Why?
I’m confused by this.
The clip shows a couple walking their dog in an empty landscape, and captions it “Not Essential.” It shows several more like that – people very social distanced indeed, getting fresh air and exercise.
What, exactly, is the problem? The Derbyshire cops seem to be confusing the pandemic with the war. Fuel isn’t rationed, nobody has to invade Europe right now, we can still find oranges.
But what if daily exercise taken locally to your home is more crowded than the Peaks? What if it’s harder to maintain social distance in your nabe than it is in the Peaks?
I just don’t understand what they’re talking about. Strolling around on the High Street just for the hell of it is a terrible idea, and clustering in popular national park spots is also a terrible idea, but surely finding an empty place and walking in that is a good idea.
What am I missing?
Security theatre, presumably.
Apparently there are random roadblocks springing up around here, with the police stopping people and asking whether their journey is essential. They want to give the impression that they’re watching us so we don’t run around licking people.
Like all security theatre, the less sense it makes the more the authorities do it.
Jesus. You’d think they’d be too busy dealing with the genuine risky behavior to have time for this.
Runners for instance. They’re a menace here and I see via Julie Bindel and others that they’re a menace there too.
We still go out walking, in the Central District (Seattle), albeit often very late, when people aren’t around. We never go near other people out there.
Stories like this one make it sound like just walking outside to check the mail is risky.
I am definitely taking this thing seriously (and fearfully), but I don’t believe that literally everything that takes place out of the confines of our homes is dangerous.
What are you missing?
An excuse to use the drones.
Runners and cyclists are a menace, yes. There are an awful lot of them, many are failing to maintain an appropriate distance and most of them are inexperienced so prone to suddenly veering out in front of cars or stopping all of a sudden.
It reminds me of the rule regarding fire wood: if you’re camping, don’t bring it from home. Purchase it locally. I live in Wisconsin and see that posted a lot. The reason has to do with preventing campers from importing bugs or diseases from one area into another. Because the bugs and diseases in one area are different than those in another area.
Which doesn’t seem to apply here — unless they’re worried about mutations capable of long jumps.
You’re missing the facts that (i) some policemen (and often the more senior ones) are very dim and (ii) some people simply enjoy bossing others around. Sometimes these come together and the result is tweets like those above. While we all understand the need for measures to keep people apart in order to contain the coronavirus, the civil liberties aspects should not be overlooked. The measures imposed should be proportional and time-limited, and not used as an excuse to nag people who are trying to stay healthy without posing a risk to anyone else. Traditionally it was the role of the Opposition to question the Govt when it took additional powers for itself, but even that seems beyond the Corbyn-led Labour Party.
(In driving significant distances to take a walk people do raise the risk of car accidents. But that’s not the argument Derbyshire Police are making.)
Ah, this’ll be why the police will only respond to calls about serious crimes. They’re all busy sat on their arses, honing their computer gaming skills by playing at being pilots.
Still, it’ll be nice for the landowners I suppose. For the first time since the mass trespass on Kinder Scout in 1933, and especially since the right to roam was codified into law in the Countryside and Rights of Way Act 2000, they won’t have to tolerate plebs trampling on their land, spoiling the view and scaring the pheasants for a while. As a bonus, they’ve even got the police providing surveillance for free; in the past they had to employ people to do that.
Here’s an example local to me with the police failing to explain their reasoning:
https://www.thenorthernecho.co.uk/news/18338100.woman-travelling-darlington-aysgarth-for-fresh-air-sent-home-police/
A notable quote:
The ‘spirit’ of the law is to prevent people infecting other people. But to the police, as always, the spirit is about throwing about their power.
Cops tend to similar outlooks worldwide, from Adelaide to Zagreb. Brings to mind the Soviet era Russian question: why do cops always go around in threes?
Answer: The one on the left can read. The one on the right can count. And the one in the middle likes the company of intellectuals.
FWIW I have been going out in both city & provincial parks (X-C skiing & walking) here in Alberta. People have merely been maintaining a distance from other people as they pass, sometimes conversing from a few meters apart.
The advice we have been given is to exercise locally and responsibly. Don’t use play and exercise equipment in parks (or drinking fountains). Riskier sports like mountain biking, surfing etc have been asked to tone it down a bit to reduce load on rescue and medical services. Likewise, people have been discouraged from going hunting, back country fishing, tramping etc because of the load this creates on both volunteer and professional SAR and medical services.
More similar to the example in the post, we’ve also been asked not to drive on day trips to find spots to walk. I do think the rationale is a bit weaker here. Yes, you’ll end up refuelling your vehicle more, but that has manageable risks through pay at pump and hygiene of contact surfaces.
Our police, like police everywhere, are at heart authoritarian control freaks. They’re taking a narrower view of what ‘stay in your bubble’ means than the Prime Minister or Justice Minister did. Then again, they have operational control.
A lot of people on Twitter said it was about not getting in accidents that would waste emergency services needed elsewhere, wasting fuel ditto, and similar. I guess there’s some truth in that – I guess it makes sense to hunker down and do what you can to shrink your footprint. I’m doing a fabulous job of that myself but then I don’t have much of an alternative. But even if there is some truth in it, there’s not enough to make sense of this ridiculous “OI! You there! You two! Walking on an empty hillside! It’s all your fault!”
