of institutions, mechanisms and techniques involved in shaping
behaviours and fostering compliance – i.e. regulatory pluralism (Gunningham and Sinclai, 1999,
Drahos 2017). Regulation, in the broadest sense, refers to ‘influencing the flow of events’ (Parker
and Braithwaite 2003). Seeing policing in terms of a regulatory craft expands our view to a wider
horizon of options for ‘influencing’ events, like shaming, education, moral suasion and other ways
to ‘nudge’ (Thaler and Sunstein 2009) behaviours in furtherance of common goods like public
safety and public health. Scholarship on regulation has been enriched by powerful literature in
the social psychological tradition that proves compliance with the wishes of regulatory authorities
is more likely to be successful when regulatory agents, like police, or doctors and other health auth-
orities, behave in ways that are ‘procedurally just’ (Tyler and Mentovich 2013).
This broad view of regulation and plurality is consistent with the view – found in scholarship on
the ‘policing web’ (Brodeur 2010), plural policing (Loader 2000, Crawford et al. 2005) and multilateral
policing (Bayley and Shearing 2001) – that the public police are only one entity among many that
work to influence the flow of events, and that the police need not, and do not, rely on coercion
and enforcement of the law all of the time, even if that is what they have been trained and socialised
to do (Friedman 2020). It could be said then that the conditions for de-centring the police and bring-
ing other institutions into the centre of our lens already exist, but we fail to see them well. Certainly,
the literature on the role of private policing entities in shaping health risk behaviours and environ-
ments has been scant (Wood 2020).
A view that emphasises regulatory pluralism is thus compatible with the normative agenda to
‘reduce altogether the footprint of force and law’ (Friedman 2020). It emphasises that the police,
as one regulatory institution, can make use of other tools, beyond coercion and law enforcement,
to influence health-risk behaviours. And if enforcement becomes necessary, it should be carried
out in procedurally just ways to maintain the legitimacy of state authorities (Tyler 2004). In this
light, the COVID-19 pandemic brought with it unique challenges to the performance of policing
as a regulatory craft in shaping behaviours and environments in furtherance of public health. In
unique ways, the papers in this special issue bring different lenses to the problems of vulnerability,
harm, plural policing, and regulation. They illuminate ways in which agents of law enforcement and
public policing have responded to the operational demands brought on by the pandemic. Most
importantly, they provide us with conceptual tools for making sense of the policing and public
health interface and elements of it that should worry us.

Vulnerability, harm, and the craft of policing: key insights from the papers
The papers in this issue help us further examine, scrutinise, and reimagine the policing and public
health interface in the context of the COVID-19 pandemic. They provide contributions from
different parts of the world – Nigeria, Pakistan, New Zealand, Australia, and the United Kingdom,
places with unique economies, political traditions, cultures, and policing legacies.
The literature on policing and public health has to date been centrally concerned with what
Brodeur depicts as ‘low policing’, that is, ‘everyday policing largely performed by agents in
uniform’ (Brodeur 2007). In their piece, Ian Stanier and Jordan Nunan shine a light on one
element of what Brodeur characterised as ‘high policing’ (Brodeur 1983, 2007) – i.e. the use and man-
agement of human sources - in the United Kingdom. Stanier and Nunan set out to understand how
the national lockdown affected the work of English and Welsh Dedicated Source Units (DSUs) in their
efforts to continue their intelligence operations and maintain relationships with their informants.
They were particularly interested in how members of these little-known units adapted to an oper-
ational environment constrained by physical distancing requirements as well as adjusted to
various aspects of their work to maintain flows of intelligence. Through survey-based data collection
506 J. D. WOOD AND P. M. GRIFFIN

