Who cares if we're burgled?

STATISTICS? Damn statistics. According to the new police performance comparisons, much of the South-East has relatively little house burglary compared, say, with Lancashire. In Kent, for example, police arrest about one in four offenders, which is better than some in its group. But you won't catch me throwing my hat in the air just yet.

Down where I live, comparative indicators aren't worth a row of beans.

I used to love the country: its peace, its freedom, its friendliness. Even in the 1980s, driving down to our weekend cottage from London, nothing much had changed. Only a few big houses had burglar-alarm systems. You could lock the door behind you and go off for the week without a second thought. A policeman lived in our village, and there was a small police station in the local town.

In London, after two burglaries, we lived with bars on our windows.

Neighbours told disturbing stories of waking up in bed to see a burglar standing over them. My wife, walking home one night, was spat at in the street. It occurred to us that we didn't have to live that way. We could move out to the country and put our children in good schools. I could commute to the City.

Eventually we bought a Georgian house on the Kent-Sussex borders: a large, rambling place which would comfortably accommodate all the bits and pieces we had inherited or collected. For the first four years we lived a normal life, the kind we had anticipated.

There were no bars on our windows. We could come and go without worrying that burglars might break in and ransack the place. It might be only 60 miles from London, but this was the country.

It was the work of a single family, so the police believed, to turn this peaceful existence into a nightmare of locks and bolts, bars and fences. The burglars broke in through a window while we were out and stole furniture and family heirlooms which were more precious to us than any insurance claim could compensate for.

What they couldn't take they piled up to remove later. They then made several attempts to collect it, to the terror of my family who were in the house at the time.

The village policeman had been redeployed; so had the town police station.

It was half an hour before a patrol car turned up with two friendly policemen who stayed for a cup of coffee.

They were there to sympathise, and to check that we hadn't been hurt. They had a good idea who had robbed us, but were not interested in following it up, despite us offering them a car registration number, a fingerprint and a detailed photofit.

We were given the impression that further investigation would be a waste of police time unless the burglars were caught red-handed - unlikely with so few patrol cars to cover a wide area.

THE message could not have been plainer. We were going to have to fend for ourselves.

In vehicles that, typically, they had stolen yesterday and tomorrow would leave smouldering by the roadside, the burglars would drive down our road and stop outside the gate for a recce.

Seeing we were in, one car would flash its lights at the other and both would drive off. If they saw someone drive away from the house they might call us to see if anyone was at home ("The caller withheld their number").

In the meantime, they terrorised our neighbours, smashing their way into one cottage through the French windows and taking what few treasures the owners had, and tailgating another who had the temerity to give chase in his car and who was lucky to escape with dented bumpers.

Any idea we'd had that it was just our village and we'd been unlucky was quickly exploded.

Everywhere we go in the South-East, the conversation turns to the latest victims.

Many are elderly women. One I know has put a sign on her gate: "Please don't bother, there's nothing left to steal."

Another widow who lives alone had her door broken down in the middle of the night and foam pumped up the stairs to stop her coming down while thieves lifted everything they could carry. She hit her panic button, but the police arrived long after the burglars had gone.

They work in gangs, with their caps pulled down, and despite the police refrain that "they won't hurt you", the level of violence is rising. The victims are not all old women who can't defend themselves.

Recently a beefy 6ft farmer and his wife heard the alarm go off in their home in Sussex and from the landing saw their longcase clock being carried off. The burglars threw rocks up the stairs at them to prevent them coming down; the wife is still traumatised.

Common to each of these episodes is that none of the burglars was caught.

The police aren't interested in theft from the property-owning middle classes: they take the view that stolen goods are covered by insurance.

Less well advertised is the fact that young police officers are naturally reluctant to chase burglars into the estates and travellers' encampments from which, allegedly, many of them come.

In Kent, we hear, the situation is worsened by something called the "Kent Policing Model", which concentrates on serious criminals at the expense of crimes such as house burglary.

The result is that local people, despairing of any help from the police whom they happen to fund, are getting used to doing without them.

Councils pay for "community wardens" and hire police officers to patrol local villages.

Meanwhile, people who want to be left with more than a few cheap sticks of furniture are having to turn their houses into fortresses.

They buy large dogs and put up signs saying "Rhodesian Ridgeback Loose".

They put in an electric gate, as we have done; they have complicated alarm systems and high fences - and of course, neighbourhood watch. Some people pay a house-sitter to guard their home whenever they are away for more than a few hours.

WHAT is the point of living in the country if we have to live behind bars because the police refuse to do their job of protecting us? To face a masked gang who break in and take your belongings by force is the kind of trauma that can ruin your happiness in the home you have made - yet the indifference of our police has now been endorsed by the apparent indifference of the Lord Chief Justice, who has mooted the question whether burglars should be sent to jail for such an offence.

I still love the country, but we are getting tired of imprisoning ourselves to defend our possessions. Friends tell us that we should sell the things we cherish so there is nothing worth stealing, but for us, so far, this would be to surrender a principle we cherish even more - our right to peace of mind.

Copyright 2003
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