PUTTING aside the row that it has generated among election candidates anxious to score points, the real concern about the police force sending mounted officers into crime hot spots in East Lancashire to tackle offending and disorder is whether it will do any good or whether it is just window-dressing.

Undoubtedly, the mounted branch does have a useful role when it comes to crowd-control situations and, also to some extent, in the public relations sense, by acting as a high-profile point of contact between the police and citizens -- as when people stop to stroke the horse's nose and chat to the mounted officer.

But that is a limited, specialist function, surely -- and one which Lancashire Constabulary has recently seen fit to actually reduce in the belief that its crime-fighting efficiency will not suffer.

So what real use is the deployment of bobbies on horseback on a rolling, limited-time basis in places like the problem-plagued Fishmoor Estate in Blackburn where this initiative has been launched?

This a neighbourhood notoriously beset by drug abuse, burglary, car crime, vandalism and nuisance -- all of which requires a carefully constructed, detailed programme of police action on a long-term basis. Does the brief presence of mounted police fit in at all with that requirement?

Certainly, several of the Fishmoor residents this newspaper have spoken to consider the exercise a waste of time and little more than a publicity stunt.

But while it may be unfair to say the initiative is of no use at all -- since there may be some transitory deterrence gain from the highly visible presence of mounted officers in a neighbourhood -- it remains hard to see what, if any, value it has in the more crucial field of the reduction of crime through the detection of it, particularly in areas that are plagued by it.

Surely, it would be far better to spend resources directly and routinely into that aspect of policing rather deploy them on an initiative of such doubtful value.