THE head of Bury police has joined a national call to shake up the judicial system to give more support to victims and witnesses of crime.

Chief Superintendent Phil Hollowood is backing the Association of Chief Police Officers (ACPO), the Superintendents Association and the Police Federation which have joined forces to urge the Government to bring about radical change to the criminal trial process.

The campaign is being headed by chief police officers from across the country who say that the trial has become a 'game' in which the search for truth has been lost.

Police feel that victims and witnesses are given little consideration, have few rights and are poorly protected. Often they are treated badly and lose confidence in the system as a result, says ACPO.

Adding his weight to the campaign, Mr Hollowood, who is Bury police's divisional commander, said: "The public have lost a lot of faith in the judicial system. "Too often people who attend court as witnesses end up feeling inconvenienced, disillusioned or intimidated. They say they wouldn't be a witness in future and this can only help the criminals.

"Police officers at Bury and across the country see first hand the trauma and anger felt by victims of crime. It is therefore infuriating when criminals get off with offences in court because of some procedural issue rather than because the weight of evidence suggests they are innocent."

ACPO has identified specific measures that must be taken to address these problems and to make the criminal trial a real search for the truth.

They include:

Better pre-trial management. In one case, an officer was forced to spend three days at Crown Court in Manchester waiting to be summoned to give evidence while there was legal argument.

The mother of a murder victim forced to sit close to the man who had killed her child and being exposed to photos of the victim's body being looked at by the defence barrister.

The prosecution being forced to withdraw a case as a result of not being able to use a witness because the judge would not let him give evidence behind a screen, despite a real fear of reprisals from the alleged offenders involved in the trial. Witnesses fear of intimidation is a major impediment to gaining convictions for serious crime offences.