You published my letter two weeks ago when I had a moan about the amount of time and effort our local police put into helping Oxford United function. I’m not anti-Oxford United, it just so happens they are our local team. My comments equally apply to any football league club in the country.

Little did I know what was to come. I read in the Oxford Mail (October 23) of the “new” police unit being set up to counter violence at home matches.

The article tells us that a Detective Inspector and a further six officers are to make up the unit.

I assume these are in addition to the police football liaison officer, spotters and public order officers already deployed at every match. In yesterday’s Mail we were also warned that dozens of police officers will be removed from the streets following budget cuts.

It does seem extraordinary to me, even more so in the current climate, that this number of officers are deployed to allow one business, a football club, to operate while the rest of us are left to our own devices and hardly ever see a uniformed officer on our streets.

May I make some suggestions?

Why don’t the police object to home matches being played in front of a crowd, if parts of that crowd can’t behave themselves? This would be normal practice should a pub, club or music venue create disorder on the same scale.

The police and the club know who the troublesome elements are, so why not simply ban them from the ground?

They are perfectly entitled to do so without them being convicted, in much the same way that pubs clubs, restaurants and shops are entitled to exclude people for various reasons.

Your story quotes the football club chairman, Kelvin Thomas, as saying: “We want this type of person to stay away from our football club.” I’m sure a couple of weeks playing in an empty stadium would focus the club’s mind, then they would come up with solutions and we could have our police back on our streets.

George Massingham, Larch Close, Bicester