Letters | 28 August 2010

Use the force

Sir: The problem with Alasdair Palmer’s argument against police reform (‘The coalition’s police reforms will fail’, 21 August) is that it merely echoed Gordon Brown’s mantra for the last ten years. According to this view, what matters most is how much money is spent on public services. The more we spend on our police, schools, etc, the better they are bound to be. Some of us questioned this idea from the beginning. Others began to have doubts when services failed to improve in proportion to the substantial resources pumped in. Most people finally rejected the age of big spending when the country went bust.

Actually — and quite contrary to Palmer’s assertion — the steepest recent falls in crime pre-dated the rise in police numbers. A better line of enquiry might be: why, when we have one of the most expensive criminal justice systems in the world, do we still have such high crime compared to our peer group countries? Why, when we have a record number of police officers — over 140,000 — are only a tenth of them visible and available to the public at any one time? (The answer, in a word, is bureaucracy.