‘OUR island is like a Hammer horror film’, opines C Taylor regarding a lack of an adequate police response on the island of Portland (You Say, July 20).

Almost everyone will obviously sympathise with what appears to be nothing more than a total lack of responsibility of the local police force.

It is their job it is to ensure that the general population of Weymouth and Portland can go about their normal everyday business without living in fear of retribution and attack from a pack of feral teenagers with nothing better to do with their lives.

There is no longer any real point in reporting criminal behaviour. The police simply attempt to entrap the odd motorist here and there and relieve him or her of a few pounds.

Is it any surprise that so many people hold the police in such contempt?

Trust between us and the police has reached an all-time low. We are at a crossroads because far too many people rightly believe that the police are a far greater threat to their safety and well-being than the yob culture and the criminals who we pay the police to protect us from.

Public protection is now a dirty word, to be avoided at all costs.

The original remit of the police was simple and fairly straight forward – even those of a senior rank within the police force could understand it (unlike today).

The job of the police is to ensure that the public can conduct their everyday business in safety and protect them from criminal intent.

That is it, plain and simple. It is not the job of the police to harass law-abiding citizens or play a ‘deaf-ear’ to those who fear reprisals of those who report criminal behaviour!

What is prevalent now is the utilisation of the police force as a convenient method to raise revenue for local government.

It is a sad fact that as the years have passed by, the police have become increasingly politicised, used as a weapon to suppress any lawful gathering and dissent which may or may not be in the interests of the prevailing political environment.

This is now the reality, where the police are a law unto themselves. Where ordinary citizens going about their lawful business can be unwittingly drawn into a situation where their own life is put at terminal risk.

Nobody needs to be a rocket scientist to embrace the idea that to get the police out of their comfy cars and onto the beat will dramatically reduce crime.

I suspect a few Chief Constables know it is true, although they would never admit it.

As long as the police spend most of their time parked up in laybys with speed cameras, or dressing up in paramilitary regalia, nothing will change in the short term.

As someone else once said, we need to take control of the police away from central government.

Instead, put control back where it belongs, with the local community.

Only by putting a huge chasm between the police and party politics and central government will this even happen.

Until that day, many criminals will go undetected and many pleas for help will be ignored and our way of life will be increasingly undermined by those who seek to make our lives unbearable.

DAVID E HARRIS, Abbotsbury Road, Weymouth