'I've been beaten up by them': How police abuse sex workers they claim to save.
Today is International Whores Day, celebrating sex workers' rights. In the US, cops continue to torment sex workers then pretend they're break up sex traffickers.
One day, Lisa*, who’s worked on the street since she was a teenager in the 1970s, was hanging out on the sidewalk when a man drove up to her in his car. He offered her money for sex. She walked away. He asked at least two more times, and she said no. This, she thought, was pretty brazen, given that she knew he was a cop—he’d even patrolled the area in uniform before.
"You think I don't know who you are?" she told him. But he wouldn’t let up. Finally she thought, fuck it, and got in his car, but not for sex.
"I need a ride to the store to get some water and a lighter," she sassed. He drove her straight to jail and booked her, despite her not having offered sex for money.
Lisa started doing street sex work in the late 1970s, when she figured out that truckers and other drivers would pick her up and drive her where she wanted, in exchange for sexual favors. They “... were very kind. I think I was very fortunate. Now that we look back, how many serial killers there were. I'm fortunate to be alive.”
Back then, when cops stopped her, lots of times they just asked to hook up and that was that. "Later on they [the police] were just mean. I've been beaten up by them. It was something like ... In stings they would verbally abuse me, calling me names and shit. I'm like, "What is wrong with you guys? Why are you saying I'm such a bad person?" Her run-ins with police for drugs and prostitution have earned her the status “felony prostitute.”
In the US, entire task forces are devoted to busting sex workers, then heroically proclaiming that they busted human trafficking operations. It’s hard to overemphasize how bullshit this is. While globally, human sex trafficking is a thing because of economic deprivation, organized crime rings, and, well, rich tourists from the the West, in America what we picture largely doesn’t occur. And what we picture, because of (of course) Law and Order: SVU, is dozens of women chained up in a basement forced to turn tricks through tears of shame and pain until their eyes go empty because they’re dead inside.
Like narcotics units, vice squads do two things that are exceedingly useful to modern police departments. They make for good PR, generating mug shots of shady characters for the local news. And they help bring in revenue through asset forfeiture, which lets law enforcement seize money and property (in many departments vice and narcotics are combined).
As Reason's Elizabeth Nolan Brown has reported, at least 41 states have asset forfeiture laws related to prostitution offenses and departments often publicly boast of their hauls, like cash and cars.
The rise of the anti-human trafficking movement in the 2000s ramped up—and transformed—law enforcement’s relationship to sex work.
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