Times letters: Tackling crime and the dire state of policing

Sir, It was good to see your leading article calling for a Royal Commission into the police service (Aug 12). It is 60 years since the last one was set up — before panda cars, before individual police radios and before terrorism and organised crime in any now recognisable form. The structures of the police service are wrong: why is there one force for Scotland and another for Bedfordshire? Its governance in the form of police and crime commissioners is a solution in search of a problem. And then there’s the farrago of the governance of the Met. The emphasis on police numbers prevents it employing people with appropriate skills to investigate the vast amount of crime that has moved on to the