The Police Aren’t the Problem. The System Is.

Every farmer has a story. The quad bike that vanished from a locked shed overnight. The GPS steering unit stripped off the tractor cab in a field, gone before anyone noticed. The fly-tipped mattress and fridge dumped in the ditch that nobody will take responsibility for. And after it happens, the same frustration follows: why didn’t the police catch them? Why does nobody ever get charged? It’s easy to conclude the police simply aren’t bothered about rural crime. 

In episode 22 of Close the Farm Gate, Frank Cannon and Charlie Frank make the case that this frustration, while understandable, is aimed at the wrong target. The problem isn’t that individual officers don’t care about your farm. It’s that the system behind them was never built to cope with the crime we’re seeing today. 

Consider this: there are 49 separate police forces operating across the UK, each with its own budget, its own priorities, and its own way of doing things. A criminal gang stealing GPS units in one county can cross a border and become somebody else’s problem, quite literally, with different data, different lessons learned, and different levels of investment thrown at rural crime depending on where you happen to farm. 

Then there’s training. Frank shares a startling comparison in the episode: a British Army colonel receives 72 weeks of leadership development over the first 15 years of their career. A chief superintendent in the Metropolitan Police, doing a broadly comparable job, gets a fraction of that, sometimes as little as two or three weeks. That’s not a criticism of the officers themselves. It’s evidence that the structure they’re operating within hasn’t kept pace with the scale of the job. 

This is what pushed Frank to spend three months researching and writing a detailed paper on reforming UK policing, off the back of a Home Office white paper that itself admitted the current system is “not fit for purpose.” He explains his thinking using a telescope analogy that’s genuinely one of the most useful ideas in the episode. 

A while back, Frank created something called The Demeter Initiative, looking at rural crime from one end of the telescope: the private security industry’s perspective. The question was, what value can commercial security consultants and crime reduction advisers bring to the table, working alongside police, to reduce the risk of rural crime before it happens? 

Writing the police reform paper meant turning the telescope around and looking through the other end: the policing perspective. Instead of private security asking “how can we help the police,” Frank asked “how could policing itself be restructured to make that help easier to use?” Counter-terrorism policing and retail crime policing already lean on private sector expertise in a formal, structured way. Frank’s argument is that rural crime deserves the same recognition. 

That’s really the sequence Frank wants to see. First, get policing to formally recognise and work with commercial security consultants, so the reactive response farmers rely on today, the call after the theft has already happened, is properly supported and augmented rather than stretched thin. Then, once that partnership exists, channel it through The Demeter Initiative to shift the whole conversation away from responding after a crime and towards reducing the likelihood of it happening at all: better designed equipment, better shared intelligence, and better use of everyone’s eyes and ears across the countryside, not just the odd patrol car passing by. 

For farmers, growers, foresters and land managers listening, the takeaway isn’t complicated. Stop pinning your hopes on the police alone to solve rural crime. It was never designed as a single-force job, and the current structure makes that painfully clear. What does help is understanding where the gaps are and why, so that when you invest in your farmyard, your machinery, or a security review, you’re doing it with your eyes open rather than waiting for someone else to fix a system that’s been broken for years. 

There’s also a practical thread worth listening for: how thieves are already exploiting the gap between old-style manual farming and new autonomous technology, why fly-tipping enforcement still doesn’t have a proper reporting hotline despite tens of millions being spent on it, and how skills already paid for through the defence budget could be redirected to support rural policing without a single soldier appearing on a country lane. 

Frank has sent his paper to several policing organisations and the Home Office directly, and you can find it by searching his name on LinkedIn. Listen to episode 22 of Close the Farm Gate to hear the full conversation, and if it changes how you think about protecting your farmyard, share it with someone else who farms, grows, or manages land. As always: stay safe, stay curious, and close the farm gate.