Somewhere in Surrey, England, police decided the best way to protect women was to send female officers jogging in tight leggings, hoping to be honked at. And honked at they were, within ten minutes, in fact. Cue the headlines: Eighteen arrests in one month! Cue the moral victory lap: Surrey Police are "cracking down" on street harassment!
But let's not pretend this is a triumph of modern policing. Let's remember the backdrop: this is the same country where, for decades, police forces turned a blind eye to the industrial-scale grooming and rape of thousands of children in places like Rotherham, Rochdale, and Telford. Not because they didn't know, it was in the reports, in the complaints, in the hospital records, but because arresting the perpetrators was politically incorrect, being non-white criminals. Even today, some sources say elements of this horror continue.
So, here's the question: how do you go from ignoring thousands of raped children to dressing up like a jogger and nabbing a man for leaning out a car window? Simple, you swap the hard, dangerous, politically messy work of dismantling grooming gangs for the easy optics of "virtue policing." Why wage a grinding, years-long investigation into a trafficking network, when you can just put on some Lululemon and tick "women's safety" off your PR list by lunchtime?
The whole thing flirts with entrapment, actively seeking out a crime in a hotspot where you know someone will bite, only to swoop in and make a scene. It's law enforcement as performance art. And the message? Not "we protect all women from all dangers," but "we'll make an example out of these men, because it's safe, it's easy, and it gets us in the papers."
Meanwhile, the real predators, the ones who groomed 12-year-olds, trafficked them, and laughed at the police, remain free, or served laughably light sentences years after the fact. The resources now going into "catcall stings" could reopen those cases, fund plainclothes nightlife patrols to stop actual assaults, or build digital forensics teams to track grooming networks in real time. But that's messy work. Hard to photograph. Hard to hashtag.
So, Surrey Police jog on, chests out, ponytails bouncing, catching the low-hanging fruit of roadside boors, while the orchards of real crime rot untouched. It's not justice. It's not even serious law enforcement. It's the middle finger to men, waved by an institution still ducking accountability for abandoning the most vulnerable victims in its care.
Welcome to Britain's new justice model: part cosplay, part social media campaign, and entirely allergic to the real fight.