Why can't the police do their job?

A knife, glistening with fresh blood, lies on a London street. There can be few more potent images to convey the agony of a great city caught in the eye of a crime storm, reeling from the daily hammer blows of robbery, carjacking, shootings and murder. The knife was used in a fight between two teenage girls near Clapham Junction, yet another bloody episode in a run of violence that has put London on edge. Everywhere people are asking what - in the name of sanity - are the police doing? Why can't the police stop it? Why don't they get out on the streets? It is estimated that only four in 10 officers actually operate on the streets.

The Home Secretary David Blunkett complains about low detection rates and warns he will take matters into his own hands if London is not made safe. Metropolitan Police Commissioner Sir John Stevens blames the courts; the Lord Chief Justice Lord Woolf tells magistrates to soft-pedal on jail sentences. In the middle of this conflict is a population bewildered and often afraid of what is happening on the streets. I have spent much of this week at Wandsworth police station observing from the inside how the police are carrying out their job.

In Wandsworth, a London borough that has suffered some of the ugliest and most tragic violent crime of recent days, there is grave concern. There have been three murders in a matter of weeks in the borough. Robbery is running at unprecedented levels. Little more than one crime in 10 is solved. In their defence, the police say they are woefully short of officers, money to fund aggressive crimefighting is hard to find, and when they do make an arrest they are overwhelmed by bureaucratic criminal-justice procedures and are repeatedly snubbed by courts that free people the police say should be taken off the streets.

So what is the reality? In a cramped corner of Wandsworth's crumbling Victorian police station, three detectives pore over piles of fingerprint and DNA evidence. This is the Docket Squad, a specialist unit formed to hunt down burglars. They work exclusively on forensic evidence found at the scene of break-ins and thefts.

Since the squad was set up in August last year they have arrested 121 people. It might be thought that, with a record like this, burglary has ceased to be a major problem in Wandsworth. Sadly, that is not the case. It is currently running at an average of 14 a day. So what is happening?

Detective Sergeant Eirwyn Pritchard, head of the Docket Squad, countered my question with one of his own. Did I know what a DTTO was? It is, he said, a Drug Treatment and Testing Order, a sanction which is being used increasingly by the courts to deal with defendants who commit crimes to feed a drug habit. Under these orders, a convicted person is not sent to prison, as long as they turn up once or twice a week for a test that shows they are staying off drugs.

Consider the case of Johnny X. He is a prolific and expert burglar who needs to satisfy a £300-a-day crack-cocaine habit. He has been in and out of jail, but the last time DS Pritchard's men put him before a court, the judge decided he would benefit from a DTTO. Three months later, DNA evidence linked Johnny X to a string of burglaries. Now, he's disappeared.

"This is happening over and over again," DS Pritchard said. "We are arresting them, but the courts are desperately trying not to fill up the prisons. Three strikes and you're out? Forget it. We constantly see people walking free who should be locked up. Crack cocaine fuels most of the crime in this borough. When our arrests reached 85, we ran a check on the people we had charged. All but four of them were addicts."

In another dingy room of the Dickensian police station the Robbery Squad is checking the list of crimes to be investigated that day. There are eight, slightly down on the 10-a-day average of last month. Crack cocaine features in the conversations here, too. Paul Burn, a PC working as a plain-clothes detective, tells this story: "A white girl and a black guy were carjacking on Bedford Hill in Balham. She jumps out into the street as if she's in distress, stops a car and he leaps out, smashes the windows with a hammer and holds the driver up with a knife. "They did this at least twice, but we got a lead and arrested the guy. He got bail, failed to appear and vanished. He was spotted on the street, arrested again and - you won't believe this - he got bail again. While he was out he was arrested for a particularly nasty burglary. It was well known that he was a crackhead, but the courts don't seem to realise what they are doing. This is not an isolated incident. We all have stories like this."

No one is surprised by police officers' complaints about the courts. They have been saying for years that it is the legal system which is, ultimately, soft on crime. For many this will sound like an old excuse. What cannot be excused is the waste of time and effort the Met seems prepared to put up with.

