Police chief suggests burglaries shouldn’t be investigated if victims left their windows or doors open

A POLICE chief has been slammed after saying his force should consider not investigating burglaries at homes where doors or windows had been left open.

Phil Kay, Assistant Chief Constable at Leicestershire Police, made things worse by comparing burglary victims and obese NHS patients.

His words come just one year after the very same force refused to attend call-outs at burgled houses with odd numbers in a ridiculous cost-cutting measure.

The money-saving pilot was introduced to assess the effectiveness of sending forensic officers to potential crime scenes, and ran for three months.

In an interview with the , Mr Kay said some students living in the town were victims of “preventable” break-ins because they thoughtlessly left doors or windows open.

He told the paper: “What the National Health Service will say is ‘we are not going to operate on you because your body mass is too high - they have not helped themselves to prevent an illness’.

“Yet if people leave doors or windows open there is an expectation the police will investigate."

He continued: “I would far rather my officers were spending their time preventing crime, protecting the public and focusing on other stuff than things that are preventable.”

Kay said burglars often target student homes because of the high likelihood they will contain iPads, expensive laptops and smartphones.

He said: “I am not suggesting we have any plans to change what we do but I pose that as a question.