A neighbour in our new street came round to ask for a cheque towards a private security patrol. “Wouldn’t that undermine the police?” I asked, sensing a threat to my bank balance. “What police?” he replied. It’s true. There are police boards sprouting all over our area (“Did you see? Incident, stabbing, assault”), but no police. London is becoming a city of vigilantes. The well-off are hiring uniformed guards, and the teenagers down the road are arming themselves with knives — because no one else is going to defend them. We have seen the results of that: five teenagers stabbed to death in the past four weeks.

We are giving up on the police because they seem to have given up themselves. The sheer quantity of blogging by disillusioned bobbies is a sign of just how blue parts of the thin blue line are feeling. PC David Copperfield drily documents the daily grind in his book Wasting Police Time. DC Johnno Hills, who quit the Brighton force this weekend after complaining in the Sunday Express about bureaucracy, has started a petition for police reform.

The latest Home Office figures show that a fifth of officer time is spent on paperwork. This week Sir Alastair McWhirter, retiring as Chief Constable of Suffolk, complained that it can take 56 people and 128 different bits of paper to bring one assault case to court. Well, thank you, Sir Alastair. Now you can go gentle into that index-linked retirement.

But where were you in April 2005, when the Government introduced stop and account (as opposed to stop and search) forms? These require an officer asking anyone to account for themselves to fill in 40 questions. Yes, 40. The consequences should have been obvious. I’m not surprised that the cops I do pass refuse to make eye contact. They’re probably petrified of becoming a party to my personal information.

The police and the public are still on the same side. But it doesn’t always feel like it. A recent ICM poll found that trust in the police is sliding. The official insistence that crime is falling does not help, when people feel it is not. Criminologists say that the most reliable measure of the true rate of violence in society is stranger murder — and killings by strangers have increased by a third between 1997 and 2005.

The police have more money than ever before, and more officers — 140,000 at the last count. But they are not having a commensurate impact. This has stoked a dangerous defeatism among criminologists and within the Home Office: the belief that rising crime is a fact of life that the justice system can do little about.

The extraordinary decline of crime in big American cities in the 1990s should be a reason for optimism about policing. But many criminologists there have tried to explain it largely as a function of demographic shifts that produced fewer young men. Others credit schemes to overcome the “moral poverty” of fatherless homes and tough neighbourhoods.

Yet a powerful analysis by Franklin Zimring, Professor of Law at Berkeley, finds both theories to be overdone. His new book, The Great American Crime Decline, finds that neither demographics nor poverty alleviation get anywhere near to explaining the three-quarters drop in lethal youth violence, for example, that took place in New York after 1990. Professor Zimring’s message is positive: that policing can reduce crime and that crime, as he says, “is not hardwired into the ecology of modern life or the cultural values of high-risk youth”. Within a generation, the behaviour of young men has completely changed — because of better policing.

We know this is true. We have seen it in Manchester, where zero-tolerance policing reduced stranger killings from 37 in 1999 to 5 in 2005. Last week’s government crime and policing review made some of the right noises, promising to reorganise the force and cut red tape. But the breathless repetition of old ideas gave little hope of any real change from a Government whose latest wheeze has been to make officers agree every single charge they make with the Crown Prosecution Service. This has helped the CPS to meet its targets for successful prosecutions, but created mindboggling delays that leave citizens bereft of protection.

How do we return pride and power to the police? A Conservative police reform task force this week published an excellent analysis of the problems, with a sensible range of solutions. The most fundamental of these is to roll back the dead hand of central control by directly electing police commissioners. In the past, this idea has been met with defeatism: it wouldn’t “take” in the UK, or it would politicise the force. But the police are already politicised. It is time to consider direct accountability, not simply because there is a gulf with citizens, but also because a radical change in management is needed.

New York’s police commissioner was, notoriously, as tough on his officers as he was on criminals. Every week the most senior officers detailed the crime in their precincts and told him how they were tackling it. Once almost half of them had been fired, there was no confusion about the objective. The NYPD was not about printing customer satisfaction surveys, but about keeping people safe.

That kind of reform will not be welcomed by a unionised, cosy and conservative service. Even the bloggers who are quick to moan about paperwork may be less keen to acquire public accountability. But the Tories must stick to their guns. There are many brave, talented police officers who work tirelessly. But they should be doing so on behalf of the public, not as the claims department of the insurance industry or the administrative arm of the CPS.

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