The Editor, Sir:

There is a critical weakness in our government's crime control strategy. It is depending too much on formal/bureaucratic solutions and less on harnessing the tremendous potential of our culture, of ordinary people and their communities.

New and more cost-effective strategies should include creating a national part-time volunteer police reserve of about 9,000 persons along the lines of the military JNR. Additionally, the rural police should be increased by another 7,000 and about 4,000 special district constables trained and appointed for call-out when needed. All this at less than half the cost of increasing the JCF to 12,000 as planned. It is also bad economics to increase the JCF based on worst-case scenarios.

This policy would embed and multiply greater community support for the police, crime prevention and intelligence; oil the informal social control mechanisms, and attract the moral periphery to our core values. Additionally, this would provide dignified lifetime employment opportunities to 20,000 crime-prone youths and their families.

This strategy - not recycled tactics - would require a complete re-think of locations of police stations while opening small storefront/mobile and special-purpose police posts, based on community crime audits. It would deepen community-based policing, reverse the spread of rural violence and praedial larceny while giving more people a stake in stable urban and rural neighbourhoods.

Let's take more people aboard, Prime Minister. They can create a surprising chain reaction that could transform the landscape of affordable social crime control.

I am, etc.,

Harold Crooks