A large hunting knife taken from a suspect in October 2025. Last year the Metropolitan Police removed 2,894 knives from London’s streets. Source: Metropolitan Police 

Wexler: How are you addressing violence against women and children? 

Sir Mark: It’s not all completely straightforward, but the vast majority of these cases are male predators and women victims. It’s not all that way, but that’s the big majority. 

When I started as commissioner three years ago, I said that we were going to try to use counterterrorism methodologies to take on male predators. What I meant by that was I don’t think in policing anywhere in the world, we’ve been as determinedly proactive with the most dangerous male predators in the way we are determinedly proactive with terrorism or organized crime. You could walk into most big-city policing forces in the Western world and say, “Okay, who are your most dangerous organized crime groups?” and they would know who they are and they’d have operations against them.  

We haven’t had the same approach of policing the men who pose the biggest risk to women and children in your city. We’re not as good at being proactive on that. There’s a whole history, of course, that we don’t get everything reported to us, and there’s the issue about building the confidence of victims to come forward.  

But a reason we’re not proactive, it struck me, is the data challenges are enormous because there are so many reports, and you can’t sift through them all manually. So we’ve been using data science to create what we call the VAWG 100. VAWG is a UK acronym—Violence Against Women and Girls. We’ve been taking every offender we have down as a suspect for the last year or two, aggregating all the things we know about them, and coming up with relative scores to pick the top 100. With that top 100, we’ve created intelligence profiles, and we’ve looked at how we can get them off the streets and in prison. 

There are three things we’ve done with them to step up our enforcement approach. The first tactic is to look at the cases you haven’t yet proven and asking if, with more effort or more support for the victim, you can get that case over a prosecution line.  

The second thing is using preventative controlling court orders, like orders for offenders stating that they can’t go near this victim again, or they can’t go to this area, or sometimes orders about their access to electronics. We put these orders in place, then do surveillance, and if we catch them out, they go to prison. 

The third thing is the “Achilles heel” or “Al Capone” approach. When you do an intelligence profile on the men who prey on women, you tend to find that they’re unpleasant and criminal in lots of ways. They’ll be drug dealers or street robbers or whatever else. So if we can’t get them in prison for the sexual assault or domestic violence, we can get them in prison for that. That gets them off the streets and sometimes helps the victims have comfort coming forward. 

We’ve had the first 18 months of this evaluated by a couple of professors, Larry Sherman and John MacDonald. Their evaluation of what we’ve done, using a sort of a randomized-control type approach, shows that we’re reducing the harm caused by these men by about half compared to normal tactics. 

Wexler: Tell me about the drone as a first responder program you’re launching. 

Sir Mark: That got going over the last few months. We’re testing it around the center of London, and then we’re going to roll it out in due course. We see this very much as supporting front-line officers. It’s not covert; it’s overt. It’s even got a blue light on it. We’re trying to make it very clear this isn’t surveillance—this is helping first responders. 

In the central zones of London, it can get to an incident within about 90 seconds, which is faster than your human police resources will normally get there. And it’s set up to be able to stream live footage from the scene. The program is only slowly building up, but this will be something we’ll build up a lot more over the next year. 

Wexler: How are you responding to the threat posed by drones? In 2018, there was a notable incident at London Gatwick Airport in which reported drone sightings disrupted airport operations. 

Sir Mark: The Metropolitan Police is responsible for policing London, but we also have some national responsibilities. One of those is to coordinate the national work against terrorism in the UK, working with our security service, MI5. As part of that, we work with the Home Office on investing in protective technologies and readiness things. 

The Gatwick Airport threat you referred to prompted more investment. So we’ve got some really good technologies, similar to that used by the military. Experts in this will know it’s not possible to have perfect technology, but we’ve got pretty good detection technologies that we have found useful for most scenarios. And, of course, that is now part of our investment in our own drones, because you want to fly them safely. So your detection technologies make sure your own drones aren’t going to crash into anything that’s an important part of that safety infrastructure. 

Wexler: You initially retired from policing from 2018 to 2022, and during that time you co-wrote a terrorism thriller, The Sleep of Reason. Did you learn anything from that process that helped you in your police work? 

Sir Mark: I’ve got a good mate who I’ve known since we were teenagers who’s had a career as a journalist and now as a media trainer. He’s never worked in politics or crime journalism. On his 50th birthday, we’d partied and had too much to drink. At the end of the evening, we got into a conversation about thrillers and decided we ought to write one. Then we woke up the next day thinking, “Oh my God, what did I promise last night?” Then eventually we said, “Actually, no, we do really want to do it.”