and thematic analysis of qualitative responses, Stanier and Nunan illuminate DSU members’ con-
cerns about the wellbeing of their informants and the ways in which members of this intelligence
community brought a health-oriented sensibility to their trade.
This article richly describes ways in which police agents were reflective and creative in responding
to the conditions of the pandemic and found ways of aligning concerns about the health and well-
being of their informants with their own operational imperatives to gather intelligence. DSU staff
recognised not only that the health of informants was at risk, but that informants’ economic security
and mental health was threatened by lockdown requirements. Stanier and Nunan depict how DSU
staff worked to be responsive to informants’ vulnerabilities such as through the provision of public
health information and advice and finding alternative ways of paying informants protect their econ-
omic wellbeing. Stanier and Nunan’s study reveals that maintaining relationships with informants
based on trust and rapport was a focal concern for handlers, and that matters of public health
were not viewed as antithetical to matters of crime control and national security.
Picking up the theme of vulnerability, the article by Francesca Menichelli examines a multi-agency
partnership designed to address the needs of people affected by ‘severe and multiple disadvantage’
(SMD). The notion of severe and multiple disadvantages makes an important conceptual advance in
its treatment of vulnerability as structurally determined. It is a conception that resonates with an
emphasis on the social determinants of health (Burris 2011, Compton and Shim 2015). A lens
focused on SMD focuses on the many intersections between different forms of disadvantage,
such as housing insecurity, mental illness, substance use and criminal legal involvement.
Engaging with the literature on plural policing, Menichelli draws from her first-hand experience of
a partnership-based approach to support people experiencing severe and multiple disadvantage.
She characterises the partnership in terms of ‘hybrid’ governance arrangements, within institutions,
including the police, from across public, private and ‘third’ sectors leveraging their assets in addres-
sing vulnerability. Notably, the partnership was established prior to the outbreak of COVID-19. Like
Stanier and Nunan’s concern with the operational implications of the pandemic for informant hand-
ling, Menichelli focuses on the operational implications of the pandemic on the functioning of this
partnership.
Menichelli’s central concern is a normative one, which is the effects of the pandemic on aspects of
responsiveness, participation, and equity in the performance of the partnership. One of Menichelli’s
findings is that local governance efforts to prioritise and address the ‘combination of needs’ (p.
536) of individuals was trumped by a national directive to focus on the single issue of housing,
thereby undermining the responsiveness of the partnership to multiple forms of disadvantage.
Due the requirement of working remotely, the partnership also experienced barriers in its efforts
to foster participation on the part of people with lived experience, including peer mentors, who
are meant to play central role in identifying needs and supporting people suffering from multiple
disadvantage. Menichelli learned that people’s complex needs deepened during the pandemic,
raising questions about how the partnership could provide intensive support equitably to all who
needed it. Menichelli encourages us to engage with these normative concerns more broadly as
we assess the functioning of hybrid and plural institutional arrangements at the interface of policing
and public health.
In the Australian context, Alex Workman, Erin Kruger, and Tinashe Dune provide insight into
issues of vulnerability, responsiveness, and equity in their analysis of how partner violence is
framed in the grey literature, with an emphasis on how newspapers constructed victims and perpe-
trators during the pandemic. Their analysis focused on whether the construction of victim and per-
petrator identity was inclusive of people with multiple identities in terms of gender identity,
sexuality, race/ethnicity, cultural identity, disability status and religious status. They were interested
in exploring whether the COVID-19 pandemic fostered a heightened awareness of the diversity of
victims in contrast to what has traditionally been a heteronormative view of partner violence,
centred on white women as victims and heterosexual white men as perpetrators.
 POLICING AND SOCIETY 507

