Your article on police funding (October 1) suggests a welcome possible increase.
However, it also prompts me to renew a question I have raised in the local press before: namely the issue of illegal (and sometimes dangerous) behaviour of cyclists, related to the apparent inadequacy of police resources.
My previous enquiry hoped for a policy statement. I didn’t get one, although the local police inspector delivered a forthright response on his operational problems.
In your article, the chief constable and the police and crime commissioner are quoted as warning that the county’s police force is “on the verge of viability”. That, surely, is an under-statement.
I believe that the largely unchecked cycling behaviour, in which most of the legal requirements are now being widely treated with contempt, shows that the force is already beyond (not “on”) the verge of viability.
This is not the fault of the force itself, but the quoted words give an impression that the chief constable and the commissioner may be treating the situation as now an acceptable norm.
What has happened in effect, is that an area of law has, through lack of enforcement, been changed and cancelled, not by will of parliament after mature discussion, but by popular assent in practice. The danger is that, having established that the law can be discarded in one area, other areas for general disobedience will over time suggest themselves.
For instance, I have twice recently encountered cars driving along (not just across) the footway, past gateways from which someone could have emerged unawares.
Cutting up the one-way stretch of Herring Lane as a handy short-cut into town, despite the nearly-blind corner at the Broad Street end, is another noticed action.
I am not suggesting that the police could monitor all such transgressions, even if better staffed; but more-or-less total lack of reaction soon leads to looseness, then exploitation, then a situation virtually beyond recovery.
With that in mind, perhaps I could ask again about policy. What is it really?
And perhaps I could ask Mr John Hayes, in particular, if the government recognises the danger to respect for the law when it dictates the under-provision of resources to maintain it? (To avoid his need to say it, of course I accept that forces should operate efficiently, but cuts beyond a certain level cannot be coped with just through more efficiency. Remember the old story of the man who fed his horse a little less each day, and had almost got it used to nothing at all when the damn thing died.)
John Tippler
Spalding
