The Home Office is giving £1m to go on 200 undercover deployments under Project Vigilant; across Kent, Hertfordshire, Gloucestershire, Essex, South Wales, Staffordshire, Merseyside, Cumbria, and the West Midlands, as part of Project Vigilant, police patrolling at night in town and city centres to combat predatory men who seek to assault vulnerable women.
Thames Valley Police began the tactic since 2019; as featured in Professional Security Magazine in 2023 when DI Tina Wallace, of Thames Valley Police, gave a presentation to the CCTV User Group conference. The policing tactic began in Oxford and has since been taken up by some other forces; high‑visibility and plain-clothes patrols, to ‘disrupt’ predatory men.
Minister for Safeguarding and Violence Against Women and Girls, Jess Phillips, said: “Every woman and girl deserves to enjoy a night out without fear. On a Project Vigilant deployment, I saw first-hand the difference this approach makes. Instead of asking women to change their behaviour, we are going after those who cause harm — disrupting predatory men and making clear where responsibility lies. This is what treating violence against women and girls as a national emergency looks like.”
Jess Phillips MP, visited Colchester on Friday, March 6. Essex Police report that among their Vigilant work so far they have disrupted a registered sex offender outside a nightspot; stopped and removed a driver linked to child rape; driven home a young girl found in the company of an older man; and rapid officer attendance at suspected spiking incident.
In detail
Specialist plain clothes officers look out for telltale signs of those behaving in a predatory way. Those officers flag concerns to uniform colleagues who tackle suspects and safeguard women and girls who may be otherwise be at risk.
Essex Police for example will run 80 additional deployments. Also with the minister in Colchester was Roger Hirst, the Conservative Police, Fire and Crime Commissioner for Essex; and Essex Chief Constable Ben Julian Harrington. He said: “Tackling violence against women and girls takes all of us – society, policing, and local partnerships. Project Vigilant demonstrates exactly that. Tackling VAWG cannot be done by policing alone and requires support from our communities, our businesses – from taxi firms and takeaways to pubs and clubs – our Community Safety Partnerships and local councils.
“Project Vigilant is just one example of how, in Essex, we are all coming together to keep women and girls safe but also to prevent offences of VAWG before they happen by targeting those that our intelligence or patrols tell us mean to do harm. It is not for women and girls to change their behaviour – they should be free to enjoy an evening out without fear of being targeted by a predator. Instead, it is those who are intent on causing harm who need to change their behaviour and realise that we are watching and waiting for them, there is no place for them on the streets of Essex.”
The Home Office adds that the spend forms part of the government’s Violence Against Women and Girls Strategy, launched in December.
Roger Hirst described the county as, for many years, ‘a leader in creating collaborative partnerships to tackle violence against women and girls’.
Photo by Mark Rowe.
