[samhw]

What do you mean ‘a civil law issue and not a common law issue’? The UK’s civil laws[0] are very largely composed of common law; the two concepts are orthogonal, not opposites, and both or one or neither can easily be true at once.

A common law issue could be either civil or criminal and says nothing about whether it’s the police’s domain (which obviously would entail its being criminal law).

[0] In the only one of two ways that you could possibly be using the word ‘civil’ in this context, given we don’t have a civil law legal tradition.