This year, a total of three people have been stabbed outside my block of flats, in two separate incidents. To my knowledge, the young men have survived, but the shock and experience of twice having the neighbourhood cordoned off with tape as police and paramedics descended, and walking past pooled bloodstains the next day, shook the neighbours. On edge late one night shortly after the second incident, I heard shouts and screams from people obscured by trees in the street, and so dialled 999. The call handler, initially calm and reassuring, eventually grew agitated after several minutes and told me he was being pressured by his supervisor to downgrade the incident from an emergency because there hadn’t yet been a stabbing.

Met chief warns police cuts will make it harder to tackle violent crime Read more

For years, the police have warned that cuts to the force will affect frontline services. Now many forces have announced they will no longer investigate what they call “minor” crimes: burglary, car theft, shoplifting. On Tuesday, the home affairs select committee was told forces in England and Wales will lose 6,000 officers by 2020 owing to budget cuts, and need an extra £440m in 2018-19 and £845m in 2019-20 to meet increased demands, including terrorism.

The police claim they have been forced into this position, and their capacity for dealing with nonviolent offences is limited. Some may find this bewildering – just a few years ago the talk was of “zero tolerance” and the “broken window theory” of policing, in which even minor crimes are pursued to prevent more serious ones from happening.

One of the reasons officers on the beat are so popular is the sense of security many people feel on noticing a visible police presence in their community. Having your home burgled is traumatising for anyone; knowing that no one will so much as check the entry point or reassure you the perpetrators won’t return will be isolating.

The heightened terror risk and this year’s sudden cluster of attacks have made many people feel unsafe in cities, even though statistically we know the individual risk is low. For other violent crimes, the worry is more rational. Official figures show a rise in reported crime, with a 13% increase in all recorded offences across England and Wales, including a 27% rise in gun crime, a 26% increase in knife crime, sexual offences up 19%, and stalking and harassment rising 36% in the year ending June 2017.

John Flatley of the Office for National Statistics, which compiled the figures, warned: “Police figures cannot provide a good measure of all crime in society, since we know that a large volume of it never comes to their attention.” Many of the stories around the Hollywood and Westminster sex scandals included testimonies from people alleging attacks who said they had either felt unable to go to the police, or they had been dismissed when they had done so. Police treatment of certain victims of crime such as racial abuse has been unsatisfactory for years.

A few years ago I reported being sexually assaulted on a bus to the police: first they misplaced my statement, then took down my Oyster card number wrongly, and then the bus number, before leaving me a voicemail to say that as the CCTV had been destroyed since it had taken so long to record the journey details correctly they were registering it in their system as “no crime”. Every friend who has reported racist or homophobic attacks or violence to the police has felt their reports weren’t properly investigated or taken seriously: further cuts and fewer police officer are unlikely to improve their experience and encourage them to come forward.

If a cultural shift does occur as a result of the sex scandals, a system by which to punish perpetrators and keep potential and existing victims safe needs to function adequately. If Britain believes it isn’t a racist and homophobic society, violent bigots should be afraid to break the law, and found and punished when they do. They certainly aren’t now, with a threadbare police service publicly admitting its capacity to prevent and investigate crime is greatly diminished, and Conservative cuts to policing will cause further dereliction of duty by police forces.

If the police give up on low-level crime, we all pay a high price | Deborah Orr Read more

But the impact of the announced investigative cutbacks will fall yet again on the poorest. We know already that your social class determines that you’re more likely to be a victim of a crime; now, when you are, nobody will even bother to visit the crime scene. It’s an open admission that the arm of the state that is in theory recruited to protect you is withdrawing from poorer communities, leaving you to shoulder the trauma of crime without anything approaching support from the police, and signalling that you’re on your own. If your grandparents live in a poor area and are burgled, no one will so much as look at the smashed windowpane and trashed rooms in their home. If you’re a single parent juggling childcare and poorly paid jobs, the economy has already left you struggling to feed your kids, with rising food, clothing and fuel costs and stagnating wages and ever-decreasing employment rights. Now, if somebody decides to steal your car in the night, you’ll know the culprit is unlikely to ever be caught, and you’ll know the state just doesn’t care.

Boris Johnson, the barely credible foreign secretary, complained this month that he was “very disappointed and mystified” by the closure of a police station in his constituency. His complaint was highlighted by the Labour leader, Jeremy Corbyn, at prime minister’s questions. For an explanation, Johnson should look to the government of which he is part. But he and his neighbours won’t be at the sharp end of the newest wave of cuts: as long as the austerity wheeze rumbles on, people such as Johnson never will be.

• Dawn Foster is a Guardian columnist