While Menichelli is concerned with disadvantaged people falling through the cracks of service
delivery systems, Workman, Kruger, and Dune are troubled by the prospect of victims, in all their
diversity, ‘falling through the cracks of our awareness’ (p. 548). Their analysis is informed by ‘inter-
sectionality’ theory which recognises the ‘interconnected parts and socially created categories
which make up a person’s identity’ (p. 554) as well as people’s unique experiences of disadvantage.
This view of intersectionality and disadvantage complements Menichelli’s conception of multiple
disadvantage. Workman, Kruger, and Dune find that media constructions of partner violence, vulner-
ability and victimhood remain deeply problematic from an intersectionality perspective, and that ‘[i]t
is critical that policymakers, policing agencies, and media institutions evolve to reflect on the diverse
voices of the people they represent, protect, and advocate for all, rather than only a select type, of
victims’ (p. 560).
Issues of vulnerability and responsiveness are touched on by Stanier and Nunan, Menichelli,
and Workman, Kruger and Dune. Normative concerns drive the focus of the next paper on the
Nigerian context. Here, we are brought back to our deepest worries about police violence as a
public health problem. Richard Abayomi Aborisade and Dooshima Dorothy Gbahabo examine
the treatment of frontline health workers by the Nigerian police during the period of the national
lockdown. In contrast to Stanier and Nunan’s finding that the law enforcement sector can be
responsive to the conditions of the pandemic and consider the health and wellbeing of insti-
tutional partners, Aborisade and Gbahabo provide qualitative evidence of police aggression and
extortion in the handling of the lockdown, renewing longstanding concerns about institutional
violence in the country.
Through interviews with healthcare workers, Aborisade and Gbahabo focused their analysis on
the ways in which officers interacted with healthcare workers who, in the context of the lockdown
were regarded as essential workers and therefore allowed by the government to travel to their work
destinations and be exempt from curfews. In theory, the journey of healthcare workers through
checkpoints was to be smooth and efficient, with minimal disruption to the work they did to help
battle the COVID-19 pandemic. The interviews elicited worker’s experiences of police encounters
at checkpoints and other areas they encountered the police. As part of the interviews, respondents
were asked to report on any forms of aggression that they may have experienced. They were also
asked to provide their perspective on why police were aggressive.
Participants reported various forms of aggression, from verbal acts such as shouting and taunting
to different expressions of disrespect. Physical forms of aggression included acts such as kicking,
beating, and pushing. Due to negative and prolonged encounters with police, some workers
reported being late for work and paying bribes to get through checkpoints. Respondents furnished
different explanations for the harmful behaviour of police, including inadequate training, stress, and
a lack of resilience in the face of additional pressures brought about by the pandemic. Aborisade and
Gbahabo suggest that ‘the hydra-headed problem of police corruption in Nigeria is attaining an
ominous level, in threatening the country’s public health at a time of a pandemic with high fatality’
(p. 579). They advocate for continued efforts to listen to the voices of healthcare workers, whose
views from the ground are revealing of the many functional and normative intersections between
policing and public health in the handling of emergencies.
Shifting to Pakistan, the paper by Zoha Waseem asks a question that is relevant to Aborisade and
Gbahabo Nigerian-based study: ‘How are public health emergencies policed in the global South,
where some states are unable to guarantee the short – and long-term wellbeing of their citizens’
(p. 584)? As with the other countries examined in this special issue, Pakistan implemented strict
public health measures including a national lockdown, to manage the spread of COVID-19. This
resulted in increased public health enforcement burdens on the part of the police. In contrast to
the findings of Aborisade and Gbahabo who point to failures of the police in being flexible and respon-
sive to this public health role, Waseem illuminates creative, everyday practices by officers to meet
these demands and cope with a lack of clarity in what they are being asked to do by different levels
of government.
508 J. D. WOOD AND P. M. GRIFFIN

Waseem deploys the concept of ‘procedural informality’ to make sense of how Pakistani police
navigate their roles and foster compliance in national efforts to disrupt COVID-19. Procedural inform-
ality is defined as ‘a condition in which policies (official and unofficial) are constructed by state insti-
tutions and conveyed to state officials (e.g. police officers), with the recognition that they will be
implemented through informal practice’ (p. 584). This concept resonates with a plural view of regu-
lation, whereby authorities at different levels of government work to pursue their policy goals
through mixes of formal and informal procedures and compliance techniques.
Drawing from interviews and surveys with police officers, Waseem illuminates the many dimen-
sions of procedural informality, such as acquiring personal protective equipment (PPE) with their
own funds in the absence of other resources, allowing vendors to stay open in exchange for
money and declining to arrest individuals in violation of lockdown restrictions. Through these,
and many other examples, Waseem raises broader normative issues that merit greater attention
and empirical study. Depending on the act, procedural informality may serve to enhance the legiti-
macy of police and authorities, and foster trust between officers and citizens. At its worst, it may
enable police corruption (as seen in the bribery example) or unfair and discriminatory treatment
of disadvantaged groupings. Notwithstanding, Waseem urges readers to be open to the possibility
that procedural informality, if directed toward good ends, might be suitable to the conditions of
certain countries in the global South.
Waseem’s analysis connects to larger debates about how best to regulate and foster compliance
in different societies, recognising that formal and informal mechanisms co-exist and intermingle.
Rules related to physical distancing, mask wearing and staying at home can conflict with people’s
views of freedom and self-determination. The police role in fostering compliance with such rules
is thus a unique regulatory challenge during a global pandemic. In addressing the problem of com-
pliance, Molly McCarthy, Kristina Murphy, Elise Sargeant and Harley Williamson extend Valerie
Braithwaite’s approach to the problem of defiance (Braithwaite 2014b) which is based on the
view, explained by McCarthy and colleagues, that ‘individuals may hold a range of attitudinal pos-
itions towards authorities and their system of rules, which are shaped by their personal and vicarious
experiences with authorities’ (p. 602). From this perspective, meeting the regulatory challenge of fos-
tering compliance must address the range of ‘motivational postures’ people display in relation to
laws and legal authorities. One question of interest to the authors is whether compliance among
people with defiant attitudes toward police is facilitated by experiences of procedurally just policing.
Through surveys administered to Australian adults during the nation’s initial lockdown, the
authors explore factors associated with compliance with physical distancing requirements. They
focus their analysis on such factors among people who display defiant attitudes toward police in
the form of two types of motivational postures – resistance and disengagement. Among many inter-
esting results, they found strong correlations between these defiant postures and non-compliance
with the restrictions, controlling for different factors such as demographics and risk perceptions of
COVID-19. They also found that in terms of police-initiated contacts, people who had experienced
such contacts during the pandemic and perceived them to be procedurally unjust were less likely
to comply compared to people who did not have such contacts or had contacts perceived to be pro-
cedurally just.
Waseem, along with McCarthy, Murphy, Sargeant and Williamson illuminate different facets of
regulation and regulatory pluralism. Together, these papers demonstrate the combined value of
unique theoretical lenses, like procedural informality and procedural justice in making sense of
how compliance is or could be fostered, especially during the period of a pandemic where police
are centrally implicated in the enforcement of public health directives. In the New Zealand
context, the theme of fostering compliance is addressed in a different, but complementary way
through the lens of plural policing in the piece by Antje Deckert, Nicholas J. Long, Pounamu Jade
Aikman, Nayantara Sheoran Appleton, Sharyn Graham Davies, Susanna Trnka, Edmond Fehoko,
Eleanor Holroyd, Naseem Jivraj, Megan Laws, Nelly Martin-Anatias, Reegan Pukepuke, Michael
Roguski, Nikita Simpson, Rogena Sterling and Laumua Tunufa’i. Like Menichelli, Deckert and
 POLICING AND SOCIETY 509

