“We have had enough of this. It is not policeable. It is not manageable,” he said.
Amid reports that people have already started to congregate ahead of lockdown measures relaxing, Marsh explained that in order to move close to people to disperse or arrest them, police officers themselves need to break social distancing restrictions on a daily basis.
However pending legal advice, unless police are vaccinated, he threatened to tell the MPF’s 32,000 members to instead stick rigidly to the two-meter (6 feet) rule, The Telegraph said, which would result in resistant rule-breakers not being apprehended.
The MFP is calling for the police to receive vaccines as one of the country’s priority groups.
On Monday it launched a scathing condemnation of the government for not agreeing to this.
“It’s absolutely disgusting. … Police officers are catching and dying from COVID-19 because of their job and yet we are still not being given the protection the vaccine offers,” Marsh said.
“It’s like we don’t exist,” he added.
‘Our Job is Unique’
Marsh, however, said the police are a special case.“Our job is unique, and we deserve the highest levels of protection. And we deserved it weeks ago,” he said.
“We cannot police from two meters [6 feet] away. We cannot do what we do from a social distance,” he added.
The Home Office said in a statement that it had “nothing to add to what the JCVI have announced about vaccine prioritization.”
Commenting on whether police should robustly enforce restrictions as lockdown rules are lifted, former Detective Chief Inspector Mike Neville told The Epoch Times that they should not.
“I’m a big human-rights … a big fan of freedoms and civil liberties,” he said, adding that the police should avoid cracking down too much.
“That’s not British policing at its best,” he said.
“And when all this lockdown ends, the police are going to have to go back to normal,” he added.
He also said that for 150 years UK people have favored the “friendly British bobby model.”
By way of illustration, he recounted the experience of a Jewish child who was brought to safety in England in the late 1930’s.
“Her comment was that the policeman smiled,” Neville said.
“And I think that’s a lovely vision … where she came from these awful automatons—you know, arresting and bullying people. And when she got off that ship, the first thing she saw—the policeman smiled.”
“And I think that we the British police should always live up to that,” he added.
The Metropolitan Police meanwhile said in a statement that Londoners should “stick to the rules” and that the police would carry on enforcing them.
“While the Government’s roadmap contains positive news, now is not the time for complacency,” the Met said.
“Officers across London are continuing to take action against rule-breakers, adopting the ‘Four Es’ process of engaging, explaining, encouraging, and then enforcing.”