“I RESPECT your position and I appreciate where you’re coming from. But I’m just trying to be honest with you, yeah? There’s really nothing we can do about it.” So the policeman blathered, as the hooded mob of yobs who, bored of firing fireworks at my neighbour, started on cars instead. “You need to understand our perspective, OK?” I hung up.

The police should not act like friends. They should be tough sons-of-bitches, carrying out that first duty of government: protecting citizens. David Blunkett’s White Paper on such “non-serious crime” — inanely titled: Building Communities; Beating Crime — will reduce the police to social workers.

Look at the touchy-feely language of Tuesday’s proposals. In new, improved “national reassurance policing”, “community support officers” will aid “neighbourhood inspectors”. These inspectors, instead of catching criminals, will be “responsible for cultivating contacts in the community (and) identifying residents’ concerns”. The tone suggests crime is a matter of perspective, policing a question of comforting. Furthermore, police should be “on first-name terms with residents”. Kiss authority figures goodbye, then. This is “user-friendly policing”. We will “feel safer”, “be treated better” and be satisfied with our “service”!

But quality-of-life crime isn’t a matter of perception, and in treating it as such Mr Blunkett misses the first principle of New York’s anti-crime revolution. In processing the graffiti writers, the scooter-stealers, the public pot-smokers and the brawlers, cops there found that they were carrying guns, hard drugs or things of an equally “take him downtown” nature. And downtown, they would find that this anti-social type had a criminal record. By prosecuting the “non-serious crime”, you catch the serious criminals. Someone who is willing to jump a ticket barrier is willing to break the law in “serious” ways. The White Paper, with its “non-serious” crime, trivialises anti-social behaviour.

Mr Blunkett wants to “go back to a time when you expected the police to be part of the community and the community to be part of policing”. But that Britain has gone. Crime statistics prove that Britain is like the NYC of the 1980s. It has to be policed as such: cops need to be cops with authority, not social workers with a cup of tea.

Julia Magnet is senior fellow at Civitas, the think tank,