This may be by getting the burglars into arrest referral schemes, by dealing with them through drug testing and treatment orders, or by treating them in prison. It could also cut car crime. Hellawell believes that it is often the long-term drug abuser who lays behind the statistic that one in three stolen cars are never recovered. The vehicles are broken up to raise cash often to pay for drugs. In Bradford, back during the riots, when I was chief constable there, we reduced burglary in one year by 62 per cent in a very sensitive area by targeting prolific criminals and picking up on the root cause of why they were doing that.
Some people are bad people, but a lot of people are driven to it by all sorts of reasons.
That's why I started putting money into arrest referral schemes, treatment programmes and got drug workers into the cells. It is a lesson which his fellow chief constables are beginning to learn. The drugs czar believes it will have a major impact when there is a network of arrest referral schemes across every police force in the country. But he realises that it is not a short-term solution. It will be at least two to three years before substantial numbers are going through the courts' drug testing and treatment programmes or the rapidly expanding schemes being run in prisons.