As a bona fide pop girlie, I’m no stranger to the big all-singing, all-dancing concert extravaganza (I waited an hour for Madonna; got the merch to prove it). Any fan who goes to these gigs knows two things.
Deputy Assistant Commissioner Ben Russell told Metro that “it’s all about spotting people in a crowd and we try to be quite precise in our approach – who is walking the wrong way? Who has turned up when everyone else is going home?”
One of the ironies about this initiative is that one of the most high-profile cases in which a stranger did violently assault a woman involved a serving Met Police officer: Wayne Couzens, who kidnapped, raped and murdered Sarah Everard in 2021.
The force says that the initiative already paid off at the Beyoncé concert, with one man removed on suspicion of threatening behaviour and stalking, and another arrested for upskirting.
By contrast, the Crime Survey for England and Wales shows that 2.2 per cent of people aged 16 years and over experienced sexual assault in 2024. Yet a third of rape survivors will never report it to police, with 95 per cent saying that they do not expect to be believed.
square DOCUMENTARIES After the Sarah Everard doc, I'd fear to be alone with a male police officer
Read More
So why exactly is the Met hanging out at pop concerts, rather than getting on with the very real issues within its ranks? As generations of entourage hangers-on and music industry leeches can attest, there’s nothing that grabs headlines more than latching onto the pop star du jour. (It is unclear if Beyoncé or Dua Lipa even realised that this was happening outside their concert.)
Their concerts are spaces in which you can, for approximately two hours, linger in a world where girls really do run the world. It’s a shame that, outside their walls, the Met is singing to a very different tune.
Zing Tsjeng is a journalist, non-fiction author and podcaster
Read More Details
Finally We wish PressBee provided you with enough information of ( The Met are on the hunt for ‘predatory men’… at a Dua Lipa concert )
Also on site :