by Lydia Sidhom, Bay City News August 17, 2023

AS THE SUN sets over Capp Street in San Francisco’s Mission District each evening, the red lights turn on, and the neighborhood becomes the center for sex work in the city. Cars pass slowly up and down the street, their occupants looking to solicit sex workers. At times, police intervene, brandishing bright flashlights and handing out citations and arrests.

Just last year, the San Francisco Police Department announced it was cracking down on prostitution, as it installed barricades on five blocks of Capp Street in hopes of curbing solicitors — or “johns” — that perused the streets.

But that same year, there were only 27 prostitution-related police reports filed by the SFPD, a nearly 92 percent decrease from 2018, which saw 336.

Although police activity has picked up slightly in 2023, the overall numbers of prostitution-related police reports show a continuing and dramatic decline over the last two decades. 

And that begs the question: What story does the policing of prostitution tell about evolving attitudes toward sex work in the city.

An analysis of the data, along with interviews with police and sex-worker advocates, suggests a variety of factors are at play — including changes in the law, in policing strategy, law enforcement’s increased focus on human trafficking and in the way sex work is viewed by the powers that be.

It is often said that prostitution is the world’s oldest profession. It is also a job that throughout history — be it in Europe’s Middle Ages or modern-day San Francisco — has not always been viewed as a profession. 

The competing perceptions of prostitution have significantly shaped the way it has been policed in the city. On one side, there are those who view the job as a crime and want it policed as such, and on the other those who have been actively fighting to decriminalize it. 

Loitering decriminalized

Prior to 2023, the police were able to arrest people whom they believed to be sex workers on the streets under section 653.22 in the California Penal Code, which states that “loitering” in a public space with the “intent to commit prostitution” is a crime. But Senate Bill 357 — or the Safer Streets for All Act — decriminalized loitering. It was passed by the California state Legislature in July 2022 and went into effect in January 2023. 

The decriminalization of loitering was introduced by Sen. Scott Weiner and supported by several sex work, LGBTQIA+ and minority rights advocacy groups, who argued that, in enforcing the California code, the police were engaging in discriminatory behavior.

Advocates for sex workers had been pushing for California to get rid of the loitering law for years, said Rachel West, who works for the US PROStitutes Collective, a network of current and former prostitutes that has campaigned for the decriminalization of sex work since 1982. 

“Anybody who was walking or standing on the street could be arrested for loitering,” West said. “It particularly targeted trans women.”

Weiner’s bill sought especially to protect transgender women and people of color, who legislators and advocacy organizations said were disproportionately impacted by the loitering law. 

Before it was outlawed, loitering with the intent of engaging in prostitution made up a majority — or 65 percent — of all police citations or arrests related to sex work within the last five years, according to the San Francisco incident report dataset. 

Around the same time that loitering was decriminalized, the San Francisco Police Department announced that it was installing barricades on the Capp Street corridor. The barricades, which went up in fall 2022 on the 18th through 22nd street blocks of Capp Street, were intended to divert sex workers and clients from the area. 

In addition to the barricades, the SFPD said in a press release that it launched a “multi-pronged plan” to address “community concerns regarding illegal prostitution, human trafficking, and traffic/pedestrian safety” along Capp Street. Part of this plan, the SFPD said, involved having officers go undercover by posing as sex workers to catch johns and cite them for soliciting prostitution. 

The “criminal activity” aspect of sex work has increasingly been pinned on the johns — who can be cited or arrested under California’s still criminalized solicitation penal code 647(b). 

But, while solicitation charges against johns are climbing in relation to previous years, they are meager compared to the volume of citations and arrests handed to sex workers for loitering before 2020 and decriminalization. 

Halfway through 2023, the police had cited or arrested a mere 31 johns for soliciting, making up nearly 80 percent of all prostitution-related police incidents, according to SFPD incident report data.

Though solicitation for the first time makes up a majority of citations and arrests for all prostitution-related charges — whereas before it was loitering — it is not the only charge being issued for johns. 

For example, a police interaction with a john can turn into a citation for a traffic violation instead of one for solicitation. The police reported that they issued nearly 150 traffic citations — none of which are considered “prostitution-related” — to johns in the Capp Street area during their fall 2022 crackdown. 

