I had been a driver for about two years when, one evening, I was waiting on a main road to turn right.

I had my indicator on but the driver of the car travelling behind me failed to notice I had stopped and went straight into the back of me.

A witness called the police who arrived shortly afterwards. The first question they asked was why I had called them. After this, they proceeded to treat me as if I was the criminal and had caused the accident and, at the end of the day, they did nothing about the other driver driving dangerously with two children in the back without seat belts.

A few years later, I arrived home from work one night to discover I had been burgled. I called the police.

When they arrived they drank my tea, fingerprinted the front door (even though the burglar broke in through the window) and left saying they couldn't find any evidence. They did nothing.

During this time, my mother suffered serious harrassment from my father whom she had left. This went on for years as he followed her, verbally abused her, wrote threatening letters and made her life a misery.

She took the letters to the police who said they took this kind of harrassment very seriously. In the end, though, they never did anything and my father still sends my mother such letters once in a while.

Finally, the most recent and daunting of events took place. My mother was leaving her place of work in Brighton and was in a fairly busy car park when a man approached her from behind and demanded her car keys. At first, she thought he was joking but quickly realised he was serious.

She started shouting and screaming for help and eventually some passers-by and fellow workers came to her rescue. She suffered serious memory loss for the next few weeks and was signed off work due to post traumatic stress. This also left her with a fear of the public and people being behind her and, as she was not at work, she has also lost earnings.

Obviously, the police were called and spent a lot of time getting statements from witnesses and from my mother but I think we can all guess where this is going.

They advised my mother they would like to prosecute the man and just needed to get all the statements together first. But, in the end, after spending all that time working on this case, they did nothing.

It makes me really sad that the only people who are protected in this country are the criminals. Now I understand why there are so many.

-Name and address supplied