Dads' Army vigilantes are not a solution

When the concept of Neighbourhood Watch was first mooted it had to be explained with some care to the more enthusiastic of its early recruits that it merely entailed keeping a neighbourly watch on one's home area.

In the event of the volunteer seeing anything suspicious they were required to do nothing more than to report this to their Neighbourhood Watch coordinator, who in turn would contact the police.

As such, it has worked well.

The whole process was, however, wonderfully caricatured in the Eighties television series Ever Decreasing Circles with Richard Briers' adroitly-observed character assuming a quasi-policing role greatly in excess of a Coordinator's duties; sticking coloured marker pins in a wall-map of his estate and referring to criminals in police parlance as "Chummy."

The process was taken to even greater lengths at a never-to-be forgotten pioneer recruitment evening in Bexhill. Would-be volunteers (none of them less than 75) kept asking the exasperated police officer whether they would go out on patrol and whether they would be issued with uniforms.

The wholly unintentional comic punch-line to this exchange came when (for the umpteenth time) the veteran was told by the police officer that volunteers would NOT be required to tackle villains ("Chummy").

Dragging himself with difficulty to his feet and wagging an arthritic finger, the veteran exploded: "That's very hard to accept when your hands have been trained to kill!"

It looked and sounded for all the world like a television sit-com come to life. But it happened in Bexhill.

Now this treasured memory of a news reporting experience has been destroyed by a single national newspaper headline.

"Police your own streets" screamed Tuesday's Daily Mail over a story about a leaked memo said to be have been sent by Hertfordshire Chief Constable Frank Whiteley, who speaks for the Association of Chief Constables, suggesting that Neighbourhood Watch members could patrol crime-hit estates at night.

Harnessing the goodwill and community spirit of the public to keep a neighbourly watch and to report suspicious activity is one thing.

Encouraging people who are without training, without equipment and without back-up to do anything approaching a "patrol" is another.

What, for example, would today's equivalent of that eminently game but aged volunteer from Neighbourhood Watch's pioneer era have done in the situation which we report this week? Police officers had to use Captor pepper spray and their batons to disarm a man walking the streets with a machete.

Members of the public had already phoned the police. The town's CCTV cameras had homed in on him.

All we needed for the perfect recipe for disaster was the fool-hardy intervention of a pensioner trying to re-live his military service.