A report by Her Majesty's Inspectorate of Constabulary reveals that there were 800 officers on an afternoon shift in a command area of one unnamed force - but only 20 were free for emergency response. In another force, 50 were booked on duty but only three were allocated to "incident management". In many areas only 2.5 per cent of officers on duty are allocated to response duties.
The report also discloses that police staff routinely downgrade emergency calls to relieve pressure on the system. They are listed as problems which require only a phone call, rather than an officer being sent out. Patrol officers sometimes question why they are being sent to particular calls, and even fail to respond.
The report, which claims that some patrol officers fail to make good use of their time on duty unless closely supervised by their sergeant, speaks of "highly inefficient use of scarce resources".
Jan Berry, chairman of the Police Federation, said: "This report clearly reinforces many of the claims made by officers in our 24/7 report published at the end of last year. The blame lies with government and chief officers. The government have set impossible targets which focus on the number of calls and how quickly they are dealt with, rather than the quality of service provided."
Only one police officer in 58 is on street patrol at any given time. Although manpower has reached a record 143,000 officers in England and Wales, only 2,400 officers at a time make it out from behind their desks to combat crime. In a town of 90,000 people, only four would be on patrol, while more than twice as many would be back at the police station filling in forms.
Columnist Camilla Cavendish recently wrote "A neighbour in our new street came round to ask for a cheque towards a private security patrol. "Wouldn't that undermine the police?" I asked, sensing a threat to my bank balance. "What police?" he replied. It's true. There are police boards sprouting all over our area ("Did you see? Incident, stabbing, assault"), but no police. London is becoming a city of vigilantes. The well-off are hiring uniformed guards, and the teenagers down the road are arming themselves with knives - because no one else is going to defend them. We have seen the results of that: five teenagers stabbed to death in the past four weeks.
"We are giving up on the police because they seem to have given up themselves. The sheer quantity of blogging by disillusioned bobbies is a sign of just how blue parts of the thin blue line are feeling. PC David Copperfield drily documents the daily grind in his book Wasting Police Time. DC Johnno Hills, who quit the Brighton force this weekend after complaining in the Sunday Express about bureaucracy, has started a petition for police reform.
"The latest Home Office figures show that a fifth of officer time is spent on paperwork. This week Sir Alastair McWhirter, retiring as Chief Constable of Suffolk, complained that it can take 56 people and 128 different bits of paper to bring one assault case to court. Well, thank you, Sir Alastair. Now you can go gentle into that index-linked retirement.
"But where were you in April 2005, when the Government introduced stop and account (as opposed to stop and search) forms? These require an officer asking anyone to account for themselves to fill in 40 questions. Yes, 40. The consequences should have been obvious. I'm not surprised that the cops I do pass refuse to make eye contact. They're probably petrified of becoming a party to my personal information.
"The police and the public are still on the same side. But it doesn't always feel like it. A recent ICM poll found that trust in the police is sliding. The official insistence that crime is falling does not help, when people feel it is not. Criminologists say that the most reliable measure of the true rate of violence in society is stranger murder - and killings by strangers have increased by a third between 1997 and 2005.
"The police have more money than ever before, and more officers - 140,000 at the last count. But they are not having a commensurate impact.
"A powerful analysis by Franklin Zimring, Professor of Law at Berkeley, suggests that strong policing can and does affect crime rates quite drastically. His new book, The Great American Crime Decline, finds that neither demographics nor poverty alleviation get anywhere near to explaining the three-quarters drop in lethal youth violence, for example, that took place in New York after 1990. Professor Zimring's message is positive: that policing can reduce crime and that crime, as he says, "is not hardwired into the ecology of modern life or the cultural values of high-risk youth". Within a generation, the behaviour of young men has completely changed - because of better policing.
"But the breathless repetition of old ideas gave little hope of any real change from a Government whose latest wheeze has been to make officers agree every single charge they make with the Crown Prosecution Service. This has helped the CPS to meet its targets for successful prosecutions, but created mindboggling delays that leave citizens bereft of protection.
"New York's police commissioner was, notoriously, as tough on his officers as he was on criminals. Every week the most senior officers detailed the crime in their precincts and told him how they were tackling it. Once almost half of them had been fired, there was no confusion about the objective. The NYPD was not about printing customer satisfaction surveys, but about keeping people safe."
However, the GOS can reveal that not all parts of the UK are quite so bereft of police protection as the report suggests. Burnham-on-Sea, for instance, is policed with ruthless efficiency by officers with a keen eye for relevance: two of them recently apprehended a dangerous graffiti artist when they ordered 5-year-old Ryan and his playmates to stop chalking hopscotch grids on the road in their quiet cul-de-sac because they were "graffiti".
His mother, who bought him the chalks, said "… he came rushing in and said, 'Mum, there's some policemen outside.' I thought it was a bit odd because you don't see the police round here very often. He said they had got handcuffs and he was frightened they would take him away."
One of the children apprehended was three years old. The incident was logged as alleged criminal damage.
Nor is this zealous cutting-edge policing confined to the West Country. Last July in the Midlands two girls were told off by police for committing a "low-level crime" - yes, you've guessed it, hopscotch again. Will these violent young hoodlums never learn? Kayleigh and Georgina, both 14, were made to clean the chalk marks off the pavement.
A police statement described the incident as anti-social behaviour and promised to deal with future cases too. The police had acted after a complaint from a member of the public. By targeting what they called "low-level crime" they hoped to stop it turning into something more serious.
God, that's a relief. Today it's hopscotch, tomorrow it might be … who knows? Hide-and-seek? One Potato, Two Potato? Skipping? Leapfrog? Marbles? There's no knowing where this could lead. Best nip it in the bad now.
B*st*rds (and no, I don't mean the kids. Although these days ….).
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