During one of many debates I had on the importance of police numbers, I was asked if I wanted to live in a society that has a police officer on every street corner, or one that didn’t need the police on every street corner. If asked the same, I assume most of us would reply the latter, and in a perfect world it would be my response too. But as we don’t live in that perfect world my answer was more nuanced: in order to get to the latter, we needed to go some way towards the former; and that answer was as correct then as would be today.

One of the most infuriating things about the politics of police numbers is that policing is the only aspect of the public sector that gets “punished” for being seen to be successful. Ever-improving health outcomes and increasing life expectancy don’t lead to calls to cut the numbers of doctors, nurses and health workers. We don’t see a clamour to reduce teacher numbers as more pupils excel in their exams and go on to university. But when crime falls (and I’ll get back to that) the importance of policing’s contribution to that is dismissed as the axe begins to fall.

There is no doubt in my mind the dreadful scenes in Southport, Southend, London, Hartlepool, and many other towns and cities can in substantial part be attributed to the virtual collapse of community policing across England and Wales. Police numbers across England and Wales fell by over 21,000 in the decade after the Conservative / Liberal coalition government, and the police adopted a wholly reactive policing style that did nothing but help sow........

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