Re: Hack is the right word
"go out with the police and watch what they put up with instead of sniping from behind a keyboard"
Let me deal with that one first: I have done that very thing in that back in the 70s & 80s I sometimes needed a police or even army escort in NI.
Now to get onto present times:
I'm in the over 70s so anything that presents an actual risk of catching the virus concerns me. We over-70s have actually been under lockdown for a week longer than the general population. Mostly it's been our daughter doing shopping for us. I've driven short distances to my sister-in-law to pick-up, from her doorstep without meeting her or er husband, our share of her Tesco delivery. So, yes take this seriously.
I also live within walking distance of a National Park. Given the amount of space there, a huge number of people could easily disperse into it and maintain separation. There are a couple of local car parks with quite limited amounts of space in them. Even if they were filled with cars the density of walkers they could bring would be negligible. Looking at it from my strictly selfish but naturally sensitive point of view, if the 2metre separation is safe I would be ultra-safe in those circumstances. Nevertheless from quite early on TPTB blocked the car parks off to prevent visitors; this only makes sense from two considerations. One is if it were the journey to get to the car park that represented a threat of contamination and I've not seen even the faintest attempt to show that.
The other is that groups of visitors would disregard the recommended spacing. Unfortunately people do not have to come out into the countryside to do that. The Beeb news site this morning has a report that the Greater Manchester Police have broken up 660 parties recently. Greater Manchester does include a lot of rural areas but there was no indication that the parties were rural, especially as s great number were described as house or street parties or gatherings to play sport. If people are going to be idiots they're at least as likely to do that at home as visit a National Park. From a country dweller's PoV my main concern is that they don't come here and let dogs loose, start fires or the other usual behaviours.
Similar arguments apply to urban parks. If people are allowed to visit the parks they can spread out to a much greater extent than if they're not.
It seems to me that one factor which has been forgotten by the present government is public morale. If the population is going to be locked down then every measure needs to be taken to maintain morale. This is not something that was lost on wartime governments but I think it is partly lost on this one.