I THINK I’ve hit on a way of improving our worrying crime statistics.

If you’re anything like me, you’ll be progressively more worried by each new set of figures.

The other day I was reading some from the Office of National Statistics which included an 11 per cent rise in homicides and a 27 per cent increase in violence against the person.

In our neck of the woods over the last week, we’ve covered everything from party gate crashers running riot at a social hall in Highworth to some bloke in court who was arrested for shoplifting, used three cells as toilets and smeared his mess on the walls.

I was a bit bewildered by that one, to be honest. Surely the logical thing would have been to leave him in the one cell until he ran out of raw materials and then clean the prisoner and the cell with some suitable piece of equipment. A firehose, for example.

Anyway, being a deep thinker, I came up with a way of bringing the figures under control.

What we should do first, I decided, was re-categorise all but a very few crimes as non-emergencies.

The definition of a criminal emergency should be severely limited. It might include, for example, a man drenched head to foot in blood, revving a four-foot chainsaw, dribbling a severed human head for half a mile down a busy shopping street, booting it through a charity shop window and shouting: “Goooooallll!”.

Anything not of similar magnitude must be officially classified as a non-emergency.

Burglar alarm blaring for 12 hours straight? For all anybody knows, the occupants have been murdered in their beds? Non-emergency.

Drug abusers gathering in an alley at all hours of the day and might? The stench of whatever they’re smoking finds its way into about two dozen surrounding homes? Innocent people forced to breathe toxins? Non-emergency.

Drunks demanding cash and abusing anybody who fails to hand it over? Non-emergency.

If somebody wishes to report an emergency, they must call 999. If the thing they’re reporting is less serious than the bloke with the chainsaw I mentioned earlier, they must be severely chastised and accused of misusing the 999 service.

But how will this improve the crime statistics?, you might ask.

Well, here’s where the best bit of the strategy comes in. If somebody has a non-emergency to report, we make them call a different number. This will initially put them through one of those automated options lists everybody hates.

You know the sort of thing: “Press ‘nine’ if you’re losing the will to live”.

Any caller with the staying power to endure this process must be put through to a call centre staffed by people who mostly wouldn’t be able to distinguish the caller’s local area from a suburb of Carlisle.

Unless they live in Carlisle, of course, in which case they’d be put through to a call centre staffed by people who wouldn’t know Carlisle from Cincinnati. Before anybody at the call centre picks up, callers must be kept on hold for 10 minutes, 20 minutes, half an hour or however long it takes to make them hang up in disgust.

This will ensure crime figures are minimised. It won’t minimise actual crime, of course, but them’s the breaks.

Anyway, I was all set to suggest my strategy to the Home Office, but then last week I tried to report a crime and realised the Home Office was doing something very similar already.

What a load of rubbish

RESIDENTS wanting to use Swindon Borough Council’s garden waste collection service will soon see the annual cost go up from 40 to 50 quid.

I don’t know about you, but I think the rogue fly-tipping firms of this borough should have a whip-round and send every councillor who approved of the wheeze a little Christmas box.

After all, business for the fly-tippers is already brisk and it looks like becoming a lot more so.

Shame about the environment, though.

How about a dose of common sense?

GREAT Western Hospital night nurses are understandably a bit peeved.

They’re no longer allowed to use the car park closest to the building.

They say being forced to use the – admittedly much-needed – new staff car park on the outskirts of the site is perilous after dark.

They also point out that there are plenty of spaces in the public car park in the dead of night, so overcrowding isn’t an issue.

NHS bosses, meanwhile, insist the staff car park is well lit and has CCTV.

Clearly the bosses believe there is no significant danger. But what can they do to hammer home the message? Perhaps each of them could volunteer to be assigned, once a month, to stroll around the staff car park between midnight and 3am. They could be given a flask of Bovril to stave off the cold and a book to read under one of the excellent lights if they got bored.

I’m sure they’d jump at the chance to be seen leading from the front and mucking in with the ordinary workers.