If we don’t have the money for public safety, take it from the aid budget

If people think that keeping order is no longer a top priority, they will take the law into their own hands

Dead criminals are entitled to be mourned. They have loved ones, too. But you might have thought that the family of the career burglar Henry Vincent would grieve in private. After all, he was killed by Richard Osborn-brooks, a 78-yearold pensioner desperately defending himself and his disabled wife in their own home at the dead of night.

Since Vincent was the assailant, surely some compunction is in order even from within the immoral subculture that spawned him. But not a bit of it. His family and friends placed one of those ghastly shrines of Cellophane-wrapped flowers, balloons and cuddly toys directly opposite the house he burgled. Mr Osborn-brooks, the victim, has been forced into hiding for fear of reprisals. If you want an example of how the criminal classes think they can get away with anything nowadays, then here it is. It is not surprising that people have felt angry enough to tear it down, while the police stood by and watched.

When burglary isn’t treated seriously by the police, criminals will inevitably take the view that homeowners are somehow fair game. Moreover, when Mr Osborn-brooks was arrested on “suspicion of murder”, what message did that send out, even if he was later released without charge? Once the moral territory occupied by the lawabiding majority is ceded, we are on the road to perdition. To that end, I found it astonishing to hear Amber Rudd, the Home Secretary, denying a link between the number of police officers and levels of crime.

Equally bizarre is the spectacle of those who have previously argued for more police now saying they don’t really matter after all. This issue has become entangled with the politics of austerity; and Labour is undoubtedly using crime as a stick to beat the Tories over public-sector spending cuts. But it is possible to argue in favour of more police and less spending elsewhere. If we don’t have the money to ensure public safety then we should take it from the foreign aid budget, which has risen by £5 billion in seven years. The Government needs to ask where its priorities lie.

However, this is less a debate about how much is spent than how we use our police. If politicians expect them to stay indoors investigating “hate crime” and the other new offences introduced by legislatively incontinent governments over the years, there are bound to be fewer officers on the streets. Their numbers have fallen to a level last seen in 1985, when the population of England and Wales was eight million lower than it is now.

By then, the beat bobby had already passed into history and the police spent much of their time in cars. But as crime soared in the mid-1990s, it became apparent that this retreat from the beat had been a mistake. Sir John Stevens, then commissioner of the Met, said: “We now know that the argument that a Pc on patrol interacting with the public is not a crime-fighting measure is not right.’’

His successor, Sir Ian Blair, agreed: “We lost sight of the issue that the public wanted reassurance... If you can get rid of a disorderly habitat with effective police in those areas, you can start to get rid of street crime.”

Most of us knew that already, only we were always being told that what mattered most was CCTV monitoring, targeting hot-spots and getting officers to incidents rapidly. But what people want is for the crime not to happen in the first place. After all, the first principle of policing is the prevention of crime; and the greatest deterrent is the prospect of getting caught. Is it really necessary to make these points to a Conservative home secretary?

When Labour was in power, the Tories denounced cuts in police numbers. After the killing of Damilola Taylor in 2000, William Hague, then Conservative leader, wrote in this newspaper that the murder was connected to reductions in the number of police foot patrols through the crime-ridden south London estate where the 10-year-old boy lived.

Tony Blair responded by recruiting more police. The fall in crime over the past 25 years has coincided with record numbers of officers, the highest prison population ever, and tougher sentences introduced by successive Tory and Labour administrations.

The Government will make a colossal mistake if it starts to give the impression that keeping order is no longer a priority because other, deeper social and cultural issues are also relevant to violent crime. Of course they are. But it takes years to address them properly, while it can take just weeks to lose control of a neighbourhood.

As the US criminologists Wilson and Kelling demonstrated when Bill Bratton applied their “broken windows” theory in New York in the 1990s, if you want to reduce serious crime then the police need to bear down hard on all low-level criminal activity in a particular area.

But for that to happen, they need to be there. An understanding of this fundamental aspect of policing seems to have been lost. A senior officer once told me that his force was able to close the remaining police houses in his constabulary because the crime rate was so low in those locations that they were not needed any more. He saw no connection between lower crime and a police presence.

Ms Rudd has promised to boost neighbourhood policing, which is shorthand for recruiting more community support officers – though their numbers, along with special constables, have also declined. But what we need is more warranted constables patrolling crime trouble spots to prevent the gangs getting a foothold. Any extra money needed to recruit them should be ringfenced to ensure it is not diverted to other tasks. Beat policing should be a well-rewarded, long-term career for those who do not want to go into detective or other specialist work. Moreover, it would help if they were large, fit men.

Losing control of the streets is to surrender them to the criminals and the gangs. If the state fails to fulfil its contract with the people to ensure their safety, then the people will increasingly take matters into their own hands. Many communities already hire private security organisations to provide residential patrols because they deter vandals, muggers and burglars. That’s what we used to expect the police to do.