Good intentions won’t put more police officers on the streets, only hard cash - Andrew Vine

We liked having them around. Our neighbourhood has its share of crime, as everywhere in Yorkshire unfortunately does, and seeing the officers felt both reassuring and a visible deterrent to offenders.

And the contact with residents was useful to the police. As we chatted and got to know them, people passed on information about suspicious things they had seen and heard, which were followed up.

For that brief period, it felt like we had returned to an older and sadly lost model of policing in which there was a much closer bond between officers and public, to the benefit of both.

The value of that bond was acknowledged in last week’s announcement by the Prime Minister that patrols are to be stepped up in towns and cities on the busiest nights of the week, and every neighbourhood will have named local officers.

Good. About time, too. Every survey of the public’s view of policing has found a desire for a more visible presence.

People are understandably keen to see that. It cannot be a coincidence that as patrols have declined over many years, crime has risen, with 90 per cent of offences now going unsolved.

The Policing Minister and Hull MP Dame Diana Johnson was right when she wrote in The Yorkshire Post last week that the link between officers and the community has eroded it, and with it trust.

Faith in the ability of the police to catch criminals has suffered as a result. It has become commonplace for victims of petty crime not to bother reporting it, as they believe no action will be taken.

Sir Keir Starmer pointed to out-of-control shoplifting and anti-social behaviour as showing how a lack of crime prevention and visible deterrence has emboldened criminals, who reason that they are highly unlikely to get caught, let alone prosecuted. And the more of them who get away with it, the more the public’s faith in the police diminishes.

On the day he spoke, there was another chilling illustration of how criminal behaviour is becoming endemic among sections of the population when it emerged 17 per cent of convictions for knife crime involve boys aged between 10 and 17.

In West Yorkshire, that proportion is higher than the national average, at 20 per cent. The rest of the county is better, with North Yorkshire at 14 per cent, South Yorkshire at 12 per cent, and Humberside at seven per cent.

Even the lowest figure is still far too high. It is truly shocking that children as young as 10 should be routinely carrying and using knives, at least in part because of malign online influences.

Seeing police on the streets, and getting to know officers in their own neighbourhoods, surely has to be one way of steering children away from the potentially tragic consequences of arming themselves with lethal weapons.

It is difficult to escape the impression that the police have been left fire-fighting because of relentless cuts to funding, responding to calls but less able than they should be – or would wish – to prevent crime by fostering links with communities.

Putting more officers into town and city centres is a start, but it will have a limited effect. Criminals who know there is a greater police presence on two nights of the week will simply avoid those days.

Despite the determination expressed by Sir Keir and Dame Diana, we’re unlikely to see any real reduction in crime until there is massive new investment in the police, and given the state of the country’s finances it is difficult to see where that will come from.

Three months ago, the Home Office announced an additional £100m for neighbourhood policing, which is very welcome, but that figure pales alongside the £1.3bn shortfall in their budgets the country’s police forces say they face over the next two years.

Good intentions won’t put more officers on the streets, only hard cash. The government, though, deserves some sympathy over the problems the police face.

It is attempting to play catch-up on years of Conservative underfunding, which began in 2010 with disastrous cuts to officer numbers on the watch of the former Home Secretary, Theresa May. Her supposed party of law and order turned out to be anything but.