SIR – A recent crime review confirms that most people in England and Wales feel that rights for criminals are put before those of victims.

For too long we law-abiding taxpayers have not only suffered at the hands of criminals and yobs, but also by the very people we pay extortionate amounts of money to protect us from these scum; by handing down far too lenient sentences for the crimes committed.

Our police are marvellous, but how is it publicly reassuring to send them out risking life and limb to arrest and inevitably release the same people they apprehended the week before?

Watch any British police TV documentary whereby the police go to the same painstaking trouble just for us to be told at the end that, even with stark TV camera evidence, those arrested were later either given a paltry reprimand or even let off for crimes that in the not too distant past would have carried a long custodial sentence.

The system is a complete joke that needs restarting from scratch. In the meantime we, like the defiant lawbreakers, need to demand from the Government our human rights to protection; after all, we pay their wages.

Saeed Shah, Harewood Street, Bradford