The British constabulary’s lust for inventing crimes to investigate, rather than simply dealing with the ones they already have, is impressive. ‘Non-crime hate incidents’ now consume the best part of a million police hours annually. Whether it’s use of the word ‘lesbian’, retweeting a feminist limerick (thereby requiring plod to ‘check your thinking’), whistling Bob the Builder at your neighbour, or (my personal favourite), a 9-year-old’s playground insults such as calling a classmate a ‘retard’, and telling another they ‘smell like fish’, the Old Bill have certainly got their hands full. I could literally go on all day, but suffice it to say: if you incentivise victimhood, don’t be surprised when everyone starts playing the victim.
Just when you thought the non-crimes couldn’t get any more non-criminal, the combined geniuses at Rozzer HQ have managed to top themselves (regrettably, not literally). As part of the campaign to “stamp out street-based harassment against female runners”, the Old Bill have come up with the Jog On campaign – which sounds like something so banal, even Sadiq Khan might have rejected it.
This time in the dock, it’s wolf-whistling – and not for its first offence either. The entrapment works something like this: hot babes from Police Squad run up and down the pavement, sweating in mufti (steady!); safe in the knowledge that Britain’s finest crack troops are waiting in the vicinity, ready to leap out and pounce on white van man for the crime of honking the horn (not to mention, getting it).
This is not the first attempt to criminalise wolf-whistling. Over the past decade, various feminazi do-gooders have assumed the task, usually alongside the outlawing of ‘misgoyny’. One particular killjoy, Stella Creasy MP (who one suspects couldn’t arouse a wolf-whistle if her life depended on it), has assiduously campaigned against this building site scourge – bizarrely equating catcalling with ‘grabbing a woman’s breasts’. It must be said, Creasy and her ilk belong firmly to the ‘refugees should be welcomed into Britain like Paddington Bear’ crowd. They’re not averse to your daughters getting gang-raped in the spirit of integration, but the one thing their consciences won’t abide is the law turning a blind eye to honkies honking!
Apart from the obvious problem of rendering police even more incapable of dealing with actual crime like stabbing, rape and murder, my principle objection to the criminalisation of wolf-whistling is that the majority of women seem to enjoy it. This is not of course to say that unwanted attention should be foisted on anyone and everyone. I myself get rather flustered whenever it’s ladies’ night at the local RNIB, and several of the more racy octogenarians ask me if I “fancy a quickie?!” But when authoritarian overreach is so obviously out of sync with public opinion, this naturally indicates that something is going wrong.
Having grown up in one of the less salubrious parts of South East London, I have lost count of the number of times young women have walked into a gathering and proudly proclaimed: “I got X number of ‘beeps’ today”. No need to take my word for it though, the defenders of building site etiquette are multifarious. “Most women appreciate the compliment”, claims Telegraph writer Celia Warden – an opinion shared by Joanna Lumley. For a more comprehensive sample, YouGov surveyed attitudes to wolf-whistling, and found that men and women were equally unfazed by it: 55% and 56% of whom think it is ‘fine’, while only 22% and 24% believe it ‘unacceptable’. The definitive answer of course must be left to the feminists themselves, who even while decrying wolf-whistling, complain that they miss it. You’ve got that then lads? Women want to be simultaneously whistled at and ignored!
The LBC interview with one of the ‘joggers’, Abby Hayward, was particularly instructive. God bless Abby. She obviously means well, having stayed up all night rehearsing her line: “I feel empowered to be part of such an operation, whose first priority is to tackle VAWG.” That’s ‘violence against women and girls’ to you and me, an acronym the British public will be slightly less familiar with than FGM and grooming gangs. And to be fair to the Old Bill, they did at least find a couple of Bobbettes who were vaguely ‘doable’ – no easy task, considering the hordes of Fanta-swigging pachyderms who festoon the UK pavements, ostentatiously policing everything except crime in their stretched to breaking-point high-vis vests.
Where are the Jog On campaign hunting for sexual assaulting males you may ask: Rotherham, Rochdale, Telford? Not quite. Instead, they’ve opted for that gang-banging hellhole, leafy Surrey. Yes indeed, the force in question is Surrey Police – who proudly boast not only the lowest crime rate in the South East region, but also the 4th lowest crime rate nationally.
Nonetheless, this doesn’t prevent them from being inveterately opposed to solving crime. According to Home Office data, Surrey Police manage to solve just 6% of crimes – that’s a measly figure, beaten only by the Met Police, West Midlands Police, Sussex Police and Gloucestershire Police.
Undeterred, a spokesman for Surrey Police commented, “These behaviours may not be criminal offences in themselves, but they need to be addressed.” Try reading that again.
“Our priority is not only to tackle and solve crime but also to prevent it from happening in the first place.”
According to Inspector John Vale, “One of our officers was honked at within ten minutes — then another vehicle slowed down, beeping and making gestures just 30 seconds later – that’s how frequent it is.
‘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.”
Presumably, Surrey Police’s next move is to arrest primary school kids at lunchtime, in case they get any ideas about alternative uses for their knives.
Pretending to deal with crime while continually covering up the real stuff, ought to be a crime in and of itself. The wankers that engage in this pantomime deserve nothing less than being laughed out of court. In the meantime, any hardcore criminals bored with the state-sponsored gang-rape of Britain’s daughters – get yourself down to Surrey, and show us the true meaning of ‘misogyny’ by perving over PC plod.
The people that run this country are simply taking the piss. On the plus side of the ledger, their time for doing so may soon be at an end.
Frank Haviland is the author of Banalysis: The Lie Destroying the West and The Frank Report, which you should probably subscribe to.
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(Photograph: Seph, CC BY 2.0 <https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0>, via Wikimedia Commons)
Will it be a crime though not to wolf whistle or honk at Trans?