Current Home Secretary Amber Rudd is yet another incumbent of this particular government office who refuses to accept the glaringly obvious.

That police numbers have a direct effect on crime.

That when there are less police officers patrolling the streets – or rather nowadays, where police officers patrol the streets in cars, criminals will take advantage of this fact and commit more crime – simply because there is a far smaller risk of being apprehended and prosecuted.

The argument put forward by the likes of Amber Rudd, that it is ‘a complex area’ and ‘not all about police numbers’, is sheer lunacy.

And as far as police numbers concerned, police numbers at the present levels (currently 121,929 officers) are totally inadequate to get on top of the current spiralling levels of criminality in the UK.

To get anywhere near to reducing the ongoing predation on the public by far too many persistent offenders, police numbers will have to double or even triple.

Reducing police numbers is nothing more than an invitation to increase crime not reduce it.

Every successive Home Secretary since the end of the Second World War has promised to ‘crack down on crime’.

And every one (with the odd exception) of them has broken that promise.

Because all governments do not want to face reality and pay for the only realistic sentencing option that will prevent those who prefer to be career criminals from reoffending.

Namely, building more prisons and increasing the time guilty defendants actually spend in prison.

What also has to stop is allowing persistent criminals to serve out their sentence in the community.

The continuing politicisation of the police and the courts is a dangerous precedent.

Not only does it make a mockery out of our so-called criminal justice system – which is no longer fit for purpose, in its current form it fails to provide either justice or protection for the countless thousands of people who are daily forced to endure being molested by criminals, who know that the odds of being caught and given a custodial sentence is nothing more than an inconvenience.

Home Office civil servants actively promote and support the idea that short sentencing policies that allow offenders to rampage through communities to commit crime.

It is a cancer that has to be removed.

And the ongoing actions of the anti-prison propagandists also has to be halted.

Not only does the number of police officers need to be raised significantly, the prison population needs to rise to at least 200,000 or more too.

Andrew Martin
Address supplied