Cartoon: John Sadler 

• IN the past year I have been in two situations where I deemed it necessary to call 999.

Once a motorcycle was being stolen by a group of three men outside my home on Royal College Street. On the second occasion a group of drunken vandals were loudly breaking windows and smashing bottles outside my house.

To my great dismay I was put on hold for five to 10 minutes on both occasions after telling the operator I needed to speak to the police – seemingly a lifetime under the circumstances.

In fact, both times it took so long to get through to an actual policeman that I ended up simply hanging up the phone because the perpetrators had already left the scene: once taking a neighbour’s motorcycle with them, and one leaving behind a carnage of broken windows and shattered beer bottles.

Luckily these incidents were not life-threatening. However I hate to think of how many truly life-threatening situations are made much worse by a caller being put on hold after calling 999.

Central police funding has dropped by 25 per cent between 2011 and 2016. Tough on crime talk is not an acceptable substitute for sufficiently funded emergency services and if the government cannot be trusted to perform its most basic task of protecting the public what can we trust it with?

TIMOTHY BARSON
Royal College Street, NW1