Actions, not words needed.

ONE in three of our teenage schoolkids has carried a knife at some point in the past year.

This, according to a report from MPs, is because they feel in danger and the police offer them no protection.

The result is a nationwide plague of knife-wielding lawlessness which led, last year, to more than 5,000 serious stabbing injuries and 270 deaths.

The cost of knife crime, says the House of Commons Home Affairs Committee, has reached pounds 1.25 billion a year.

Now let's imagine that we took that money and spent it on providing police to make the streets safe so that youngsters did not feel the need to carry weapons.

If each copper cost us pounds 40,000 a year that cash would provide us with an extra 30,000 police.

Now imagine if these men and women did not spend most of their shifts filling in paperwork but were actually embedded in local communities.

Safe streets Surely it is incontrovertible that they could make a major difference to the safety of our streets.

Look at the results of an exercise in Essex where a squad of nine local coppers was deployed to stay on the case of known local burglars.

By keeping constantly in touch with 13 crooks they saw burglaries drop by over 40 per cent.

Now I am not suggesting that every known crook should have his or her own permanent police tail.

But surely we don't need any more of these kind of exercises to convince us that having enough police officers to stay in the face of the local scumbags will dramatically reduce levels of crime? And this in a frightening era that has so many decent citizens, particularly the elderly, living in fear behind their own front doors.

So why don't we stop producing reports and start producing the Bobbies?