The Dimming of The Blue Light?

This blog is no fan of cuts in public services in order to re-stimulate the economy, regarding the destruction of jobs and of spending power as an obviously absurd means to that end, and mindful of the private sector's dependence on those services. But their are thirty thousand more Police Officers today than there were in the Seventies. What do they do? If they did what we paid them to do, and patrolled the streets, then, among many other positive effects, no politician would dare suggest sacking forty thousand of them.