I wasn’t surprised to hear that six police officers raided a pub in Essex after a customer complained about the presence of 15 golliwogs on display behind the bar. After placing the dolls in evidence bags, the officers told the pub’s owner that they were investigating a possible ‘hate crime’. Needless to say, you’re lucky to get a visit from a single officer if you report a burglary in Essex, let alone six. In 2018-19, just 5 per cent of residential burglaries reported to Essex police resulted in someone being charged or summoned to court. It appears that the only way to get a full complement of officers to investigate a crime – not just in Essex, but anywhere – is to report it as a ‘hate crime’.

I live on what must be the most burgled street in Acton and the advice I give to my neighbours if their home is broken into is not to call the police straight away, but to grab a can of spray paint and daub the words ‘Trans women aren’t women’ on the outside of the house. Then, when reporting the break-in, make sure to tell the police about the ‘hateful’ messages your visitors left behind. In less than a minute, a van load of officers will be on your doorstep and a police helicopter will be hovering overhead.

I’m only half joking. In my street’s WhatsApp group, a month doesn’t go by without someone announcing they’ve been burgled. The most recent was a house on the other side of the road. The family returned from a weekend away to find a glass panel on their front door smashed and the bedrooms ransacked. The alarming thing was, the family had left their car in the driveway and discovered a pebble on the bonnet, which they suspect was a signal left by a ‘spotter’ to indicate the house was unoccupied. This suggests the local housebreakers are pretty well-organised. It was the third burglary on the street in eight weeks.

Since we moved to Acton in 2007, we’ve been burgled three times. The first time it happened, the intruder came in over the back wall and entered the house through the back door, which wasn’t locked because we were all upstairs. He swiped seven different Apple devices, which were all plugged in at our ‘charging station’ in the kitchen. The second time, we think a child squeezed in through a small window in the downstairs lavatory and then let in his accomplices. Caroline lost all her jewellery. The third time, in which they jemmied open the front door with a crowbar, the only thing stolen was my daughter’s laptop, which included all her A-level photography work.

The police responded well on the first occasion, not so well on the third. The stolen Apple devices included a phone that I was able to track down to a house about a mile away using ‘Find My iPhone’. I tipped off the police and, credit where credit’s due, they got it back for me. But they said there wasn’t enough evidence to prosecute because none of the other items were in the house and the person who had the phone claimed he’d bought it off a stranger. The third time we were broken into, Caroline called the police when she returned to the house by herself and found the door hanging off its hinges. She was asked if the intruders were still on the premises and said she had no idea, at which point the officer on the other end of the line told her to go in and have a look around. Not surprisingly, she declined.

After our neighbour reported the latest break-in, we decided to buy an Amazon Ring – a motion-activated CCTV camera you attach to the front of your house. After half a day’s faffing about, it’s fully operational and I get a notification on my phone every time someone’s at the front door. If I click on it, I can see who’s there and even speak to them via an intercom. It’s excellent for keeping an eye on the comings and goings of my teenage children – two of my 18-year-old son’s friends didn’t leave the house till 6 a.m. last Sunday! – but is unlikely to protect us from house-breakers. For one thing, you have to pay Amazon a subscription of £3.49 a month if you want to retrieve the recordings – something I hadn’t realised when I bought it – and for another, the burglars round here usually wear hoods and face masks. Still, I suppose it might act as a mild deterrent.

The drawback, of course, is the next time I’m burgled the police will be able to access the footage and see that it was me monkeying about with a spray can at the front of the house, daubing the house with ‘transphobic’ slogans. I’ll then be arrested for committing a hate crime.