District Attorney Brooke Jenkins has also focused the office’s efforts on johns, she said in a statement issued last fall. Johns are referred to neighborhood courts and “john school,” a virtual course which teaches “the firsthand experiences of prostitutes, the health risks associated with solicitation, sex trafficking education, and the potential legal consequences of future offenses,” read the statement. Since November 2022, the DA has referred 51 solicitation cases to john school, according to the office. 

If the police are focusing their efforts on citing and arresting johns — and the DA on prosecuting them — in light of the decriminalization of loitering, it leaves the question: how are sex workers themselves now viewed and treated by law enforcement? 

The answer the police department gives: sex workers are the victims of abuse and human trafficking.

When asked if the SFPD views all sex workers as victims of human trafficking, spokesperson Eve Laokwansathitaya said yes; that is, police do not recognize the possibility that people may engage in sex work simply to earn a living wage.

“This is more seeing prostitutes as victims,” Laokwansathitaya said. “Our focus is going after the people soliciting prostitutes — the johns — because prostitutes are the victims of human trafficking.” 

It’s two different things

Advocates for sex workers say that while the police department’s concerns about human trafficking are legitimate, they should not obscure the fact that much sex work is engaged in voluntarily just to make a living.

“The police themselves and the police department have traditionally mixed up sex work and trafficking as the same thing — they’ll use those interchangeably,” said West, the advocate at US PROStitutes Collective. “Sex work and trafficking are two different things: there’s human trafficking, which is abuse, coercion and fraud, and then there’s women out there trying to work, and the police are stopping them from working.” 

And despite the police’s new stated attention on trafficking, the number of sex trafficking citations and arrests has stayed constant throughout the past two decades, according to the SFPD incident report data.

In lieu of citing or arresting sex workers for loitering, the police aim to “provide resources” for sex workers themselves, Laokwansathitaya said. The police view themselves as “advocates” for sex workers, intended to serve as a conduit between victims and a life outside of the sex work industry. 

In keeping with this approach, Laokwansathitaya said police officers in the Special Victims Unit are encouraged to hand out “referral cards” that contain phone numbers to services such as the National Human Trafficking Hotline and emergency shelters. Officers carry these cards around to give to sex workers. In some cases, they “can call the numbers on the card to set up arrangements, such as shelter,” Laokwansathitaya said.

The answer is poverty 

The two-decade decline appears to signal an overall de-emphasis on prostitution as a criminal activity by the police. 

Yet sex work remains illegal. And advocates for prostitutes argue that law enforcement fails to recognize that many people engage in sex work just to support themselves.

The growing focus by police on human trafficking boils down to “false care,” said Nell Myhands, who works with US PROStitutes Collective’s sister organization Women of Colour in the Global Women’s Strike. 

“The police needed a way to say, ‘we care about these women who are out there, and we will show you how much we care by calling them trafficked instead of poor,’” Myhands said.

Instead of focusing on trafficking, the question should be “Why are women in prostitution in the first place?” West said. The answer, West and Myhands said, is poverty.

“Crackdowns start with the idea that sex work is immoral and criminalized, ignoring the reality that sex workers are moms who are just trying to make a living.” Nell Myhands, Women of Color in the Global Women’s Strike

The US PROStitutes Collective reported that 66 percent of women arrested on charges of prostitution are Black. They added that sex workers are disproportionately mothers who turn to sex work as means to support themselves in a city with an increasingly high cost of living

“Crackdowns start with the idea that sex work is immoral and criminalized, ignoring the reality that sex workers are moms who are just trying to make a living,” Myhands said. “And then women and children get blamed, and people say: ‘How dare you engage in sex work even though you’re hungry? How dare you engage in sex work even though you’re homeless?’”

Instead of focusing police resources on crackdowns, the US PROStitutes Collective and other advocacy organizations have pushed for the city to implement more policies that would address poverty. This includes, for example, expanding the child tax credit and providing a guaranteed care income for low-income single mothers. 

The sentiment behind that approach is shared by some Mission District residents, including Arturo Rosas, who has lived in San Francisco for 44 years. 

“Prostitution will keep happening in this city for as long as there are poor people in this city,” Rosas said one Tuesday night while watering his plants on Shotwell Street, a street over from Capp. “How else are these girls going to survive?”