IF the General Election is a boxing match, there is no way the Conservatives can win on points. They are already too far behind in the polls, so they need a knock-out blow.

To be fair, on Tuesday night they probably landed a punch on Labour with their hard-hitting election broadcast.

In the starkest possible terms, it showed criminals released early by Labour indulging in street robbery, house burglary and drug dealing. It was horrifying.

After air and food, safety is on the top of most people's basic human demands. Fear of crime means people don't feel safe. The Tories latched onto this, and magnified the problem hugely.

Now even more people don't feel safe. It is ironic that police forces and other agencies do their best to reduce the fear of crime yet here we have a political party doing its best to increase it just to win votes.

THE Tories' broadcast trumpeted that 35,000 criminals have been released early because of a Labour scheme. Under the scheme, these offenders are electronically tagged and kept under home curfew.

Of these 35,000, 1,100 have committed further crimes, including two rapes. These are official Home Office statistics.

I have been involved with the police service for 27 years and all my instincts tell me that these statistics are inaccurate.

All policemen know that about 80 per cent of crime is committed by 20 per cent of offenders.

Yet according to the early release statistics, only three per cent of the 35,000 have committed a further crime. Although I am inclined to believe that Labour's law and order record isn't bad, I do not believe that it is as good as this astonishingly successful statistic suggests.

In fact, all of my instincts say that some of the remaining 33,900 have just not been caught.

And I guarantee that these figures were out-of-date the day after they were compiled when another early release prisoner committed another crime.

So although I condemn the Tories for their fear-inducing broadcast, I also doubt whether Labour's statistics have any bearing on the truth.

IT has taken 30 years for the country to reach its current crime-ridden state. So we can't expect any government to sort it out in just four years.

All three of the main political parties at the moment believe that they will sort it out by increasing the number of police officers on the beat: Labour and the LibDems say they'll provide 6,000 each; the Conservatives say 1,600.

I say to all of the parties, you are wrong. Of course everyone wants to see more police on the streets - unless you are a criminal. It gives you a sense of security.

But if you put an extra 10,000, even 20,000, police officers on the streets it would not make a significant reduction in the amount of crime. It would be a step in the right direction in helping to reduce the fear of crime, because the public likes to see visible policing. But it's not the entire solution.

It works like this. One police officer in one month works 20 days when holidays and days off are taken into account. On each of those days they work eight hours - less a 45 minute meal break. So it's seven hours by they time they get on the beat. Then they arrest someone, and the subsequent paperwork takes a minimum of two hours and often more than a day.

Your extra officers would soon be on a day-off or off the streets doing paperwork and you would be little better off.

But promising more officers is an election-time headline-grabber. It's just a shame the same politicians aren't about in between elections because, in law and order terms, one of the greatest crimes at the moment is the way they are attempting to steal people's votes.

Published: 17/05/01