ONLY this month, an East Lancashire couple who found a pile of suspect pills while out walking were told by our "too busy" police to flush them down their lavatory - and then go out and look for more.

Earlier, readers told of how, when they co-operated with a police appeal to the public for them to report untaxed cars, they were ignored when they did.

And, just last week, a Blackburn householder who complained to them of constant vandalism at his home said that it took three weeks for the police to respond - while, tonight, the chairman of his local community association writes that the problem is due to serious underfunding of the police force by the Government. All of which might lead the crime-cowed taxpayer to conclude that our bobbies are handcuffed by immense budget and manpower constraints.

Yet, at the same time, we learn that the struggling force has the resources to mount another campaign this summer against drink-drivers despite this species being as rare as a rozzer on the beat - when out of more than 30,000 motorists pulled up last Christmas and New Year, just five were arrested for being over the limit.

And now we learn that four top officers and one civilian employee of the force are to get top-of-the-range "company cars" - costing you and I a cool £32,000 a year.

Times are evidently hard. But the excuse for this expenditure is that the force needs to attract top-level candidates for its top-level posts and, unless the car perk is available, the right stuff will go to the forces where it is.

This is piffle. For there is no real market in top-level candidates in the country's police forces - only a finite number of eligible applicants which would remain the same whether or not they were being lured to this or that constabulary by the prospect of a posh car going with the job. It is soft police authorities falling for the officer-led propaganda that they will get second-best sorts if they do not follow the others offering BMWs as part of the job package who are to blame for this spiral that sucks so much money out of the operational budget for no discernable improvement in the crime figures.

Home Secretary Jack Straw should stop this snouts-in-the-trough syndrome forthwith - particularly when, in Lancashire, things are so dire that it takes a bobby three weeks to turn up - and order all forces in the country to stop subsidising luxury cars at public expense for police chiefs, especially when, if they want them, they can afford them out of the handsome wages that, in Lancashire, they get for deploying the thin blue line against a phantom problem when the real ones are flushed away.

Converted for the new archive on 14 July 2000. Some images and formatting may have been lost in the conversion.