Undercover female police officers are patrolling the streets of Bradford to catch drivers who catcall women or shout sexist comments at them as they drive by. File it under you just couldn’t make it up I suppose.
According to The Mail Online:
Drivers who catcall passers-by are being targeted by an undercover police operation.
Women officers wearing plain clothes have been walking in areas of a city where students have complained of being harassed from cars.
Drivers who shout ‘things from their vehicles’ risk being pulled over and handed a fixed penalty or, if taken to court, fined £1,000.
The crackdown on sexist and lewd comments by men is taking place in Bradford and relies on a Public Space Protection Order which is in force for the entire city and relates to the use of motor vehicles and behaviour likely to cause harassment, alarm or distress.
Banned ‘activities’ include the ‘use of sexual language or making sexual suggestions’.
In an incident last week officers stopped a van after the occupant was ‘shouting’ at plain-clothes women officers.
The driver was reported for a breach of the PSPO order and is likely to be issued with a £100 fixed penalty or taken to court.
This is farcical. It’s also ironic in the extreme. West Yorkshire Police has a history of failing to protect genuinely vulnerable women. Take the grooming gang scandal. The force has settled hundreds of compensation claims brought by girls who were failed by detectives and officers who turned a blind eye to the activities of sex traffickers in Bradford and Rotherham.
This is the same West Yorkshire Police that has repeatedly encouraged people to report “non-crime hate speech incidents.” How deliciously dystopian.
“Please call us when you hear something offensive. No, it doesn’t have to be a crime, but tell us anyway. We want to know who and what he/she said, just for the file you see.”
