Ms Mountstevens has promised a fairer budget settlement "to put more bobbies on the beat".

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Bobbies were to give priority to the kind of offending that shaped local views about a neighbourhood.

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Why do we demand bobbies on the beat even when we know it is an incredibly inefficient way of catching criminals?

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Under a new government scheme, prosecutors have started working in police stations in order to help the bobbies get the paperwork right.

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Crime rates were well down, fear of felony was low and the citizenry could scarcely move without bumping into bobbies on the beat.

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Yet the recent spate of attacks will only increase the feeling in some quarters that one day Britain's bobbies may have to cross this Rubicon.

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Nowadays such forces are readier to fight protesters with distance weapons (such as rubber bullets) rather than grappling with them at close quarters, as British bobbies do.

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But Sir Peter once told me how he had seen bobbies among the T-shirted crowds of a summer community fete looking more like Robocop than Dixon of Dock Green.

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First Minister Alex Salmond, whose government has pledged to boost additional police officers by 1, 000, has previously said that, if faced with having to cut costs, he would put "bobbies before boundaries".

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