CRIME in York has soared as the city's thin blue line struggled to cope with the aftermath of September 11, Great Heck, foot and mouth and flooding.

Official crime figures for the year ending March 31 have yet to be published.

But in an exclusive interview today, York police chief John Lacy said all the indications were there had been a 17 per cent surge in recorded crime in the York and Selby area in the last year.

That meant, he said, an extra 4,000 victims of crime.

Violent crimes were up by 18 per cent, he said.

For North Yorkshire as a whole, official figures are expected to show a 15 per cent surge in crime. The figures come as a massive blow to a force which had prided itself on its year-on-year fall in crime levels for the last six years.

Chief Supt Lacy said some of the rise could be blamed on new rules for counting crime introduced nationally and on York police's new call handling centre.

But he said the figures nevertheless meant a "significant rise" in real crime.

"There were 4,000 more victims of crime in the last year, which was a real disappointment," he told the Evening Press.

Mr Lacy spoke out in the wake of the incident at Heworth Community Centre recently, in which terrified residents who pleaded to police for help in stopping teenage thugs smashing the centre up were told "we have no resources".

That had been an unacceptable mistake, he said. "Hemplands should have been classified as immediate response and it was not". But with resources stretched to their limit police had no alternative but to prioritise at peak times. "Priorities are burglaries in progress, domestics in progress, RTAs. Incidents where life is at risk.

"The community centre was a prime example of where we had run out of resources. On that night we had reports across the city of burglaries, car crime, public order incidents, domestic violence, road traffic accidents. What do you do?"

Mr Lacy accepted that North Yorkshire had more police officers than at any other time - 1,420 compared with 1,325 in 1975. But in 1975, those 1,325 officers had had just 20,000 crimes to deal with compared with 51,000 last year. "Crime has more than doubled since 1975, and since 1960 has gone up tenfold," he said.

"We live in a far more violent society as people become unpredictable through drink and drugs even at a young age."

Police problems were compounded last year through having to deal with the aftermath of September 11, the floods and Great Heck. Officers also had to be seconded to deal with three vicious murders, and yet more officers were sent to help police the Bradford riots, he said.

On top of that, he accepted, the York and Selby areas were under-resourced compared to other areas of North Yorkshire based on demands on police time.

Updated: 11:20 Friday, May 03, 2002