Witness the place they call the writing room in Wandsworth police station. It is a dark, grubby space furnished with a few creaking desks and old office chairs spewing chunks of foam rubber. This is where police officers type their reports into computers. The machines look like museum pieces and, indeed, some are older than many officers who use them. It is seems incredible that an organisation like the Metropolitan Police relies on such equipment for its vital tools. It gets worse.

The Met's computers are based on a first-generation system. The two key functions are crime reporting and crime intelligence. These two systems do not talk to each other. To go from a crime report to criminal intelligence involves leaving one system and logging into the other. It is currently not possible for a detective to feed a suspect's name into his computer and use one programme to check everything the police know about him. And the computers are slow. I asked a detective at Battersea to call up a crime statistic, a perfectly straightforward entry from the database. It took six minutes to raise the information.

Officers have been promised a new system which will streamline the currently onerous processes. But that's in the future. Meanwhile, at a time when London is clamouring for more action from its police, individual officers are spending more and more of their time bogged down in office work and bureaucracy, grappling with ancient computers and a user-hostile system.

London is awash with drugs; they are in the background of most crime in Wandsworth. Yet when police seize drugs they are obliged to embark on a crazy paperchase. The substances have to be checked by a laboratory before a suspect can be charged. The officer in the case has to fill out three separate forms in triplicate, which then have to be signed by a detective inspector who is only usually available during the day. Then the forms have to be taken to Wandsworth police station for the signature of a specialist crime officer. Then a formal message has to be sent to Scotland Yard. Only then can the drugs be sent for analysis.

"It usually takes about eight weeks before we get the results," one officer said. "By that time the suspect has probably been released on bail and has either disappeared or has committed more crimes."

Vital equipment is often in short supply. A team heading for a special operation in Battersea was kept hanging around for more than an hour because they couldn't find a vehicle in which to travel. They had been given £6,000 to spend on surveillance equipment for their project, but the buying process is so tied up in red tape the equipment is unlikely to arrive before the operation ends.

Does London deserve this? The police officers we rely on feel they are fighting crime with one hand tied behind their back. Known criminals, freed by the courts, sneer at them on the streets. A young detective, Jane Malett, told me: "We want to get out there. That's what we joined for, to do in-your-face policing. We are desperate to get out on to the streets and catch the bad guys."

They know who they are. Photographsof the so-called Prominent Nominals - PromNoms - decorate the walls of every CID office. Wandsworth officers are currently looking out for 70 individuals suspected of being active in street crime and burglaries. So why don't they round them up? "We need evidence," a Battersea officer said. "Some of these people are smart and sophisticated. We need the sort of hard proof you can only get from long hours of surveillance and that costs a lot of time and money."

No one knows this better than Martin Jauch, Wandsworth's chief superintendent. Reorganisation of the Met's manpower has seen his complement of officers cut from more than 580 to 558. Resources are on a knife-edge. There was jubilation among his officers this week when they managed to find £18,000 to buy their first number-plate recognition machine, one of the most useful tools in modern crime fighting.

But Chief Supt Jauch can claim some success. Last year his officers closed down an open drugs market on the Winstanley Estate in Battersea, home of the So Solid Crew garage collective, widely blamed for inciting youngsters to crime. In a complex operation involving undercover officers, nine individuals were arrested and subsequently convicted of dealing drugs. Five crack houses were put out of business.

Now, Wandsworth council has made available £273,000 which the police are using to fund a three-year project aimed at keeping drugs off the estate. Most of the money pays for overtime. It may come as a shock to most Londoners to learn that one of Wandsworth's most successful assaults on crime was made courtesy of a council grant, but it could not happen any other way.

The police say they need more resources to take the fight to the criminal. Mr Blunkett is wary of spending more money. The police want the courts to think the unthinkable and fill the prisons to overflowing if that's what it takes to keep miscreants off the streets. Lord Woolf says no.

London has a long relationship with its police service and this may be a defining moment, a point at which we decide whom we trust. A hard look at the operation indicates major flaws and weaknesses that must be addressed. But ultimately it is the police, the men and women on the streets, who can stop London hurting. They must be given all it takes to succeed. If they don't, they will never be forgiven.