How much longer can we expect to see criminals treated with kid gloves while the victims suffer?

I would ask Lord Woolf but have no desire to choke on anything I might bring up when he replies.

It's not just the police and courts who are soft - landlords are, too.

As one Whitehawk resident said on television, "What can you do?", meaning that Brighton and Hove City Council, by refusing to evict anti-socials and criminals from its flats and houses, was of no more use than the forces of law and order in maintaining a decent quality of life in the area - hence the large minority of armed, violent, drug-dealing yobbos in his locality who can get away with whatever they want.

In my part of the city, too, anti-social neighbours are rarely evicted.

My own housing officer even said recently that starting any such proceedings would make one notorious character even more dangerous.

So much for the housing inspectorate's one-star rating for "good liaison with tenants".

The council is so laid-back about these people - often lazily renamed "special needs" tenants - that it even ignores vicious homophobes, despite the useful election propaganda it would generate in gay Brighton this May by cracking down on them.

This attitude mirrors local "spin policing" perfectly, whereby officers drone on at public meetings about how safe the minorities are now and the audience just ignores them because they know it's all rubbish.

Straight, gay, black or white, you're only safe until the end of the meeting, then - wham! - back to reality.

So why should thugs and criminals alone be protected? Surely an extra clause should be added to the Human Rights Act, promoting the rights of victims too?

Human rights lawyers cannot reasonably object to such an amendment - after all, they would be making twice as much money as they do now by representing both the prosecution and the defence.

Then both the police and the landlords could have their socks sued off by the long-suffering public when they again fail to protect the human rights of the decent majority.

-Ian Hills, Blackman Street, Brighton