On the "police in bars" story, I thought I'd try and write a list of all the things wrong with it. This is based on my own thoughts and comments I've seen on Twitter, here and in private chats with friends. They are in no particular order and I'm sure it's not exhaustive.
1) Bars and pubs are closed right now, yet
sexual assault,
domestic abuse and
murder of women by men continues unabated. How does putting police in pubs help?
2) Many bars and pubs are already part of the
Ask for Angela scheme which allows women to notify bar staff discretely that they need help. Police would be much better supporting and helping to expand this scheme.
3) The intentions of the scheme are unclear. Is it to make men think they're being watched so they'll behave, or to give women someone to get help from should things turn bad? If the former, assault and harassment is often difficult or impossible to see from a distance, and can be easily explained away. If the latter, how does the woman know who to turn to if the officers are plain-clothes?
4) Having plain-clothes officers opens up the system to abuse - anyone can pretend to be a plain-clothes officer in order to gain the trust of a woman, only to abuse it.
5) Police officers commit sexual assault!
This article from 2019 revealed that almost 1,500 cases of sexual misconduct had been reported against police officers in the previous six years.
This article from around the same time found that only 1 in 18 Metropolitan Police officers reported for sexual misconduct were formally sanctioned. And
this piece from yesterday found that 26 members of the Metropolitan Police were arrested for sexual offences between January 2018 and August 2020.
6) Police officers do not protect women.
This story is from Australia but there's nothing to stop it from happening here either. The officer claimed the woman assaulted him, when in fact he assaulted her when she didn't smile at him and avoided eye contact. Closer to home, and more recently, a woman walking home from the Sarah Everard vigil on Saturday was flashed by a man. When she tried to report it to police
they dismissed her. If police are unwilling to take seriously allegations of sexual harassment in the immediate aftermath of a vigil for a woman murdered by a
known sexual harasser, then how on earth are we supposed to be believe they'll take seriously an allegation made in a pub?
7) The police don't take sexual crimes seriously. In the year to the end of March 2020 58,856 cases of rape were recorded by police in England and Wales.
Only 2,102, or 3.6%, were prosecuted. Victims' commissioner Dame Vera Baird said in her
annual report that the level of prosecutions has got so low that "
what we are witnessing is the de-criminalisation of rape". Putting police in pubs isn't going to help.
8) This feels like a stealth way of getting police into pubs in the name of "women's safety" where they can then identify other illegal activity such as drug dealing.
9) Strangers are not the people who are most dangerous to women. Of the 1,425 women and girls killed by men between 2009 and 2018, only 10% were killed by strangers according to the
Femicide Report. Most of these killings (78%) occurred "at home". While the scheme is aimed at tackling lower level crimes against women, these statistics reinforce the fact that pubs and bars are not hotbeds of sexual assaults, and focusing on them will do little to protect women.
10) The Crime Survey for England and Wales estimated that
less than one in five victims of rape or assault by penetration reported their experience to the police in 2018. These statistics show that victims do not trust the police to take their claims seriously. Victims are regularly
traumatised by their treatment by the police and face further trauma during
cross-examination if they are one of the few victims to get their day in court. Putting police in pubs does nothing to fix these systemic issues.
If police were serious about tackling sexual crimes then there is much they can do, starting with treating the crimes that are reported to them seriously and treating victims with respect and decency. This scheme is nothing but an ill-conceived PR stunt and one that fortunately seems to be backfiring already.