The crackdown on wolf-whistling is ‘precrime’ in action

Crime rates are soaring in the UK. In the year to March 2025, shoplifting hit its highest level since records began, up 20 per cent to more than 530,000 offences. And theft from a person rose 15 per cent to over 151,000 cases.

So you would think that Surrey Police would have enough on their hands at the moment without trying to tackle non-criminal incidents. But it seems not. Last month, they announced the launch of ‘Jog On’ – a county-wide operation, first rolled out by West Yorkshire Police in Bradford, in which plain-clothed female officers don running gear and jog through public spaces, trailed by squad cars ready to swoop on anyone who cat-calls, wolf-whistles or makes ‘sexually suggestive comments’.

‘These behaviours may not be criminal offences in themselves, but they need to be addressed’, said one Surrey Police spokesperson. Acts of this kind might, he added darkly, ‘lead on to other behaviours’.

His colleague, inspector Jon Vale, struck a similar note: ‘The next time you see a female jogger, just think, they could be a police officer with colleagues nearby ready to stop you.’

Perhaps Surrey Police should take their own advice and ‘just think’. After all, is prowling the streets in search of lawful remarks and behaviour it deems distasteful really the best use of police time in a county, and a country, grappling with an actual crime epidemic?

Surrey Police’s inability to see that their role is to enforce the law, rather than hunt down wolf-whistlers, is not just a case of muddled priorities. It also rests on the now fashionable idea that low-level, lawful forms of speech and expression are the first rung on a behavioural ladder to criminality. That speech or behaviour – usually of a sort that our ‘progressive’ elites disapprove of – is a gateway to criminal offending. This rationale is then used to justify the authorities’ ever-earlier intervention into people’s lives.

One can see this rationale driving state intervention in many different areas of expression and speech. In the Online Safety Act 2023, Ofcom’s draft guidance, ‘A safer life online for women and girls’, sets a ‘clear expectation’ that social-media platforms should go ‘above and beyond’ their legal duties to tackle ‘online misogyny’. It concedes that the content it wants social-media companies to target ‘is often not illegal’, but that it can ‘normalise harmful beliefs’.

Or take the UK government’s counter-extremism programme, Prevent. This has shifted its focus from targeting conduct (acquiring weapons, making threats and so on) to treating certain views as risk indicators – even if those views are perfectly legitimate and even mainstream.

Inevitably, this has led to lawful expressions of belief being misread as early warning signs of future extremism. One Christian teacher was flagged to Prevent after stating in class that marriage is between a man and a woman. A schoolboy was referred for posting a YouTube video in which he declared that ‘there’s no such thing as nonbinary’. And a 24-year-old autistic man was reported by his social worker for viewing what she described as ‘offensive and anti-trans’ websites and ‘focusing on lots of right-wing darker comedy’.

Likewise, the recording of so-called non-crime hate incidents (NCHIs) – where someone perceives another person’s perfectly lawful speech as hurtful – rests on the same premise: namely, that holding certain beliefs, for example gender-critical views, is suggestive of someone on a pathway towards committing violence against trans people. This is why women’s rights campaigner Jennifer Swayne was arrested and detained for 10 hours by Gwent Police for allegedly causing ‘offence’ after putting up posters in public that read, ‘no men in women’s prisons’. It is also why campaigner Kellie-Jay Keen was visited by police after warning online that gender self-ID would be exploited by male sex offenders.

It was the master of dystopian fiction, Philip K Dick, who in his 1956 novella, The Minority Report, first imagined a precrime police unit hunting down those it was foreseen would commit a crime. Dick’s nightmarish logic is now a technocratic rationale driving the authorities to clamp down on freedom of expression.

Whether it’s cat-calling or defending women’s single-sex spaces, the state is eager to intervene, based on the same dystopian logic. The authorities are treating lawful acts as early indicators of criminal intent. Keep jogging down that path, and the space for freedom of expression will soon disappear from view.

Freddie Attenborough is the digital communications director of the Free Speech Union.