mid a national reckoning about women’s safety, the government has shown that it has little understanding of what actually makes women safe. In response to an outcry following the abduction and death of 33-year-old Sarah Everard, No 10 has announced new measures to protect women from sexual harassment and assault, including a proposal from Boris Johnson that plainclothes police officers will patrol bars and clubs at night to “identify predatory and suspicious offenders”. Few women have requested these measures, which seem bizarrely irrelevant to the issue at hand. Increasing the presence of undercover police in bars and clubs would have done nothing to prevent the conditions of Everard’s death as we currently understand them; her killing took place during a pandemic, she was not in a bar or a club, and the man charged in association with her kidnapping and murder wasn’t a civilian, but a serving police officer. In light of all this, how could the presence of more police, invisibly woven into the fabric of women’s everyday lives, possibly make us feel safer? Sisters Uncut, the feminist direct action group that has led a series of vigils for Everard, initiated a conversation last week about the ways that policing fails to keep women safe. The police and justice system supposedly protect us from gendered violence, but data from the Home Office has shown that 98% of reported perpetrators of rape are not prosecuted in England and Wales. On the way home from the vigil for Everard held on Saturday night, one attender said the police failed to help her after she reported that she had been flashed. Last summer, the police were also late to act after the disappearance of Black sisters Nicole Smallman and Bibaa Henry (their mother said she felt this was due to racial stereotyping). After Smallman’s boyfriend discovered the remains of the two women himself, some police allegedly took selfies with their bodies and shared them in a WhatsApp group chat. A 2019 Observer investigation showed that nearly 1,500 accusations of sexual misconduct were made against police officers over the course of six years, but only 13% resulted in a dismissal or resignation. In one instance, a survivor of rape said an officer working on her case “took advantage of her vulnerability and had sex with her on two occasions”. This is only more concerning in light of the “spy cops” scandal, in which it transpired that undercover officers had sex, relationships and children with women who had no idea of their true identities. Of the government’s most recent proposals, many women will wonder: who will protect us from the plainclothes police? For marginalised communities, the idea of increasing the police presence in bars and clubs carries a particular historic weight. In 1969, the New York police department conducted a routine raid at a gay bar called the Stonewall Inn, resulting in a seismic riot that inspired the first Pride parade; even now it is considered a global symbol of queer resistance. Raids on gay clubs are also part of history on this side of the Atlantic, with officers famously arresting 11 people at London’s Royal Vauxhall Tavern in 1987. During this period, police were known to entrap gay men, or make arrests by leveraging the legally ambiguous status of the queer party drug amyl nitrite (or “poppers”). Nightlife policing has also disproportionately targeted Black communities, with plainclothes raids dating back to Soho’s Shim Sham club in the 1930s and 40s. Police continued to raid the establishments and parties of Windrush descendants throughout the 1970s and 80s, at a time where brutality was even more prevalent. This is not to suggest that the near future will look the same as recent history. But there are important connections between the past and today. In England and Wales, Black people are nine times more likely to be stopped and searched than their white counterparts, and five times more likely to have force used against them. The police officers who lied about tackling the 19-year-old student Julian Cole to the ground outside a nightclub, leaving him partially paralysed and brain damaged for life, have still not faced criminal charges. As it currently exists, club security isn’t free from issues of sexism, racism and homophobia. Even so, for many women and marginalised people, nightlife can offer a square foot of freedom in the dark, a place to express your gender or sexuality without fear of judgment or violence. In particular, “safe space” clubs and parties can function as hideaways to briefly escape the harassment that many of us experience in the world. They often have their own community policies for addressing sexual violence which, together with the success of initiatives such as Good Night Out, a campaign for safer nightlife, show how interventions rooted in community empowerment can genuinely make clubs safer for everyone. As Sisters Uncut wrote on Wednesday: “Any increase in police power, whether it’s undercover officers in bars and clubs or the current police, crime, sentencing and courts bill, will lead to an increase in state violence, especially for those who are already marginalised.” Putting more undercover police in nightclubs and bars is a timely symbol of the creeping encroachment of policing and surveillance into our everyday lives, often under the guide of “safety”. Yet rather than make women safer, this seems likely to do the opposite. Micha Frazer-Carroll is a columnist at the Independent