colleagues make the case that explanatory and normative engagement at the interface of policing
and public health must be attuned to the plurality of regulatory institutions and practices. Like
Waseem’s paper, along with the piece by Aborisade and Gbahabo, the article by Deckert and col-
leagues demonstrates that context matters to how we assess the performance of policing and its
responsiveness to the COVID-19 pandemic. They argue that in the context of New Zealand’s colonial
history, the landscape of policing is best viewed as a plural landscape. At the outset of their paper,
they state that ‘[t]he way in which a public health crisis such as the COVID-19 pandemic is experi-
enced is heavily shaped not only by how it is policed, but also who it is policed by’ (p. 621).
Deckert and colleagues extend Loader’s framework of plural policing to identify the constellation
of policing nodes, operating at the same time as the public police, that worked to foster compliance
with pandemic control measures. In addition to the New Zealand Police, these include Indigenous-
led community checkpoints as well as forms of ‘peer-to-peer’ policing and the regulatory tools they
deployed, including enforcement, education, norm-setting, and surveillance. Echoing the scholar-
ship on regulatory pluralism, the authors were interested in larger questions of how these co-existing
forms of policing ‘affect each other’s functionality and legitimacy’ (p. 622). Their study findings are
based on document analysis, surveys about people’s experiences of pandemic control measures, and
depth interviews.
With respect to the public police, Deckert and colleagues noted that the NZP developed oper-
ational guidelines which emphasised the use of education and encouragement, with a view that
enforcement, including arrest, be used a last resort. The authors found evidence that the NZP
officers focused their enforcement practices on select situations, stopping people, for example,
when they were travelling in their cars and thus assumed to be travelling far. There was less evidence
of officers enforcing physical distancing rules or hygiene practices. Co-existing with NZP practices,
Indigenous-led community checkpoints were set up to protect the health of Mãori communities
that, historically, have experienced low levels of trust in the public police. The checkpoints
allowed for the stopping of travellers in efforts to regulate ‘essential travel’, in line with Mãori
values including ‘taking care of others, guardianship, and protection’ (p. 632). Theoretically, the
authors characterise this type of policing as a form of ‘next-to-government’ policing, acknowledging
Indigenous sovereignty rights and the critical need for NZP to recognise their legitimacy and culti-
vate true and equal partnerships with them.
The forms of ‘peer-to-peer’, ‘below-government’ policing observed by Deckert and colleagues
made use of informal tools of social control including surveillance and threats of formal reporting
to NZP, particularly in relation to behaviours deemed out of compliance with physical distancing
and travel restrictions. The authors raise concerns about the authoritarian tone of such peer-
focused practices, and their potential to foster resistance more than compliance. Deckert and col-
leagues suggest that future work should focus on the ‘synapses that connect individual policing
nodes’ (p. 634) to ensure that the tools of enforcement and coercion are combined to good effect
with the tools of education and encouragement. Like Menichelli, they provide evidence of the
need to exert democratic control over plural policing arrangements. Without such efforts, issues
of trust and legitimacy in regulatory authorities will remain ever-present. Pulling back the lens on
all the papers in this collection, perhaps it is our shared concerns about trust and legitimacy that
must propel future work on regulatory pluralism at the interface of policing and public health.

Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

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