The police should focus on catching burglars and violent criminals rather than wading into social or political issues that are not criminal, the head of the College of Policing has said.

Andy Marsh said forces could lose their legitimacy by taking sides on contested issues. “Our new guidance on managing non-crime hate incidents, for example, is very clear: the police should not be involving themselves in spats on Twitter,” Marsh told The Sunday Telegraph. “It is not where the public want the police to be . . . We cannot pick sides on social issues, we have a job to do: to police without fear or favour, to prevent and detect crime.”

Clear-up rates for crimes such as rape and burglary are particularly low. For offences recorded in the year to March, a person was charged or summonsed for theft in 4.1 per cent of cases and for rape in 1.3 per cent of cases. While the number of police officers began to rise under Boris Johnson, there are still fewer than there were in 2010.

Marsh said the public wanted the police to get on with reversing “unacceptably low” clear-up rates.

“The fundamental purpose of the police is to keep our community safe, catch criminals and bring offenders to justice,” he said. “What we need to improve on are the basic components of that mission. We need to answer the phone when there are emergencies.

And then we need to be relentless in our follow-through that brings offenders to justice for the crimes that matter most to our communities.”

Speaking before he gives the John Harris Memorial Lecture at the Police Foundation this week, Marsh said the police would lose public trust if they stopped treating crimes such as burglary and car theft as a priority.

Instead, they needed to investigate “consistently and appropriately” both these offences and more serious crimes, such as rape.

Last week Suella Braverman, the home secretary, wrote to senior policing figures saying that the public felt officers spent too much time on “symbolic gestures”. “This must change,” she said, and “initiatives on diversity and inclusion should not take precedence over common-sense policing”.