Shropshire Star comment: Rural crime must be tackled

And when the police are away, the crooks are at play - and the impression which has taken hold in this county's rural areas is that those areas have become a criminals' playground, a huge help yourself and do as you please lawless zone, where you can be reasonably confident that you will not be caught and will not go to jail.

According to the National Rural Crime Survey, only 27 per cent of people in rural areas are satisfied with policing in their communities.

These are national figures. We do not know what the Shropshire figure would be, but from the feedback coming through from the Shropshire countryside there is no reason to think local faith in the police is any higher.

On the contrary, it seems that there is so little confidence in the police to tackle rural crime, that Shropshire country folk think they are wasting their time to report it in the first place, unless it is something really serious.

Ironically, the way that might work through in the statistics is that it would give the impression that recorded crime in country areas is falling, when the true situation is that there is a crisis in confidence out there in the fields and villages.

The challenges for the police are obvious. The places which have the most officers have the most people - towns and cities. Thinly populated areas are thinly policed. Whole swathes of countryside have to be covered and the distances, and therefore response times, are bigger.

Then there is the nature of farming and rural life.

Livestock and farming machinery are out there in the fields and are generally perfectly safe from theft because of that bond of mutual trust among country people.

Perfectly safe, that is, until crooks with pickups, vans, trailers, and so on, have days out, or nights out, from towns and cities into the countryside to take advantage of the rich pickings.

Barn fires are a real problem - often the cause is a mystery but arson is a high probability - and then you have those acts of anti-social behaviour in which people cannot be bothered to visit the local tip and visit the local country hedgerow to dump their old sofa.

Police have a number of initiatives. But with levels of dissatisfaction at these levels the country verdict is that they are not doing their job - and a lot of work is going to be needed to rebuild confidence.