They won't even investigate if you've lost something now. I had my shed recently broken into, and multiple tools stolen.

Their response was "This isn't an emergency. We don't have the resources to follow this up. I hope you have home insurance".

My local police force won't even answer burglary or theft calls any more. They have an automated service which gives you a crime reference number over the phone!

"Press 1 for a burglary crime number... press 2 for a theft from the person, for example a mobile phone... press 3 for the loss of an item..."

Option nine is "Minor assault against the person".

The non-emergency number (101) just give you the phone number for the automated service...

Did I mention it's a premium-rate number?

And yet Hammond thought it was quite appropriate to recently raise the 40% tax cut-off to £50k [1] giving an average increase of £390 a year to that bracket, a 1% cut in corporate tax [2], and all the while overall funding for the police has fallen by about 20% when accounting for interest in the past 8 years [3].

I earn to benefit from these tax cuts, and I still think that decision was beyond ludicrous - as does everyone else I know who is set to gain from it. It truly baffles me that we're approaching a period of increasing poverty, where crime will inevitably rise, and the police are getting gutted like this.

[1] https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2018/oct/30/budget-incom...

[2] https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/rates-and-allowan...

[3] https://fullfact.org/crime/police-funding-england-and-wales/

> Their response was "This isn't an emergency.

I hope you weren't calling 999 - 101 would have been the appropriate number.

I did call through 101. I was only roughly summarising what they said. I asked if they would come around to inspect the damage and I think the exact reply was something along the lines of "Unfortunately we can only do police call outs for emergencies now. The best we can do is file a report over the phone."

In the third case it's not you who's been defrauded. You're still just the victim of copyright infringement. You'd be bringing it to the attention of the police because the investor had been defrauded, at which point the police might actually pay attention depending on who the investor is..