I ALMOST tackled a burglar this week. Well, he wasn’t actually burgling my house, he was burgling my holidaying neighbour’s house four doors down. Not that I’m not brave. Though I do always tend to describe my bravery with a double negative.

It started with a call, late at night from my neighbour’s alarm company, asking me to meet the police outside his house. After five minutes of fumbling in kitchen drawers, plantpots and an old biscuit barrel, I recovered his front-door keys, and proceeded bravely down the road, with my significantly taller wife beside me. Outside we found no police, so decided to go in. I’d just put the key in the lock when I saw a flashlight upstairs and a figure run into a bedroom.

What goes through a person’s mind in those circumstances? Could he, the intruder, use reasonable force to prevent me from preventing him carrying out the burglary? Sorry, that’s what goes through a lawyer’s mind. My wife is a person, not a lawyer. Her take on the situation was far more practical. There’d been a spate of knife crimes in our area of North London in the weeks preceding the burglary. What if he, or they, had a knife?

Now, I’ve always got on well with burglars. Admittedly, my previous contact with them had been on a strictly professional footing. And this encounter didn’t seem to fall into that category. Even if he was a former client, the chances of him accepting my advice to disarm and leave peacefully seemed slim. We decided to rush back home, dial 999, tell the police that there was an intruder in the house, “right there, right now”. We returned to the street, alerted several neighbours, and waited a safe distance from the house. And we waited. We waited for about half an hour, breaking our vigil only to call the police once again. After around 40 minutes, we heard the sound of breaking glass from the house and saw a hooded figure emerge with what looked like a computer box in a bag.

All five of us looked around anxiously for the police car. I wondered, fleetingly, if there was a defence of reasonable cowardice I could raise with my neighbour. What if I was deemed by him to be someone who’d demonstrated the use of excessive and unreasonable timidity? No, that wasn’t going to be me. So, mentally mouthing the words Starsky and Hutch, I jumped into my car, executed a jerky seven-point turn and followed the thief. It was only about 50 yards, two grass verges and a railway track before I lost him.

Ten minutes or so later the police arrived. No real explanation for the delay, but once I’d let them in it triggered six police man-hours of checking the premises, calling out two SOCOs (scene of crimes officers) who dusted for prints around the broken rear window, and actually found plenty. Unfortunately they were all glove prints; damn clever burglar — no wonder he wanted the computer.

It was all rather depressing. If the police can’t catch a burglar who stays in a house for 40 minutes under observation, it’s pretty bad. If five middle-class neighbours can’t confront a burglar, that’s pretty weedy too. Seven years ago I was caught up in a bank robbery. I didn’t really want to do it, but the money was good. I jest, but on that occasion, I did intervene. I don’t know why, but I did. This time and a spate of knife crimes later, I didn’t, and I feel bad. If I and my neighbours are any kind of barometer, a corrosive fear of crime is certainly rising.

The author is a barrister and presenter on Radio 4 Law in Action

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