Overzealous police are taking the lockdown too far

This is an exceptionally difficult time for those working in the emergency services. They are having to respond to situations they never expected to be involved with, often risking being infected with coronavirus themselves. That much is true. What is also true is that this crisis has brought out an interfering tendency in some people which goes along the lines of neighbours calling the police to demand they arrest someone who appears to be going out for a ‘second run’, or sitting on Twitter waiting to pounce on someone who appears to have flouted the rules by buying chocolate bars.

This second feature of the coronavirus pandemic is annoying enough when it is coming from some retired bloke called Neil who was using his spare time to tell strangers they were in some way Doing It Wrong long before things started to go badly wrong in Wuhan. It’s more of a problem when the people sitting on Twitter waiting to pounce are in fact working for the police.