It’s 8pm and Colchester’s city centre is starting to hum with Friday night revellers.
There are bars, pubs, restaurants and clubs getting ready to entertain the crowd.
But just as the nighttime economy wakes, less than a mile up the road, officers at the city’s police station pack out their gym hall.
There are around 100 seats and a pulldown projector with the words ‘Project Vigilant’ on the screen.
Uniformed officers listen to the presentation about aims and ambitions for the evening ahead, with many here on shift till 2am.
It’s not long before they’re on foot and in cars, on the lookout for sexual predators who are loitering and lingering in the shadows, ready to prey on vulnerable people, predominantly women.
We learn about the types of behaviour they are looking out for: those who stare, stalk and leer at women, those who approach women who are on their own or maybe drunk – and the ones that invade personal space.
Many of you reading will know the type.
The key to tackling much of the uncomfortable behaviour though, is the officers hidden in plain sight.
Some in that presentation had been dressed in civilian clothing, once deployed, they feed back their intelligence to their uniformed colleagues in real-time.
Plain-clothed male and female police officers roam the city centre, just as though they’re members of the public also out for Friday night drinks.
But all the while, they wait, watch and chat to observe any unsavoury actions.
It’s a key tactic of ‘Project Vigilant’, a Home Office funded initiative that’s already up and running at Thames Valley Police, Wiltshire Police and Norfolk Constabulary.
Today, the Government has given an additional nine forces across the UK a slice of £1 million, which it says will now fund over 200 undercover deployments across Kent, Hertfordshire, Gloucestershire, Essex, South Wales, Staffordshire, Merseyside, Cumbria and West Midlands.
Good Morning Britain was exclusively invited to see Essex Police’s deployments in action, alongside Safeguarding Minister Jess Phillips, whose work in the violence against women and girls sector spans decades.
“I want women to feel safe,” Phillips tells me.
“The whole point of this is that we’re not going to change our behaviour so that bad men don’t hurt us. We’re going to make sure that we women feel they can have a good time, at the same time as making sure there’s somebody with their eye on the bad men.”
As part of the visit, the District Commander for Colchester Police, Chief Inspector Michelle Sparks explains they’re also just as interested in those in vehicles.
“Our officers are trained in behavioural and detection techniques, in order to identify those individuals who may be preying on vulnerable people,” he explained.
“It might be they that approach a lone female, in order to try to befriend her, even though that contact is unwanted, or individuals might be loitering in taxi ranks.”
Good Morning Britain understands that successful actions have included identifying a registered sex offender outside a popular nighttime venue and intercepting an intoxicated young girl being carried by a man she didn’t know.
Work that Jess Phillips tells me is vital.
“I’ve seen some deployments where they’ve found somebody from just watching their behaviour, gone back, looked up on the computer, found that they were a known sex offender, gone to their car and found cable ties and ropes in the back of their car, ” she says.
“That is terrifying, but it really gives me hope that this sort of proactive policing is the way forward.”
The hope is that by tackling these offences, officers can prevent future crimes.
Evidence shows predatory behaviour can have devastating consequences.
“The officers here tonight were told that this isn’t a small thing, it looks like looking out for weird loitering, but I’ve seen where that leads to rape, murder,” the safeguarding minister says.
“It’s really, really important that police are out there thinking about people’s behaviour, to stop that escalation.”
Necessary work, when being a woman in Britain still comes with risk.
But this time, it’s the predators who are being preyed upon.
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