Last summer our local paper ran a story about the police being terribly short manned and that was the reason it took them 45 minutes or so to respond to a 999 call where a woman was being beaten up in the street. And why they couldn't police a small village just outside the main town.

Within a couple of weeks of this story there were 2 police cars parked just off the main road by my house. Two were using the speed gun (over the roof of a parked car so they were hidden) and an officer was waving people into the side road to be booked out of sight.

Really annoyed me how they hadn't got the manpower to deal with either aforementioned situations but had plenty to book people for speeding They were there a matter of days after the road was reduced from a 40mph to a 30mph limit.