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The paper has two parts. The first begins with mapping out four distinct ways in how the COVID19 virus may effect certain groups incommensurately and lead to systemic and institutional discrimination. This is followed by an overview of how Roma throughout Europe have been targeted by racializing and securitizing populist political rhetoric (often coming from government or local governments and identifying ethno-culturally rooted reasons for higher infection rates and disobeying curfew and social distancing measures) and law enforcement action during first wave of the pandemic in Albania, Belgium, Bulgaria, Hungary, Italy, Moldova, North Macedonia, Romania, Serbia, Slovakia, Turkey and Ukraine. Using the example of the Hungarian framework for policing multicultural communities, the paper investigates whether such legislation could in fact be used as a basis for such targeted action. Hungary is not among the countries where such anti-Roma political rhetoric would have been reported from, and its legislation on policing multiethnic communities is used, because it arguably fits within the model of adopting European and international standards and rhetoric. The paper introduces the concept of benevolent penal populism (which carries the potential to be turned into a malevolent one) to explain this threat and phenomenon.