Some years ago I was told by a primary school head teacher that a visit to her school by a police constable had been cancelled that day because the officer had to help escort a prisoner to court and there was no other officer available ‘this side of Milton Keynes’.

The concerned head asked what the response would be if the school, say, had to deal with an intruder and called the police for help.

The officer replied ‘I’m afraid you would be appalled if I told you.’ It appears that staffing in the police force is not improving. And despite the protestations of Government, the root cause is mainly funding.

It is not just the NHS and Education funding that is being progressively squeezed but also law enforcement it seems, as is evidenced by the news this week that some forces are downgrading emergency calls in order to justify a slower response when there is a shortage of officers or reclassifying high-risk domestic abuse victims as lower risk in order to justify non-attendance.

Police forces have been put under tremendous pressure too by the exponential rise of investigations into child abuse over the last few years.

It is a subject so repellent and alien to most of us that many police officers are understandably traumatised by the harrowing process of investigation and it is difficult to recruit replacements when officers leave the force as a result.

The evidence of the problems of underfunding is overwhelming A report from Her Majesty’s Inspectorate of Constabulary refers to around 46,000 wanted suspects at large from crimes as serious as murder and rape, to crimes being effectively written off and inexperienced officers being left to carry out complex investigations.

And now they have been called upon (quite rightly of course) to reduce the threat to life caused by people recklessly using mobile phones while driving.
I would love someone to work out the police to citizen ratio of my childhood when we knew and interacted regularly with our local officers and what the comparative costs are. We could afford it during post war austerity. Why not now?