Government cuts left police retreating from the streets, solving just one in 10 offences and “really struggling” to deal with routine crime, the leader of Britain’s police chiefs has said.

Sara Thornton steps down this weekend as chair of the National Police Chiefs’ Council, after a four-year tenure during which her and her colleagues battled to get the government to recognise cuts were leading to fewer officers and resources to fight crime.

In an interview to mark her departure as NPCC chair and after 33 years of policing, Thornton told the Guardian she wanted to see an end to the blame culture when policing goes wrong and for a recognition that officers were dealing with some of society’s worst problems and not “running libraries”.

Thornton also said the public was noticing the effects of cuts. “We can do the organised crime stuff, the big counter-terrorist stuff, but where we are really struggling is on the routine response to crime. How quickly we get in there, how many people are being investigated and how many people are then being charged or summonsed.

An armed police officer on patrol. Photograph: Andrew Matthews/PA

“What is happening is that fewer and fewer calls to the police are resulting in the deployment of an officer to the person who made the call.”

She said some of that was due to efficiencies, and changes in public taste to interact online or over the phone. But too much of it was not, Thornton said. “I worry we have crossed the boundary between being efficient and making cuts.”

She said that, unlike hospitals, the police cannot close their doors when overwhelmed by demand.

She said cuts made since 2010 when the Conservatives came to power and when Theresa May was home secretary, insisting police could cut crime with fewer officers, went too far.

Thornton said that “to begin with, you can make efficiencies,” such as selling off old big buildings and forces working better together.

But a vicious circle developed. “The concern is … you end up taking quite a long time to get somewhere, and of course all your evidential leads are disappearing, you are less likely to find witnesses, and therefore less likely to arrest the culprit and therefore we end up with the last set of figures [which] showed that charges and summonses amounted to 9% of all crimes.

“Two things are happening. One is the absolute number of charges and summonses are declining, but also what is happening is the number of crimes is increasing.”

Police are grappling with rising knife crime and this month won nearly £100m extra for an emergency increase in the number of officers in the worst hit areas.

Thornton said conditions in areas where there is gang-related drug violence had worsened in the last decade. “Undoubtedly [there is a] lack of infrastructure in the communities that [perpetrators] come from, whether that’s in terms of youth provision, whether it’s in terms of keeping them in school rather than putting them in pupil referral units, whether it’s about social care, whether it’s about a whole range of opportunities, [they] are just not there in the way they were 10 years ago.

“I can see in terms of serious violence the lack of that sort of provision is part of what’s driving this.”

But she said there are still ways police could make a big difference, such as the Met’s success in driving down moped and acid crimes: “You treat these like epidemics and they can come down. There is nothing inevitable about it going up and up and up. Treat it as an epidemic; we just have to find what the treatment is.”

Thornton said policing needed to reduce its “blame culture” and move to an airline industry-style approach to errors where the focus is on learning and fixing errors, not threatening officers with being fired.

She said policing had found it difficult to identify and learn from failure: “When confronted with failure the easiest thing to do, which we learn as children, is to blame. But as an organisation that’s the worst thing you can do in many ways, because you never learn ... if you are looking for the scapegoat all the time.”

She added: “Policing is difficult, it’s high risk. We are not running libraries. We are dealing with difficult situations … things will not always go well.”

Rules on holding officers to account also needed to change, she said.

The Home Office said it had increased funding for the police by more than £1bn this year “including council tax and funding to tackle serious violence – the most substantial investment in policing since 2010”.