The police crackdown can't "end" prostitution - nothing will end it except some fundamental economic changes and getting most of these women off the drugs that keep them tied into it. Moving it about is okay - it makes it difficult and less lucrative for the pimps and the prostitutes, and harder to find for the johns. I'll take the temporary solution of harassing prostitution down to a dull roar, over the non-solution of letting it run free and increase with a constant stream of damaged women and damaged neighborhoods as this crime and all the related crimes are given the official city nod.
I gladly pay my share of taxes that supports police work taking down prostitution. What should we let go next in the name of fiscal frugality? Vandalism? "Minor" drug dealing? Break-ins where "only" a few hundred dollars of property is stolen and damage caused, and that insurance will mostly take care of? Car thefts? Nobody is suggesting that we let all this property crime simply run unabated to destroy our neighborhoods, but yet that argument is made about not busting prostitutes. A clue - that other stuff is about property, and it's an "aggravation" as well, but prostitution is a violent crime that targets women who are both victims and take a role in the perpetration. I suspect that the disconnect for some people is that they feel that because prostitutes commit a crime, there is no need to see prostitution as violence against them. That's a nice, comfortable fallacy that goes absolutely nowhere in the real world. Real life: a woman's ruined/lost life is worth 10,000 times or more what a stolen car is, whether she is a "willing" participant or not.
Minneapolis has paid to put up a lame statue of Mary Tyler Moore (our lame answer to the St. Paul's lame attempt to bask in the Peanuts notoriety by claiming Schultz as their own, I guess), bail out the Target Center and Gaviidae Common (wholly unnecessary corporate welfare on the hoof), and many painfully wasteful things that benefit only the wealthy/corporate interests. Spending money on curbing and hopefully eliminating more prostitution is far better spent, and costs a fraction of that. We need to spend more on dealing with the underlying issues - aiding these women to get off drugs, into a safe, affordable place to live, and back on track for legal, living-wage work.
Roxana Orrell Central
On Wednesday, June 25, 2003, at 12:12 PM, [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote:
Message: 16 Date: Wed, 25 Jun 2003 12:14:23 -0500 From: WizardMarks <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> To: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Cc: Jim Mork <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> Subject: Re: [Mpls] Street Vice;Art
Jim Mork wrote:
Wizard Marks ... tries to justify police crackdowns on prostitution. At no point has she even tried to answer how that crackdown is going to end prostitution
WM: Police crackdowns move prostitution from where it is to some other location. However, those of us who live daily with street prostitution will accept that "solution" for the moment while real solutions are worked out.
WM: I don't think that's quite accurate. What I sent out was a lot ofWhat we mostly get are her emotions about prostitution.
information about how street prostitution works couched in my utter
disgust with the romanticized notions surrounding street prostitution
and the daft notion that legalizing the abuse of women and children is a
solution to anything, rather than what it is--a way to make the denial
by the body politic deeper.
WM: I find this a very curious notion. When the tax man puts the bite onIt will involve spending MY money and it will involve spending YOUR money.
my paycheck, he simultaneously says this ain't my money anymore, though
I may have a 1/280,000,000 say-so in how it's used. So once it gets to
the tax man, kiss it good by, same as you would if you dropped it at the
track or bought lottery tickets or spent it on prostitutes.
WM: Are you deliberately missing the point here? Police move theSend in the cops only works for certain things. It reduced the murder rate, so it was money well spent. But I don't recall a time when a socially-caused problem like prostitution or drug use went away because of social coercion. There may BE a solution (not every country suffers to the same degree), but police coercion seems not to be it.
problem, they are not set up to solve it. For the interim--and it's
gonna be a LLLLLLLOOOOOOOOOONNNNNNGGGGGG interim, I'm willing to settle
for moving it. I'll be damned if me (or I for you purists) and my
neighbors are going to be the only ones to deal with the consequences of
genocide. But, so long as you're pretending that cost is the most
important factor here, how much did we pay to shut down Hitler? In
constant dollars, if you please. How much is it costing the body
politic to allow prostitution to flourish? Fifty-one percent of the
population is female, count the boy children so abused and I cannot even
say how much higher the percentage goes.
In sum, I'm rageful, in this instance, because those poo-pooing any
solution are also those who are in heavy denial about the seriousness of
the situation and the daily cost to all of us of not instituting
solutions that address the core issue.
TEMPORARY REMINDER: 1. Don't feed the troll! Ignore obvious flame-bait. 2. If you don't like what's being discussed here, don't complain - change the subject (Mpls-specific, of course.)
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