Oh, I agree, as long as they haven’t driven across half the county to get there. I’m really lucky. We live near an area with streams and a hill literally a few hundred metres away. Lots of nice walking paths and we can keep well away from others. Went for a walk yesterday and my partner commented she’d never seen so many families out together.
I think it has more to do with the scenes at Snowdonia the other day, where there were so many visitors that it was impossible to practice distancing. I have seen comments from people who thought they would go somewhere quiet for their exercise and found that hundreds of people had the exact same idea.
The same logic applies to traffic diversions, where sat navs try to steer you around jams and end up causing another jam somewhere else because everyone else’s sat nav did the same.
Here too, lots of people walking, families, etc., kind of pleasant actually. I’m mostly a recluse too, so my lifestyle hasn’t changed much, but I did make a short drive to a park today, and I did notice something funny. I must have passed more than half a dozen people driving along in their cars *alone* wearing masks. Maybe it’s a fashion thing now? Got a couple good laughs today in any event.
I have walked daily in a nearby cemetery for over five years, for my health. There seem to be more people walking in the cemetery these says. We just all try to keep our distance.
The police think (rightly) that we cant be trusted to make good decisions. As Colin Daniels pointed out, a few days ago people were congregating in droves at visitor attractions and entirely failing to maintain social distance. We’re all idiots, no two ways about it.
The police response to this (wrongly) is to prevent us from making any decisions at all. It’s the standard, go-to response of police forces all over the world. It’s pure security theatre and I’m not at all convinced of its effectiveness. The idea is to maintain the thin blue line. Since police resources are limited, create the illusion of a panopticon through conducting random spot checks and giving a deliberately exaggerated impression of police powers.
I don’t have a problem with police disrupting congregations of people. I don’t have a problem with police preventing congregation, perhaps even by policing roads such as, say, the A66 which is the main route into the Lake District. By all means have a word with people heading that way and remind them of the need for social distancing and the lunacy of mass tourism at this time. But I do have a problem with the police taking it upon themselves to dictate the thoughts and movements of individuals when they are neither illegal nor harmful. That is not their role although, as we’ve seen of late, the UK police at least do very much believe that it is.
If we are all irredeemable idiots (and I’m quite willing to believe that we are) then we might indeed need more draconian laws. Perhaps we’re already in that territory. But at present we have power-drunk police officers revelling in their wide remit to direct people’s movements and I’m uncomfortable with that to say the least.
So, day two of our national lockdown. Police warned a dog walker or driving 20 km to a large braided riverbed to walk their dog. FFS. That is ridiculous.
I can see some logic in this.
I think it very likely that if nothing is done about this, this place will be crowded in about a week. And I don’t expect people arriving there, seeing it is crowded and then returning without a walk.
I can sort of see it. Last weekend beaches, parks, mountains were packed with people who were overcome with the need to go out simply because they were told not to. Snowdon was busier than many locals had ever seen it. I was caught up in the traffic in that area, and it was insane. I was more than happy to just give Snowdon a respectful wave from a distance on the way home from a week on Anglesey. Locals were on edge because people with enough money to own holiday homes were coming from disease-riddled areas for a jolly self-isolation holiday in a sparsely populated area with very limited health provisions. People were (allegedly) driving from Manchester and the like to panic buy. The dog walking groups I’m in on Facebook are full of “went to my usual place to walk the dog and it’s suddenly full of people who don’t have dogs” posts. The kids are off school, people aren’t in work, the weather is absolutely glorious for the first time this year, and everyone has been treating it like a holiday. That’s why we all had to be grounded in the first place. So I think if the police want to show drone footage of people who think that because everyone else is already sticking to the rules it means they don’t have to, fair enough. By all means shame those people. If they were arresting them, I’d object, mostly because I still see everyone’s damn teenagers congregating in the streets and racing around the estate on their illegal dirtbikes without helmets.
Now get off my lawn! (Shakes fist)
Yes but the way for the police to underline the “don’t mob beauty spots” message would be to show us mobbed beauty spots, not a starkly empty vast landscape with 2 people and a dog in it. I promise you, I completely get the “don’t form crowds” message; I’m very exasperated at all the people in my nabe who WILL NOT stop marching down the sidewalk squarely in the middle instead of moving to one side or the other. But a vast empty landscape is a different situation. In the cemetery about a mile from me I don’t care what people do, because there are very few of them and there’s masses of room to avoid each other without getting hit by a car.
Last week, they did show us the mobbed beauty spots. I suppose this week, their point is “stop trying to find a fucking loophole and fucking well do what you’ve been asked to do for 3 fucking weeks”
I think one of the problems is that it’s hard to say how many people are too many. That car park has 7 cars in it. Does car number 8 pull up, and think “nope, I’m one to many” or do they think “well all these people are out so what’s one more”? It’s more likely to be the latter, because that’s what we’re like. Then the next person thinks the same, then the car park is full of people who all feel justified in being there because of all the others who were there before them so no big deal, and then we’re back to where we were last week. Only now, the police will have to wade in and tell people to go home. And I imagine they would prefer not to have unnecessary contact with other people at this time. Except for the ones who get a kick out telling people what to do, which I’m sure plenty of them do.
Don’t get me wrong, I’m still walking my dog twice a day because I’ve got the excellent reason of not ever seeing anyone on our walks in normal times. That’s why the “one walk a day” rule doesn’t apply to me ;)