Joan Smith: Such a criminal waste of time and effort

I don't know whether it's standard issue in London police stations these days or evidence that someone has a sense of humour. But when I went to report that someone had broken into my car last week, while I was in Spain, I did so under the beady eye of Dixon of Dock Green, whose framed portrait hangs behind the reception desk in my local nick. In fact, I could have used the services of Jack Warner in the half hour I spent in a dingy waiting room, trying to comfort a distressed elderly woman who had lost her purse and keys.

Along with other members of the public who had come to report various minor incidents, I helped search her bag to make sure the items hadn't been mislaid, suggested that she should telephone the council rather than break a window to get into her council flat, and established which shop she had been into immediately before noticing that her purse was missing. Meanwhile, the sole officer on reception duty ground on, inaccessible behind sliding glass doors, entering someone's details into his computer without regard to what was happening in the waiting room.

When it was finally my turn, I took pity on a man who had come in earlier, after losing his wallet, and been instructed to call Lost Property, who then advised him that he should have filled in a Lost in the Street form. I let him go before me – I'm an old hand at police stations, and had delayed my visit until I had a spare 90 minutes to devote to the extraordinary form-filling bureaucracy our police service has become.

This isn't just my opinion, although H M Inspector of Constabulary, Sir Ronnie Flanagan, put it more politely yesterday. In an interim report, he suggested that police forces in England and Wales have become completely bogged down in red tape and tend to "over record and under deliver".

This observation is likely to have been met with a weary sigh by anyone who has recent experience of reporting crime, while something Flanagan expressed as a prediction – "We risk diverting officers' priorities to recording crimes rather than getting out on the streets solving them and preventing them" – has already happened.

When I hear dreadful stories of middle-aged men dying after confronting groups of jeering teenage boys, I wonder how many times they've called the police on previous occasions and been left waiting for hours for anyone to arrive. Some time ago, the woman who runs the corner shop near my house dialled 999 when she saw a group of men tampering with an ATM at six o'clock in the morning; they were rather busy, the police told her, and asked if she could get a bit nearer to see what the men were up to.

As a direct result, my bank card was cloned and almost £1200 stolen from my current account, and the same thing happened to several of my neighbours. I reported the fraud to the police, who gave me a crime number, but I never heard from them again.

Indeed, as far as I can see, a great deal of police time these days is spent performing this one function: churning out crime numbers. They are useful when dealing with banks and insurance companies – I did eventually get the stolen money back from my bank – but too many officers seem to think they've done their job once a number has been issued.

On Monday, the officer taking my details worked his way through a list of largely irrelevant questions and failed to make a note of all the other petty crimes, or instances of antisocial behaviour, as I believe they are now called, which have taken place in my street during the last couple of years; my spare wheel has been stolen twice and my neighbours woke up one Saturday morning to find we'd all had our tyres slashed.

On that occasion, a civic-minded neighbour collected our details and rang the local police station, only to be told that each of us would have to report the incident individually. I tried and was put on hold for so long that I gave up, which is why I regard crime statistics with scepticism these days.

At this point you could be forgiven for thinking that what I'm talking about is minor stuff, too petty for the police to bother with, but most criminals are serial offenders who gain in confidence each time they face no sanction. When a short, muscular man spat at one of my friends and began chucking half bricks at us one sunny afternoon, I went to the police and gave them a detailed description of the assailant.

A community cop duly turned up at my house, assuring me that he very much wanted to speak to the individual concerned and give him some advice about "inappropriate behaviour" – anything else being too drastic an option, apparently. I wasn't at all surprised when a man matching the description I'd given was arrested not long afterwards after he tried to stab a couple of women.

It is not even the case, in my experience, that the police respond with alacrity when someone reports a serious offence. Two years ago, when an Islamic extremist threatened to kill me, the incident was "no-crimed" – police jargon for refusing to recognise that a crime has been committed – until I managed to involve the then Home Secretary.

After what seemed to me a very reluctant investigation, a district commander telephoned to tell me that the individual had been identified and I had no need to worry because he lived "in the far north". There is no recorded instance, I have to assume, of an Islamist being in possession of either a car or a railcard.

The Home Secretary, Jacqui Smith, agreed yesterday that changes are needed to make the police "more effective" at fighting crime. But it would be easy to underestimate the scale of the problem, which requires a wholesale change in the culture of the police.

Sir Ronnie Flanagan acknowledged as much, describing the service as "risk averse" and suggesting that individual officers are afraid to use their own judgement. All of this is true, but the most serious charge that can be levelled against the police is that they have forgotten that they are a public service.

That much is evident from the moment you walk into a police station and find yourself confronted not with an efficient and responsive crime-busting machine but a tortuous bureaucracy. No one wants to return to the era of Dixon of Dock Green, although a cup of tea and a kind word to elderly people in distress would not go amiss.

The real problem is that the police have stopped listening to us – and that's why so many people no longer regard them with respect or confidence.

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