Kevin Hurley states that, “I said right at the beginning that we should be authorising police officers to taser people on the spot if they don't comply, and if that doesn’t work we should use baton rounds on them, and if that doesn’t work we should use lethal force!”
“If we do not get compliance in the coming months whilst the vaccine comes in, we are looking at tens of thousands more deaths,” he notes.
The police commissioner blames the UK Government for the present situation in the country: “The Government must take the public with them on COVID policy and if they fail to do this, you will never make non-compliant people follow the guidelines. People lose all kinds of confidence in the Government with confused messages.”
He claims Prime Minister Boris Johnson needs to make a “real effort to re-educate the public and say, 'we got it wrong' and lay out a clear message about the situation at the moment," and he adds that, "those in charge are not capable of making hard policy decisions and aren't dealing with people who won’t comply.”
The order in which people are being vaccinated is wrong, he remarks. Mr Hurley also makes the case that we should have started with the medics and carers and then those who keep the country going such as those working with utilities - energy, sewage - truckers and those who work in telecommunications.
He says that without these crucial employees, society will quickly deteriorate and he says that his experience of working in Iraq and Afghanistan taught him that “vital infrastructure needs to be maintained as a priority".
He believes that only after these people are vaccinated should we move on to the medically vulnerable.
He concludes by bluntly stating, “COVID is not a hoax but there are some people who you simply can’t convince.”