How NYPD's Vice Unit Got Prostitution Policing All Wrong
( Yea, there is no systemic racism alive and well in the USA, according to the GOP. )
Most sex workers are trying to feed their families and avoid homelessness. The city’s preferred solution, counseling sessions, didn’t help them. And NYPD’s “crackdown” conveniently resulted in very few white people being arrested.
by Stephen Engelberg
May 3, 5 a.m. EDT
In recent months, the city and state of New York have moved to decriminalize prostitution. State lawmakers repealed a law that made “loitering” to sell sex a crime. District attorneys in Manhattan, Brooklyn and Queens announced that while they would continue to prosecute pimps, sex traffickers and “johns” who pay for sex, they would be referring men and women involved in prostitution to social service agencies. The DAs dropped thousands of cases of unlicensed massage, prostitution and loitering dating back to the 1980s.
The changes came after a ProPublica series on prostitution arrests in New York City that began with a basic question: What are the costs (or possible benefits) to society of sending police officers out to arrest people for prostitution? As with many investigative stories, this one began with a specific tip about an undercover cop who was purportedly entrapping women and a few men into offering to sell sex. We didn’t know his name, just that he was referred to in court proceedings as Undercover 157. (In a statement, the NYPD defended the undercover officer as a veteran “with approximately 1,800 successful buys and no complaints against him at the NYPD or with the Civilian Complaint Review Board,” later clarifying this meant no active complaints.)
ProPublica doesn’t have the time or resources to follow up on every allegation of a single potentially rogue cop. But reporter Joaquin Sapien and editor Alexandra Zayas had a gut feeling that they were looking at something larger. A few years earlier, multiple present and former members of the New York Police Department’s vice unit had been convicted of running a brothel, a hint that oversight might be lacking.
We dug into the NYPD’s procedures for policing prostitution in the 21st century and learned more worrisome details. In an era of body cameras and miniaturized recording devices, the cops were not routinely recording the verbal exchanges that led to arrests; the evidence that someone had offered to do something illegal was relayed by the undercover cop to a nearby backup team via radio. Few of the cases ever came to trial. New York created a system in which people accused of prostitution could be diverted to classes intended to help them leave “the life.” If they missed any classes or failed to appear in court to show their attendance, a warrant could be issued for their arrest.
( excerpt ) “I know for a fact that white men are the key demographic,” Meredith Dank, a research professor at John Jay College of Criminal Justice, told the reporters. Dank and her colleagues have interviewed more than 600 young people who trade sex in the city. In one of their studies, 65% said their main clients are white.
The punishment for the crime of prostitution was being disproportionately paid by New York’s Black and brown citizens, many of whom lived in the city’s poorer neighborhoods.
https://www.propublica.org/article/how-nypds-vice-unit-got-prostitution-policing-all-wrong
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