This is not the the way the Home Secretary means the policy to be followed of course, but it is what will happen.

The callers have to be from different families, so you can bet that our analysts at FHQ will be working on how to prove that callers are distantly related. We will also probably work on the definition of “street” so we can skew the calls that way too. After over a decade of New Labour targets, our senior managers are experts at this kind of thing.

The other option is to cunningly put all the calls we DO attend down under the ASB banner (it’s not hard as most incidents involve idiots behaving badly) thus increasing the % of successfully attended ASB calls.

This is the way we manage things in the UK police. With a population of 70 million, many of whom we know nothing about because we are not even sure where they come from, and the lowest police numbers since 2002, we have little choice.

On the ever-so-sexy subject of the public deciding what the police should be doing, please remember that the only mail bag we get which is bigger than the one complaining about police speed enforcement, is the one we get complaining about people speeding.

See what I did there?