Coronavirus Fines Are A Mutual Aid Issue

It seems like the Left has surrendered its opposition to the oppressive power of the state to the Right.

Across England, police have issued thousands of people with fixed penalty notices under coronavirus regulations, with enforcement levels during January and early February at levels seen in the first period of lockdown in March and April 2020.

Many people may feel that such measures are necessary for a public health emergency, a view that has been actively reinforced by the police and the media.

Why, though, would we immediately assume that coronavirus fines have been enforced fairly?

Within activist circles otherwise focused on the importance of care during the pandemic, it has seemed to me there has been a hesitancy about addressing this issue or it hasn’t even been considered at all.

This is in spite of knowing so much about the disproportionate, arbitrary and discriminatory way that other police powers like stop and search are used. There is evidence too that the enforcement of coronavirus regulations have simply meant the continuance of racist policing by other means.

Who sounds the most like they stand in solidarity with people who have been unfairly fined?

Perhaps this hesitation is because, in the face of delay and indecision by the Johnson government, it was the Left back in 2020 that championed the introduduction of the lockdown in the first place. Later it has vocally supported maintaining lockdown measures such as the closure of schools.

Quite rightly, it has tended too to view anti-lockdown opposition as caring more about the economy than about caring for people, invariably tied to anti-vaccine conspiracies and outright denial of the risks of Covid-19.

Those concerns are understandable but I can’t help but wonder whether the Left’s oscillation — perhaps sometimes even puritanism — about the way the lockdown it demanded has been enforced has ceded ground for criticising and challenging the oppressive power of the state to the political Right.

Quite frankly, who at least sounds the most like they stand in solidarity with people who have been unfairly fined under coronavirus regulations? Is it us? Or is it right-wing commentators and anti-lockdown groups?

Challenging fines

The latest police figures show 68,952 fixed penalty notices were issued in the eleven months to the end of February 2021, with 27,517 (40%) from 6th January when national restrictions came into force. Almost half of all these fines have been handed out to the 18–24-year-old age group and 24% to people from black and minority communities.

Only a small number of fines have been issued for large indoor gatherings: most have been for contravening movement restrictions and for failing to convince police officers that a person has a “reasonable excuse” for leaving their home.

In my work for Netpol, I regularly receive emails from people wanting to challenge these fines. Many also include stories of police officers inventing excuses for using stop and search powers on them, ostensibly on the grounds of some other imaginary offence such as possession of drugs but quite obviously just to obtain their personal details.

A few have talked about situations where they didn’t necessarily have a cast-iron excuse for leaving home, but officers showed a complete lack of sympathy for the enormous mental health challenges that recurring lockdowns have intensified.

I’m thinking in particular of one example, a man who wrote to say he was fined for sitting in his car because he desperately needed time away from his family, after months stuck at home when he was furloughed. Trying to explain this to officers — and appearing difficult and argumentative — is almost certainly why he was given a fine he can ill afford to pay.

One big problem is there is no automatic right to appeal for fixed penalty notices. Some local councils have a local resolution process. In most cases, however, if you are unhappy about the fairness of a fine then the only option is not to pay it within 28 days, await prosecution for a criminal offence and then defend yourself at the Magistrates’ Court.

It is difficult to know what to recommend to people facing this option. The best advice is to find a solicitor, but huge cuts in legal aid have made this extremely difficult. Local law centres are already struggling to cope with requests for help with growing debt, housing and welfare benefits problems.

In September 2020, it was reported that half the fines issued by police had not been paid. A proportion of these are very likely because of planned objections. I can’t thinking, though, that many are just because people don’t have the first idea what to do.

Mutual aid, even if you are innocent

There isn’t, unfortunately, a network of grassroots organisations around Britain that are both monitoring and challenging the police at a local level and able to provide help to individuals who have been fined. I wish there was.

The Covid 19 pandemic did, however, lead to an explosion of volunteer-led mutual aid groups. Not all of them have survived and not all of them organise in a way that encourages political participation or embraces the idea of “solidarity, not charity” (from the start, some were quickly co-opted by local councillors).

Those mutual aid groups that have managed to combine sharing resources with demands for transformative change are, however, in a position to fill the gap by choosing to offer help to people who have received coronavirus fines.

This can mean assisting with challenges to unfair fines. Yet if we are serious about making it clear that the state treating a public health crisis as a public order opportunity will always lead to unfairness and abuses of police power, then it should mean helping anyone who needs it.

It means offering basic advice and support for anyone facing a court hearing and assistance with complaints about unlawful and aggressive police conduct when fines were issued. To quote one of the members of Netpol’s network, the Activist Court Aid Brigade, this is an offer to “support you even if you are innocent”.

The alternative, after all, is dividing people into “deserving” and “undeserving” of our solidarity — the absolute antithesis of what mutual aid values should represent.

Kevin Blowe is a coordinator for the Network for Police Monitoring (Netpol), writing in a personal capacity