It's nice to have good neighbours.

Young Gerry, who manages the jewellers' shop by the entrance to our church of St Michael's, Cornhill in the City of London, last week noticed a man behaving suspiciously - going in and out of church all day.

He rang the local police who turned up, found the man with tools for robbing the poor boxes and nicked him. What he was actually "tooled up" with, as they say in the burglary trade - one of the more profitable of trades in Britain today - was a long piece of wire with sticky tape at the end. Just what you need for inserting into the poor box and lifting five pound notes.

God knows how much money the church had been losing to this thief. The policeman advised us that nowadays you can install more secure boxes with a "drop safe" inside, beyond the reach of wire and sticky tape. These will probably cost us about £200, but it will be worth it in the long run.

So you might think I'd be chuffed? Not really. The policeman who caught the thief said: "It makes me angry because nothing will happen to him. Of course, he'll be summoned to court, but he probably won't even turn up. And if he did, he'd be discharged without penalty. So all I get is hours of paperwork back at the station and our thief will be back robbing churches inside the week."

Everyone I talk to is apprehensive about the inexorable rise in crime, yet the authorities try to reassure the public by telling us that this fear is actually only a "false perception." They trot out statistics from the British Crime Survey to prove that crime is in fact going down.

But the BCS is deeply flawed because, unbelievably, it omits serious crimes such as murder and rape, and does not take into account crimes against people under 16 and pensioners. So the BCS overlooks those areas of criminal activity that most worry law-abiding citizens. The numbers of murders and rapes are actually increasing.

The outrageous ride-by shooting to death of 11- year-old Rhys Jones shocked even the most sunny-minded optimists - except the metropolitan liberals and lefties, the chattering classes, who sneer that it's only conservatives and fascist reactionaries who harp on about the rise in crime. But 18 children have been murdered by guns or knives in London alone in the last eight months. The BBC has just reported that 3,000 crimes are committed each year by children under the age of ten.

Guns and knives are available everywhere for the asking, and the young thugs who make up the lawless gangs which turn our town centres into no-go areas in the evenings are certainly availing themselves of them. Youngsters are being knifed or shot just for their mobile phone or ipod.

In many places in Britain today we see drug and alcohol-fuelled anarchy. The criminals are secure in their lawlessness because they know that it is extremely unlikely they will be caught and that, even if they are caught, they will not be punished. There are people in Liverpool who know who killed Rhys, but they won't "grass" because they live in fear of revenge by the gangs.

So the law is held in contempt by thousands of thugs and thieves. We don't need more barmy initiatives such as the latest wheeze, the so-called Acceptable Behaviour Contracts.

We need policemen to be out on the street catching criminals and we need the laws we already have to be strictly enforced. If the prisons are full, build more - as many as it takes. All it needs for evil to prosper is for the good people to do nothing.