THE depravity of some of the people in and around this town beggars belief.

Now, hard-working staff at The Royal Oldham Hospital are being targeted by muggers and carjackers at knifepoint on the car park where they actually pay to leave their vehicles.

Like many of our readers, we ask “what is the world coming to?”

It’s been a long-standing given that the criminal underworld has little to no conscience, but a woman doctor finishing her shift, threatened with a knife and her car stolen? What next.

It appears that this incident, this incident was not the first to have occurred in recent weeks. There have been spate of such terrifying instances.

This begs the question, what have the relevant authorities – hospital administrators and police – been doing to try to prevent this from happening or apprehend the offenders?

Are the police so under resourced that no plain clothes officers can go and observe what is happening on the hospital car park and catch the offenders?

And what about the hospital itself? Is there CCTV on the car park? If not, it should be installed as a matter of urgency using the money paid by members of staff for the privilege of using it.

We share the outrage expressed by many users of our Facebook page, and call upon anyone who knows the perpetrators of these appalling crimes to do the right thing and call the police anonymously with their names.

And let’s hope that if or when they are caught, they receive meaningful custodial sentences – the only realistic deterrent, we would argue, in an age when courts seem reluctant to send offenders to prison because of overcrowding. Send them down, and let them suffer, we say.