What is the police’s obsession with reducing so-called “fear of crime”?

It is bad enough that so little real information about the extent of crime in our community is released without the Bradford District Safer Neighbourhoods and Partnerships launching a new policy which will involve keeping Neighbourhood Watch groups in the dark about crimes committed outside their immediate area – as if criminals restricted themselves to specific streets.

The group claims that releasing details of crimes committed on a ward-by-ward basis is “counter-productive” because some people might think there is more crime going on than there actually is. How is that counter-productive other than in persuading people they have nothing to worry about and making the police look as if they are catching more criminals than they are?

It’s a story newspapers are very familiar with. We rely on police to issue details of logged crime to enable us to tell our readers – the residents of Bradford and district – exactly what is going on in their community, but the information released barely scratches the surface.

And yet police are very quick to use the media when they want help tracking an offender, when they are seeking witnesses or information.

This “need to know” policy smacks of nanny-ism and has to stop. Our readers are adults and they are perfectly capable of working out for themselves what the risk of crime is from an open and honest supply of information.

It is not the job of police to tell them how to think.