Police should go easy on locking up MCO violators

COMMENT | Yes, most of us understand the frustration of the police when people keep travelling without reason, increasing the probability of getting and passing Covid-19 infections from and to others.

But it is not going to help the efforts in stopping the spread of the virus if we lock up violators all together and bring them to the court to face the music all handcuffed to each other. This is yet again another case of the police taking things too far in these tough times.

These are not hardened criminals that the police are dealing with. Most of them are very ordinary people confused about the situation and trying to cope as best as they can. Most of them have not had to deal with such movement restrictions in their lifetime.

To throw them into jail and to have them roughed up, handcuffed and put into police cells is a bit of an overkill in these times when people may just vent too much by being confined in their homes.

If you lock them up together in police cells all over the country, which are notorious for their crowding and their lack of hygiene, sometimes for days at a time, it is inevitable that if just one of them is a carrier all the others are going to get Covid-19 as well.

In effect what the police are doing by locking people up is ensuring that the very thing that they are trying to prevent – the spread of the virus – is actually facilitated by their operating procedures. The next cell for a Covid-19 outbreak may be a police cell if we don’t watch it.

Not just that, they are needlessly endangering themselves by arresting the violators, which often can only be done by force and physical contact, and then taking them to police stations. Every police officer in the station and others arrested are in danger if there is a carrier among them.

Surely there can be some way in which the procedures can be changed...