Police forces need to start tackling local crime that affect communities - Andrew Vine

Apart from being shaken, they were, thankfully. But what really pulled me up short was when the security guard, brushing himself down and grinning ruefully, said: “He does the same thing most weeks.”

Really? The shop manager, who’d joined us, nodded. Most weeks, the same man charges in, steals a bagful of booze and legs it. Once, he’d threatened somebody with the knife he was shouting about.

I’d got a good look at him – scruffy, dark-haired, in his late 20s – and offered my name and phone number to the manager to pass on to the police if a witness was required.

He thanked me, but said there was no point. He’d ring the police, of course, as he always did, but they wouldn’t turn up until a couple of days later and hadn’t made any progress on arresting the thief, despite him now having been caught on the shop’s CCTV several times.

And that’s that. Theft, threats and an assault on the guard are all part and parcel of just another day at work for decent folk earning an honest living from their jobs at a supermarket, and nobody doing much to stop it.

It’s safe to assume that staff in shops across Yorkshire will have similar stories to tell, taking it in their stride because that’s the only thing to do as the incidents are officially classified as a low-level crime and effectively not investigated with anything approaching vigour.

Except it isn’t low-level to those on the receiving end and in any sensible assessment, a thief’s threat to use a knife ought to make him a target to be caught urgently before somebody gets hurt, or worse.

We’ve given in to too much crime, and had foisted upon us an attitude that it’s just a fact of life to be put up with.

The sense of a battle not only being lost, but a failure to even fight it, was there on the shelves of the supermarket, where everything from joints of meat to jars of coffee are security-tagged in a forlorn effort to stem a tide of theft.

Only weeks ago, Sainsbury’s announced that in some stores it is introducing gates that prevent customers leaving unless they scan their checkout receipts.

I thought about the supermarket incident last week when the head of the police inspectorate warned that public trust and confidence in the service is hanging by a thread.

Sex scandals in the Met have been partly to blame, but so has what Andy Cooke, the chief inspector of constabulary, condemned as a failure to tackle “local problems that people see”.

He’s spot-on and his call for new powers to compel police forces to make improvements will strike a chord with any crime victim fobbed off with the most cursory of investigations when their home is burgled or car stolen.

Extraordinarily, he also pointed out that investigating crime and responding to the public are the lowest-performing areas of policing, despite these being the things that matter most to people frustrated that criminals mostly get away with it.

Worryingly, this is nothing new. A former chief constable I know well has been raging for years that police forces have lost sight of the need to carry out the basics, such as being a visible presence in neighbourhoods, knowing repeat offenders on their patches, or even responding quickly.

His 30-year career began with foot patrols on rough housing estates in West Yorkshire, where a police presence discouraged crime and officers’ knowledge of who was likely to be responsible for break-ins, drug-dealing or assaults resulted in arrests and convictions.

Too much of that has fallen by the wayside, and Mr Cooke acknowledged public trust will be further damaged unless the police up their game. Poor leadership of forces is another factor in the decline.

But it isn’t just about individual forces, or their chief officers. Government cuts to police budgets have been disastrous on the Conservatives’ watch, and the party that always shouts loudest about being champions of law and order is guilty of failing to put enough money where its mouth is.