A priest is getting ready to celebrate a regular Saturday evening mass. Some teenagers are playing hockey at a rink. Three well-dressed men are about to get on a bus.
During a pandemic, all these seemingly innocuous activities could be breaches of the law.
When the Spanish Flu struck Canada between 1918 and 1920, local boards of health ordered schools, theatres, churches and other public places, including skating rinks, closed. They expected police to enforce those closures. If similar decisions were made today — and that possibility is included in plans — the priest and the teens playing hockey would be breaking the law.
In 1918, some provinces — Alberta for one — made the wearing of masks compulsory. Those caught without them were taken to court and fined. Unless the well-dressed men were wearing masks, they, too, could be law breakers.
Outbreaks of highly contagious and serious diseases, such as severe strains of the avian flu, severe acute respiratory syndrome (SARS) and Ebola virus disease that's now ravaging West Africa, can lead to extraordinary measures that police may be expected to enforce.
In preparing pandemic plans, police agencies should be well versed in who has the power to enact such laws, and be certain that the rationale for enforcing extraordinary measures — and the implications of breaking the rules — will be fully explained to the public. The last thing a police department needs in an emergency is public resistance to orders because they haven't been fully explained.
Bylaw enforcement won't be the only policing challenge during a pandemic.
Planning for risk
When an officer enters a home in which someone has died, others in that home could pass the virus on to him or her — and potentially the officer's family. And unlike seasonal flu outbreaks, pandemics strike young and healthy adults. Many patrol officers are in the age group most at risk.
This scenario isn't hypothetical. The Canadian Pandemic Influenza Plan states that in a pandemic — when death rates soar — EMS personnel, nurses and police will have to declare deaths. For police, that could mean entering private homes where a death has occurred. But the plan doesn't spell out the implications of that policy.
A report prepared in 2009 for the U.S. Justice Department concluded that many pandemic plans "may have been written without law enforcement input and some of the stated roles and responsibilities [assigned to police] may not be realistic." It's a finding that should concern all Canadian police. The U.S. report was written with the help of two Canadians police officers — Alain Bernard from Ottawa and Tom Imrie from Toronto.
When SARS arrived in Toronto in March 2003, it came without warning. Police officers who responded to the first case at a Toronto home were unaware of the danger. As soon as the danger was understood, the Toronto Police Service (TPS) tracked down and quarantined all potentially exposed officers. Eventually, 307 officers were voluntarily quarantined.
The health threat to these officers wasn't the only police issue during SARS. Police officers were expected to provide security at affected hospitals. The TPS had to provide staff for multi-agency emergency response centres. The agency also had to inform its personnel of the potential risks that SARS presented, something it did with a video that was produced and shown to all members within 24 hours.
Unlike SARS, a pandemic is likely to come after some warning. But once it arrives, it will likely cover the entire country within days if not hours, and will create major challenges for police.
Estimates are that as many as 40 per cent of uniform personnel will become sick or be forced to stay at home to look after sick family members. Just imagine a 13-member detachment with four or five off because of the flu, or a department of 200 people missing as many as 80.
And all of this will happen during such a widespread emergency that there's no mutual aid. Even in 1918 and 1919, when the Spanish Flu spread from coast to coast in about 10 days, mutual aid was very, very rare. Today, every community and every police department or detachment will have to cope on its own using the remaining resources it has available.
There will be other questions to address.
Health authorities may decide to "placard" homes in which people are ill with the flu. What are police to do if they catch someone sneaking out of one of those homes to buy groceries?
What happens when an officer is asked to check on families in an isolated area and he or she discovers an entire family ill, too sick to look after each other?
What happens if there is a limited supply of Tamiflu or vaccine? Should police be on the priority list?
All these possibilities should be addressed before a pandemic strikes so that clear policies are in place. It's most important to plan locally as every community will have its own challenges and must work out its own solutions.
Then and now
It might seem helpful to look back to 1918 and 1919 — when 30,000 to 50,000 Canadians died from the flu — to see how police operated then. The available data that exists suggests that for the most part Canadians were compliant when closures and other orders were issued.
Theatre owners in Ontario argued that theatres didn't present a health risk. A skating rink in Amherst, N.S., hired a lawyer to argue its case to stay open. Officials listened politely but both closure orders stuck and both were complied with without police intervention.
While this is reassuring, there's a problem in making conclusions based on lessons from the past.
When the Spanish Flu struck in autumn 1918, Canada was at war. People had become accustomed to emergency decisions. Thousands of Canadians were still dying in Europe so when a call was issued for volunteers to nurse the sick, thousands of women volunteered, and some became ill and died.
When a less severe outbreak occurred in 1920, the war was over and the spirit of volunteerism had passed. Health officials in cities like Calgary and Toronto reported difficulty in getting volunteers.
Today, the situation will again be different, and some of these differences will affect police departments.
School closures will force working parents to find ways of caring for their children. This won't be easy especially when those children are sick. Parents who are absent from the workplace to care for their children will create problems for many agencies, including the police.
During the Spanish Flu, most people infected stayed at home; they couldn't afford to do otherwise. Now, most Canadians have hospital insurance. The Canadian Pandemic Influenza Plan assumes that people will stay at home in another pandemic but this may be a wrong assumption to make.
The U.S. Justice Department planners estimate that today, people are more likely to go to hospital than they were in 1918. They envisage long lines of people at hospital emergencies, many ill and upset because they can't get treated.
It's conceivable of course that in a new pandemic, as in 1918 and 1919, the Canadian public will accept the need for exceptional measures and that no enforcement will be required. But it's important that police review local plans to make sure what's expected of them is realistic especially when they are almost certainly to be short of personnel. It would also be wise to make certain that police plans don't have unrealistic expectations of what other agencies will be able to do.
Many departments have developed pandemic plans and the RCMP Operational Readiness and Response Co-ordination Centre, created in 2006, has concluded that in a pandemic — as the scenarios in this article suggest — police would have to enforce public health orders like quarantines and travel restrictions, limit access to areas deemed out of bounds, transport and protect medical equipment or medications, protect certain types of facilities and, in a worst-case scenario, control crowds.
But a pandemic will not be so much one national emergency as it will be thousands of local emergencies all at the same time.
Departments and detachments need to know their local plans to make sure the role health officials expect them to play makes sense and that they will have the resources to do what is asked. They need to know who will be making the rules and how those rule makers see the rules being enforced. They need to be ready to spell out to their members precisely how they will deal with issues so their response will be consistent. They definitely need to be in on all public health-related communications so public expectations will be in line with police policy.
Agencies also need their own internal plans, including policies on sick and bereavement leave and personal health care.
More than half a century of research shows that people behave rationally in emergencies especially if they are kept accurately informed. But much of this research is about how people behave in floods, earthquakes, tornadoes and chemical spills, not pandemics. A new pandemic will to some extent mean a journey into the unknown.
Is a pandemic likely? Health officials say it's a certainty — they happen on average every 25 years — and the U.S. Justice Department study concludes that the impact on society and on police will be enormous.
Joseph Scanlon is professor emeritus and director of the Emergency Communications Research Unit at Carleton University. He has been studying individual and organizational response to emergencies since 1970 and recently has been reviewing the Canadian response to the 1918-19 Spanish Flu. He is a regular contributor to Gazette magazine.