Should police follow up every local theft?

Home secretary, SuellaBraverman, responsible for policing in the UK, has said officers must investigate every theft to catch more offenders. 

She said it was "completely unacceptable" that criminals are often "effectively free to break certain laws".

It feels obvious. If you have your mobile phone stolen, or your shed is broken into, you want an investigation, your stuff back and the criminals caught and punished.

I know when it happened to me, that's what I wanted. 

But a diktat from Whitehall blasted out to the village bobby on a bike in rural Northumberland, in the throbbing metropolises of Manchester and Birmingham, the seaside towns of Southend and Whitstable and the leafy suburbs of Surbiton is well wide of the mark. 

It is a soundbite relying on pressing an obvious hot button – these police officers are clearly doing a Gilian Kegan sitting on their backsides doing nothing. But now they will because the Home Secretary has called them out.

There are two problems. The first is a lack of resource. The police can't follow up every crime. They don't have enough officers or money.

The second, is more subtle. Different areas - the seaside town, the rural village and the  big city centres, have different local challenges. Crime is different in each of them. And local communities have different priorities according to their locations and demographics. One size doesn't fit all.

It is not for the home secretary to tell local communities what they want and what their police should do. It is for those communities to decide.

The answer is decentralisation. Give the power back to local people and their councils to decide how the police should be funded and what they should.