Today's announcement that Home Secretary David Blunkett has named the Little Horton and Canterbury districts among the first Policing Priority Areas is likely to receive a very mixed reaction. These parts of Bradford are included in the list of five communities nationwide with high crime levels identified for action in the new initiative led by the Home Office's Police Standards Unit.

The extra focus on a joined-up action plan to deal with crime and anti-social behaviour is welcome, but the fact that no large extra funding is available to help with it is a big disappointment.

The Home Office says that the new unit will not take part in operational police matters but will be there to assist and support local officers. It is hard to see how, without extra resources, it will be able to offer any real practical help in dealing with the difficulties that local officers have been trying to sort out for years.

It lays the Government open to charges of interference rather than tackling the problems head-on by providing extra manpower to deal directly with issues on the ground.

The new stop-and-search guidelines also announced today hopefully will help to restore confidence in the way police deal with the ethnic minorities, but there is a genuine concern that it could hamper them further by taking resources out of the front line because of the bureaucracy involved in recording details of every "stop" incident.

The proof of the pudding, as they say, is in the eating and Bradford people will be watching closely to discover whether this is genuinely an answer to dealing with crime in these troubled areas.