Public funding of £1.2 million for the Brighton & Hove Anti-Victimisation Initiative will end this autumn.

The purpose of the AVI was to encourage certain sections of the community such as ethnic minorities, domestic-violence victims and victims of homophobia to report crimes.

I am a gay man and my initial feeling was the AVI was a good idea.

But then I decided to look beyond the soundbites and try to find out how successful the AVI has been in achieving criminal convictions - surely the ultimate benchmark of an expensive law-enforcement initiative.

£1.2 million is a lot of public money for an experiment so I asked Brighton Police how the AVI had performed with regard to homophobic crimes.

They advised me (in a letter dated July 18, 2002 from DCI Martin Cheeseman) that between early 2001 and May 2002, 150 homophobic incidents had been reported to the AVI. Of these, "some 30 have been detected".

Assuming "detected" means solved, this is a 20 per cent success rate, or an 80 per cent failure rate, depending on how you look at it.

In light of these statistics, I feel the decision to stop funding the AVI is the right one. Spend the money on ensuring all trainee police officers receive adequate training to enable them to deal will all sections of the community. We need equal policing for the entire community.

Initiatives focussing only on certain sections of the community, as the outgoing AVI does, may cause the general populace to feel disregarded and neglected.

-Jay Nemes, Montpelier Street, Brighton