Police excuses for not policing...

Following a conversation with Sergent Sutherland of Derbyshire Constabulary I am left with the following key points and conclusions:

1: Resource - "7 officers shared between Melbourne and Repton"
Melbourne is paying approx £150 per household x 4000 households = £600,000 for 'Policing', Repton is a similar size and presumably paying a similar amount. Why are we only getting 7 officers between us for £1.2 million? At an estimate of £50,000 per officer we should have 24! And that is assuming policing is only paid for by council tax. Where is the money going?

2: Priority - "Accident rates are low compared to elsewhere."
From experience it is next to impossible to get any road incident recorded when telephoning the police 0345 1233333 number. The receptionists usually refuse to take details if no car registration number was taken and placing any report is like taking an exam on car identification. If no injury occurs they say they are not interested. Whilst the official stats say this is a low accident area, this is only because Derbyshire Constabulary are deliberately making getting any indecent recorded. I find that it is a very high hit-and-run incident stretch.
The refusal to police an area until there is a high injury/death rate is clearly not the approach used for other crime, such as alcohol, knife or gun crime. It is unacceptable that this approach is take to policing the most common cause of violent death.
By contrast, The Met have http://www.met.police.uk/roadsafelondon/ demonstrating a commitment to road safety.

3: Rules for a reason - "We have a low accident rate so we don't police."
Refusing to police speeding and tailgating is like playing Russian Roulette. Whilst they are not actively the cause of incidents, they increase both the likelihood and the severity of the consequences should a collision occur. We had a road death on this stretch of road only last year. The number of incidents I am recording clearly indicate there is a problem on this stretch of road, we are paying for policing, we should be receiving the service that money is being taken from us to pay for.