SIR: With reference to the scandalous car crime figures, my son followed all PC Ashall's advice: visible and invisible car devices, stop lock etc, but still had his car stolen two weeks ago. It disappeared without trace, this for the second time in two years, while he was in work. He now faces two years still to pay on a bank loan, increased insurance payments and a difficult time getting to work etc.

What is being done to combat these crimes? Not much it would seem. Register the registration number on a computer and hope a member of the public will report it parked or trashed somewhere. Decoy cars should be used everywhere, with tracker devices in them to catch the thieves and identify the garages where a lot of the stolen cars finish up being re-sprayed or stripped down every week of the year. And when they are caught, the criminals should not just get a smacked hand from our courts.

When I worked for the Metropolitan Police, every district had its own police station, with officers patrolling their beats. This is what we should be looking at now, not some high-tech station miles away, and the closure of local stations.

The criminals in Bolton will have a field day.

A very angry mum

(Name and

address supplied)

Converted for the new archive on 14 July 2000. Some images and formatting may have been lost in the conversion.