One five foot tall woman was reportedly thrown to the floor and a gun was put to her head in the course of a prostitution arrest. In order to enforce the prostitution laws behind closed doors, the police have to resort to all sorts of unfair and illegal practices. Not too long ago Police Officer Francis Hogue was convicted of forced oral copulation with a massage parlor worker, a Laotian refugee. Lately there has been an increase in complaints about police misconduct in prostitution arrests. The police have been licensing and busting masseuses for some time.
Prostitution just moves somewhere else, to the streets, and from neighborhood to neighborhood.
And the next time it crops up the women are even more vulnerable. It costs a fortune and the police wind up using questionably legal, and even illegal means to bust them. The industry is tenacious enough to find ways to get around the police, but each time they are busted in the name of rescuing them, it means the workers become more marginalized, the working conditions become more stressful, and the prostitutes basically suffer. As someone with direct knowledge of the situation, I was very disappointed with the gross inaccuracies, superficiality, and sensationalism of Leslie Griffith's report last night on massage parlors inthe Tenderloin. I work as a community health outreach worker focusing inthe health and well being of the women in the massage parlors and their families.