Police would be able to ‘stamp out’ anyone tempted to carry out a string of stranger sex attacks, a senior detective has said.
Det Ch Insp James Senior is responsible for Thames Valley Police’s Project Vigilant, a force-wide scheme that sees plain clothes and uniformed officers patrol night spots to identify and stop predatory and inappropriate sexual behaviour.
The project was launched in Oxford in 2019 in response to a spike in sex attacks and violence linked to the ‘night time economy’.
That included the activities of prowler Nelson Soares, whose eight-month reign of terror started with him exposing himself to passing women before he moved on to breaking into students’ bedrooms.
In one instance, he took a naked selfie with his victim while another woke to find Soares - later jailed for a decade - ‘spooning’ her in bed.
Det Ch Insp Senior told the Oxford Mail: “I’d be very confident that with the amount of deployments that we run as part of vigilant alongside the investment in local CCTV, I’d be really confident that we’d be able to stamp out any kind of string of sexual attacks like that ever again.
“Clearly, for us we have a bank of individuals that we monitor and we look at.
“Whenever we get any sexual offence they’re the first people we look at to see whether they’ve committed it.
“I’d be really confident we wouldn’t have those issues.”
Since last October, officers in Oxford have made 42 stops as part of Project Vigilant patrols of the city centre at night.
Across the Thames Valley, of the 201 men stopped and spoken to about their behaviour, a fifth had previously been spoken to, cautioned or convicted of violent or sexual offences against women.
In total, 27 men were stopped for harassing, stalking or unwanted behaviour towards women. A further 37 were stopped for loitering near places, such as parks or other green spaces, where predatory behaviour tends to happen.
The emphasis is on preventing potential offences before they happen, the police say. Of 201 stops across the force since last October, only six people were arrested for various offences including sexual assaults.
Det Ch Insp Senior said the scheme was ‘business as usual from now on’ for Thames Valley Police.
The project is being introduced by other forces, including the Metropolitan Police, and information about those stopped in Oxford was shared with neighbouring police forces.
City centre sergeant Kayleigh Livingstone said she had herself been subject to inappropriate comments – including marriage proposals – while conducting the Vigilant patrols of night spots.
Last New Year’s Eve, she and her colleagues intervened when a lone woman was followed out of an Oxford nightclub by a group of men who were cat-calling her.
“They were actually okay with me,” the sergeant said. “A couple of them were making comments like ‘you should be out catching real criminals’.
“It’s quite difficult for us to measure what we’ve prevented. For all we know, we’ve prevented a serious sexual assault from happening that evening. Or, I’ve just engaged with some males on a night out and given them some educational advice.”
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