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Expectations of researchers, media, public officials, and practitioners seemed aligned with the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic. Domestic Violence would rise, in prevalence and reporting, due to the effect of the lockdown measures on known risk factors, such as financial insecurity, psychological strain, social isolation, and decreased access to services. The data emerging paints a less uniform picture between different Member States and frontline responder sectors.

On the basis of data collected by the IMPRODOVA-Consortium, a clear empirical observation can be made: while a homogenous rise in service uptake in the social sector can be observed in each of the eight countries covered by the project, police reporting and data on domestic violence is comparatively heterogenous. While law enforcement in some countries recorded a sharp rise in DV incidents during the lockdown periods, others saw reporting numbers and data stagnate or drop. Working from the assumption, that patterns of violence are less heterogenous than the data collected by LEAs, the question arises how to explain this divergence.

In the presentation, three hypotheses will be investigated: Frist, heterogeneous data as statistical artefact. Second, specific forms of violence enhanced by the lockdown delay the uptake of certain services by victims. Third, socio-legal and organisational differences influencing reporting and data produce differences among Member States.

The emergence of the COVID-19 pandemic in March 2020 in Europe marked a fissure in many areas of the society, including policing. As a means for containing increasing virus outbreaks, almost every government in Europe resorted to issuing strict lockdown measures, essentially halting all public life. Consequently, the police have been tasked with enforcing novel legal rules such as mask wearing, social distancing and curfews. However, due to the nature of the pandemic crisis, the enacted measures were often issued on short notice, leaving little time for legal scrutiny, nor for adequate communication – to the public or law enforcement agencies. The proposed paper – which is based on a project currently submitted for review – specifically looks at this intersection of hastily issued laws and their enforcement on the ground level through police forces and the subsequent issues that have resulted from this.

Starting from an organisational studies point of view, we consider that the problems with “policing the pandemic” might emerge as a result from a three-level governance of pandemic response – the governmental/legal level; the organisational structure of the police; ground level policing. This means that issues that ensue due to unclear legislation might trickle down onto the ground level work of police, where individual officers need to enact these measures in the interaction with the public and within their own discretionary scope. Large scale pandemic response thus rests on the shoulders of ground level police discretion, which has the potential of creating frictions in the police-public relations. Problematising this issue and understanding how this might materialize in practice can help to better understand how these issues can be mitigated – in the current pandemic as well as for future instances of crisis as well.