When I was young, the song ‘The Laughing Policeman’ always spooked me a bit; I’ve grown out of most fears, but this one if anything has grown over the decades. Because never before has it seemed more obvious that the police are amusing themselves with us – and the end results, far from beingamusing, are really quite scary.
Never mind, ladies – there’s going to be a crackdown on wolf-whistling, that’ll keep you safe
As taxpayers, we pay the police a lot of money to solve crimes and catch criminals. But it appears that we are not exactly getting bang for our buck, with criminal behaviour becoming ever more acceptable and the police response less reliable. The epidemic in shoplifting is often cited, culminating recently in a North Wales shopkeeper putting up a sign saying ‘Due to scumbags shoplifting, please ask for assistance to open cabinets’. Only then did a policeman visit, having been alerted by a somewhat over-sensitive member of the public claiming that the sign was ‘provocative and offensive’.
There is a feeling that police are scared of actual criminals and far prefer to bully law-abiding citizens for stating obvious truths about the impossibility of a man becoming a woman or singing Christian songs in the street. The ‘mind the grab – phone-snatching hotspot’ tape which has recently appeared on the kerbs of Oxford Street as part of an initiative by the electronics shop Currys is the latest apparent surrender by the forces of law and order to the criminal fraternity.
You’d think that it would be all hands on deck to catch these scumbags. But apparently we have so much spare police-power that LBC radio recently reported on an extraordinary phenomena whereby undercover female cops have been dressing up in skintight lycra and jogging through public parks in order to attract cat-callers – who then get a scolding by a nearby crack-team of nags, presumably concealed by bushes. A spokesperson for Surrey police tutted: ‘These behaviours may not be criminal offences in themselves, but they need to be addressed.’
The Free Speech Union quite rightly dubbed it a ‘bizarre social-psychology experiment’ but the rozzers in question insisted that the prank would help protect women and girls in public and that the trial, which lasted a month, led to 18 arrests for offences such as harassment, sexual assault, and theft. Inspector Jon Vale, of Surrey Police, told LBC that the aim was to deter offenders: ‘One of our officers was honked at within ten minutes – then another vehicle slowed down, beeping and making gestures just 30 seconds later. Someone slowing down, staring, shouting – even if it’s not always criminal, it can have a huge impact on people’s everyday lives and stops women from doing something as simple as going for a run. We have to ask: is that person going to escalate? Are they a sexual offender? We want to manage that risk early.’
What a shame none of his colleagues in the Met thought to deter PC Wayne Couzens on his ‘escalation’ on the way to the murder of Sarah Everard. (The fifteenth woman killed by a policeman – that we know of – in 12 years.)He exposed himself three times, with witnesses reporting registration details of vehicles he used, but police took no action, leaving him to continue as a serving police officer affectionately known as ‘The Rapist’ to his colleagues. As Ruth Davison of Refuge said at the time of his sentencing, ‘Wayne Couzens pleaded guilty to three counts of indecent exposure. His car number plate was given to Met police officers, who should have carried out the correct checks to identify him as a serial sex offender and working within the force. He should have been immediately suspended from duty and investigated. Instead this didn’t happen and he was free, just days later, to escalate his behaviour and murder Sarah Everard using his status as a police officer, utilising handcuffs and his warrant card to coerce Sarah into getting into a car with him.’
The police have always been the most sexually sinister of the services which are ostensibly there to protect the public; their startling misogyny includes everything from using images of stalked, attacked and murdered women as their own private pornography stash to the brotherly solidarity they showed to the grooming gangs, ignoring the terrified children who summed up the courage to report their rape and torture, sometimes to the point of arresting the girls themselves for ‘disorderly behaviour’.
Does the police force attract nasty men in greater numbers than other professions? The paraphernalia which might attract sadists is there: uniforms, handcuffs, truncheons and tasers. One of the reasons why broad-minded people like me feel uneasy when we see photos of policeman happily appearing alongside men in extreme fetish-wear at Pride marches is that we are instinctively aware that if people find it OK to parade their sexual kinks in broad daylight, it tends to make civil society far less civil for women and children.
So is Surrey Police’s -alling project a kind of penance? Perhaps, but I think it’s far more likely to be our old mate the ‘wokescreen’. Pay lip service to protecting women and girls while simultaneously being an enthusiastic part of a legal system which seems increasingly to find actual violence against women and girls really rather trivial. Remember the embarrassing about-face Labour had to perform about enquiries into the Muslim rape gangs after Lucy Powell said they were a ‘dog whistle’. She couldn’t be sacked by Starmer as he’d already referred to people calling for a new inquiry into the gangs of jumping on a ‘far-right bandwagon’ back in January.
The grooming gangs have gone quiet, though one would have to be a certified half-wit to believe they’ve shut up shop. The focus now is on freelance sex attackers. Witness the women of all hues who have been protesting outside the migrant hotels, which house charmers such as Aron Hadsh from Eritrea, who sexually assaulted a young woman with learning difficulties – and was handed a 14-month prison sentence.
Never mind, ladies – there’s going to be a crackdown on wolf-whistling, that’ll keep you safe. Don’t you worry your pretty heads about the fact that each day sees more men pouring into this country whose misogyny is easily as Medieval as that of their co-religionists in Rotherham. As Alex Phillips has pointed out, many of these men are brought up in segregated societies which see a woman who shows her legs on a sunny day as basically asking for it.
Before it went wet, Private Eye ran a spoof headline on the increasing briefness of jail sentences for homicides: ‘KILL NOW AND WIN A FORD FIESTA’, I think it might have been, which might be updated to ‘RAPE NOW AND WIN AN E-SCOOTER’. If I had to make a modest proposal, in the Swiftian style, to solve this country’s cataclysmic crime problem, I’d suggest jailing those of us who don’t break the law, and letting loose those who do. It’s already started, with the government letting out woman-beating men to make room in prison for women who post things on social media disapproved of by the state. It’s a dystopia worthy of Dick – where words are literally violence but actual violence is no big deal. The thought-police will police our minds while our mere bodies will be left to defend themselves.
Regrettably, the philosophy of too many of those whose job it is the protect the public and punish the criminal appears to be the modish mantra ‘Forgive and forget’. Forgive the criminal and forget the victim, that is – especially if the victim is female. Scolding a couple of honey-trapped cat-callers is going to do nothing to put this right.
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