In the front of an unmarked police car driving near Borough High Street, a voice comes through a walkie-talkie.
“Male exposing himself outside Borough Market,” the man says. The two more senior female police officers in the front of the car turn to each other with a satisfied look.
This incident on Tuesday night (December 7) soon results in the suspect being arrested for indecent exposure and affray – a relatively rare occurrence on Operation Vigilant, a pilot scheme being run in Southwark and Lambeth to help proactively tackle violence against women and girls in public areas near pubs, clubs and bars.
Police say that’s not because the operation is inefficient, but rather because they want to prevent sexual assaults and other kinds of violence against women before they happen – rather than arresting someone after they have already hurt their victim.
The Central South basic command unit (BCU), which covers Southwark and Lambeth, got the idea from Thames Valley Police, who launched their own programme in 2019, largely to protect students in Oxford from sexual assault on nights out.
Central South’s predatory offender unit, which tackles serious sexual offences, is running Operation Vigilant on twenty evenings – called deployments – the first of which was on October 23 and which will run up to the end of March next year. Tuesday night was the seventh deployment.
The unit got a £90,000 grant from the Home Office for the trial scheme. If the project is deemed a success, it could be rolled out London-wide.
The deployments work to a seemingly simple plan. Plain clothes officers walk around a ‘night-time economy’ hotspot – Borough High Street or the area around Waterloo station, for example – looking for people who appear suspicious. These could be people loitering outside pubs or making rude, sexual comments.
At that point the plain clothes officers radio uniformed officers to come in and talk to the suspicious person. This could end up in an arrest – although that has been rare on the deployments so far – or just a quick conversation. The aim is to deter potential sexual offenders from committing crimes and gather intelligence for future use. Officers do not go inside venues.
Science teacher jailed for sexual relationship with a 16-year-old
“It’s not about the quantity of arrests, it’s about the quality of intelligence we get,” the senior officer on the deployment says.
Asked if police were concerned that their approach, which appears to be based at least partly on the spotters’ instincts about who potential criminals might be, could lead to accusations of bias and profiling, the same officer says that Operation Vigilant is “not about ruining anyone’s night out who doesn’t have criminal intent”.
The operation is data-driven – Tuesday’s deployment took place on Borough High Street because Met figures from the past two years suggested there were two one-hour time slots that evening when sexual offences were likely to occur.
Whatever the vagaries of the methods, officers seem convinced of the importance of their mission, which is only a part of the Met’s programme to tackle violence against women and girls. Some officers also appeared to be proud that four of the seven plain clothes spotters on Tuesday were women.
Three women punched by lone man on Jamaica Road in Bermondsey in series of unexplained attacks
The operation was launched against a backdrop of rising sexual assault reporting rates after Covid restrictions lifted, officers were told in a briefing at a south London police station before the deployment began.
But Sarah Everard, the Clapham woman murdered by a serving officer in March, is also inescapable in the background of the Met’s activity to tackle sexual violence – and she was also brought up in the same briefing. The Met’s reputation took a battering in the aftermath of the murder and the way the subsequent Clapham Common vigil was policed.
“We need to tackle rape and other kinds of sexual assault quite urgently,” the senior officer on Tuesday’s deployment says. “It inflicts real trauma on victims, or survivors. It can be life-altering in some cases.”