How an anti-prostitution law led to police harassing/arresting trans women

Some of you might be wondering how a law can lead to trouble for a certain group of people who are not breaking the law. Well, here is a good example of that.

New York had a law that prohibited "loitering for the purpose of prostitution".
However, police applied a very broad interpretation to this law, singling out individuals who appeared to be men wearing provocative women's clothing, and searching or arresting them based on extremely weak evidence, like for standing too long on an area of the sidewalk, or appearing to wave at a car.

https://www.npr.org/2021/02/03/963513022/new-york-repeals-walking-while-trans-law

Some trans women, after being searched, have been arrested simply because police found a couple of condoms in their purse. The fact that they had three condoms in their purse is taken as "evidence" they were involved in prostitution.

Advocates of trans women say police do not understand their subculture well, and often assume that a man wearing flamboyant women's clothing is a prostitute. Many of these trans women are poorer Black and Latino people who do not have a car for transportation, so are more likely to be picked on by police as they walk the sidewalks.

New York decided its law was leading to discrimination against trans women, so its law was finally repealed.

The overall bigger legal issue here is that, sure a law can can be passed to criminalize something, but then the question becomes exactly what sort of things will be taken to constitute "evidence" of that crime?

What often happens is that certain minority groups of people end up getting targeted and will suffer because of the existence of that law, and its interpretation, even though those people are not breaking the law.
People who are simply doing something that's not commonly done by the average person in the population. It could be someone growing plants indoors, who police mistakenly assume must be growing cannabis, it could be someone with a chemistry lab in their home, who police mistakenly assume are making drugs, or in this case, it could be trans women walking on the sidewalks along the street who police mistakenly assume are engaged in prostitution.

 

Some of you seem to think it's always a simple black-and-white thing to tell if someone is breaking the law. It's not.
There is no easy way to tell if someone is "loitering for the purposes of prostitution". If police had to have absolute proof, they'd rarely be able to arrest anyone, under this law, and so the law would go unenforced. Instead those given responsibility to enforce the law took certain liberties in deciding what sort of things constituted adequate evidence that someone was breaking this law.
Since prostitutes often wear flamboyant outlandish risque clothing to advertise themselves, the police used that as one primary factor. Of course, this just happens to be something many trans women do too.

Of course, it wasn't just that. Once police viewed a trans woman with suspicion, they would then scrutinize them for other pieces of evidence. And oftentimes this evidence was just coincidence or turned out to be really flimsy.
But it seemed reasonable to those police officers to arrest these trans women for breaking the law.

For example, maybe the trans woman just happened to be stopping at a street corner too long. Making it more suspicious that she was a prostitute. Maybe she waved to someone she knew in a car that went by.

Then the police stop and search her.
These trans women have been arrested just because they had too much money in their purse, or happened to be carrying a couple of condoms with them.

The thing is, from the perspective of many police officers, a biological man wearing that type of clothing, carrying a large amount of money and several condoms, all while walking down the street, not in a car, is very unusual and practically evidence that they are in the prostitution business.

Of course, that made transwomen who were poorer minorities and could not afford a car much more likely to be the ones to get harassed and arrested.

 

There's no legitimate reason for it to be illegal for adults to buy and sell consensual sex anyway. Bad laws always have bad consequences, and this is bad law.

 

There is some inherent trade-off. Some types of laws may make it easier for law enforcement to prevent a certain type of illegal activity, but they also take away from individual liberties and even (as is demonstrated in this story) cause in certain situations people to be arrested who were not actually breaking the law.


Another issue here is that this was kind of an "intent" law. Any law that has language of "for the purpose of" or with "intent to", can be open to a very broad degree of interpretation. Because no one can mind-read a suspect and know what they were actually thinking, so they start using other circumstantial evidence to guess what the "motivations" were, which basically then turns something that is not illegal into something illegal.

Example: Standing on the street corner is not illegal. But then standing on the street corner becomes illegal if they think there was a certain reason you were standing there.
Whether you did something is a black and white thing, it either happened or it did not. The reason that you did something is not a black and white thing. That is like trying to read what the thoughts were in your mind, or trying to predict the future (an alternate future that did not actually take place).

 

Thats the result of law enforcement being turned into 'crime prevention', which isn't supposed to be their job. Crime prevention is the job of the citizen- don't leave your valuables sitting out in your yard, lock your door at night, be prepared to defend yourself and your loved ones, etc. Tasking cops to crime prevention is effectively the same as tasking them to 'pre-crime' which undermines the foundational principle of due process.

 

Are you referring to that futuristic sci-fi film Minority Report ?

 

No, what we're doing now is even worse. At least in Minority Report, they had a time machine and could theoretically objectively identify intent. Our 'crime prevention' victimizes people based on stereotyping, guilt by association and guesswork.

 

Being the cynic that I am.... probably the ONLY reason "prostitution" hasn't been legalized yet is the government hasn't connived a way to TAX every act, as it's largely "cash and carry" transactions.

 

That’s a pretty good summary of the situation! Nice job OP!

 

Thank you. I'm glad someone appreciates my writing and sharp-cutting assessment of this issue.

 

Of course, you do good work. And you deserve to know it.

 

Clearly this is a local law and a legitimate problem.

Here in the state i live in and other states nearby there has tome a lot more to make an arrest for prositution. The police have to have money change hands and an explicit agreement that it is for sex. Usually they tape it.

Other states have different laws and legal standards.

Aside from the fact that prositution should be legal, this law is somewhat akin to forfeiture laws that many states have. If the police find you with a large some of cash they can simply take it without any arrest or evidence of a crime. Despite the fact that you have a right to carry legal tender with no limits and owe no explanation to anyone why. The assumption is someone with tens of thousands of dollars can only be involved in an illegal enterprise.

 

No such thing as consensual sex when a prostitute is involved. There is always, and I mean always some form of coercion at work.

 

It sounds like you think business is necessarily coercive.

 

@kazenatsu Yeah that is unfair. I can understand why you would not want people dressed scandalously in women's clothing at street corners, especially if it's daytime and kids could be around, but simple tickets for that would be more appropriate. Eventually they would stop.

 

It's coercive because it's illegal meaning they don't receive protection from really bad employers. Plus human trafficking is often associated with prostitution.

 

The business of prostitution always is. As a guy, you can't see the pressures, the coercion. The women get it.

 

Is male prostitution also inherently coercive?

 

Human trafficking is of course coercive, as well as compulsed prostitution. Their tendency of association is a result of the industry being black market which is a result of there not being a competing legal market.

 

All prostitution, male or female, is at the bottom the result of coercion of one kind or another. That is, unless you entertain the fantasy that little boys and girls grow up wanting to be prostitutes.

 

No one wants to grow up to work in the sewer either... but I've never tried to call my job 'coercive'. In fact, I'd consider it entirely reasonable to prefer to have sex with strangers for money rather than climb into small dark underground tunnels filled with spiders and human waste for a living.

It really sounds like you're just trying to make excuses for supporting a legal system based on the enforcement of morality as opposed to protecting freedom of choice.

 

If you were forced to work in the sewers, whether through financial stress and there being no other option open to you, than yes, that's coercion. But there was nothing forcing you to take a job in the sewers. You had options. Oh, and there is nothing wrong with working in sewers. It is extremely necessary work and I would guess it has a higher dollar value than other work you could find. Absolutely nothing wrong with any of that.

 

This is true for some sex workers. Or do you think they're all forced into it?