Why police work struggled during the pandemic
In early April 2020, the “Easter decree” caused quite an uproar. The first wave of Covid infections in Austria was just beginning to subside after an initial lockdown had been in place from mid-March. In order to prevent the virus from spreading again through family get-togethers or potential “corona parties” during Easter, the government announced that it would prohibit “gatherings in a closed room attended by more than five people not living in the same household”. That announcement was greeted by protests galore. Lawyers considered that the decree exceeded the purview of the law. The Ministry of Health admitted that it had caused confusion and backtracked in subsequent “clarifications”.
In the end, this ill-fated Easter decree was just one of many such short-term legal stipulations in the coronavirus era. Rather imprecise or highly controversial regulations made life difficult for the police, who were the ones responsible for their enforcement. Police officers had to cope with the constant staccato of new legal norms without losing a sense of proportion when applying them. In the FWF-funded project “Police in the fight against the pandemic”, researchers from the Vienna Center for Social Science Security Research (VICESSE) are now investigating how successful this interaction between politicians, administrative authorities and the police was in the exceptional circumstances of a pandemic. After all, the coronavirus period is also regarded as the first global police phenomenon in which law enforcement officers worldwide faced similar challenges.
“Policy-making, administration and the police are the control instruments of a democratic constitutional state. We were interested in how these instruments worked in detail in the face of a real crisis in which the state had to react quickly,” notes project manager and VICESSE founder Reinhard Kreissl. “It is obvious that the pandemic not only revealed weaknesses in the management of emergency situations, but also that the outer limits of democratically legitimized action can be reached very quickly. And there is also a risk that a good deal of the lessons from what went on may be overlooked.”
Personal details
Reinhard Kreissl studied sociology in Munich and Frankfurt, followed by researching and teaching at universities in Germany, Austria, the USA and Australia. In 2015, he took on the position of director of the Vienna Center for Social Science Security Research (VICESSE), which he himself founded and which conducts independent studies at the interface between science, technology, judiciary and policy-making.
The project “Policing the pandemic” (2021–2024) received EUR 283,916 in funding from the Austrian Science Fund FWF.
Violation of fundamental rights
In Austria, a decree (Erlass) is an administrative regulation directed to a subordinated authority. Decrees and ordinances, which are also issued by administrative authorities, were the central vehicles used by the federal ministries to react quickly in the fight against the pandemic. Fully-fledged laws, in contrast, would always have required a decision by the Parliament. “The ministries issued an enormous amount of decrees and ordinances and in some cases – like the Easter decree – this involved violations of fundamental rights. We have tried to reconstruct the dynamics that were triggered by this type of pandemic management,” says Kreissl.
In the context of the project, the sociologist and his colleagues vetted available legal documents and a large number of media reports from the coronavirus years and turned them into a timeline of the pandemic from a legal and administrative perspective. The team conducted dozens of interviews with members of the police, the Red Cross and representatives of the regional and central administrations. A series of focus groups helped flesh out the interviews. “While this is not a broad-based survey, this form of qualitative research gives us valuable and far-reaching practical insights into the interaction between the various authorities throughout Austria,” emphasizes Kreissl.
Problems within the police force
One of their findings is that the police themselves definitely experienced problems caused by the pandemic. The polarization of the population over vaccination versus non-vaccination was also prevalent within the police force. “The police force itself was also subject to regulations, such as the mandatory separation of vaccinated staff from unvaccinated officers. The pandemic gave rise to a number of such problems that posed enormous organizational challenges,” notes Kreissl. “Maintaining smoothly running daily operations was difficult.”
At the same time, it was challenging for the police, an organization with well-established routines, to quickly switch to crisis mode, which involved new rules on an almost daily basis. “How is one expected to enforce a facemask requirement at a demonstration where thousands of people don't have one? The many decrees and regulations, which were almost impossible for the police to enforce, unsettled everyone,” says the researcher. “There was often a major mismatch between the politicians' intentions and the capabilities of the police. It even went so far that upper échelons stopped passing on the decrees to the police stations so as not to unsettle the officers even more.”
Larger discretionary scope
Kreissl states that many police officers developed the notion that the fulfilment of their duties simply had to be guided by their own personal appraisal of the situation and be carried out with “discernment and common sense”. “The uncertainties of the situation gave civil servants an unusually wide margin of discretion. Regulations as distinct from their pragmatic implementation keyed to specific on-site requirements drifted further apart than is normally the case.”
After the pandemic, a series of official reviews was held to evaluate police performance. Kreissl recalls that similar appraisals were conducted after the refugee crisis in 2015 and 2016. “Unfortunately, experience shows that such reviews rarely lead to structural changes,” notes the social researcher. “One indication of this is a simulation in the context of an EU project with representatives from various organizations, in which we re-enacted another refugee crisis – and which once again ended in chaos. The fear is that the lessons learnt from the pandemic will similarly be negligible.” Nevertheless, there is hope that the scientific analysis of the dynamics of the state structures during the pandemic will contribute to an improvement.
Publications
Herbinger P.L. and Reiter H.: Von den üblichen Verdächtigen und pandemischen Überschüssen: Der zweite Code der Polizei in der Pandemie, in H. Cremer-Schäfer, A. Pilgram und A. Aigner (Hg.) Gesellschaft. Kritik. Ironie. Wien: LIT Verlag 2023
Laufenberg R., Adensamer A., Herbinger P.L.: Polizieren der Pandemie als Mehrebenen-Problem, in: Neue Kriminalpolitik 4/2021, Nomos
Herbinger P.L., Laufenberg R.: Policing in Times of the Pandemic. Police-Public relations in the interplay of global pandemic response and individual discretionary scope, in: European Law Enforcement Research Bulletin, (SCE 5), 2021
