Nicholas Kristof Says Busting Johns Is the Key to Shutting Down the World’s Oldest Profession

Is there any police activity more
pointless and pathetic than a “sting”
aimed at people seeking to buy arbitrarily proscribed products or
services? It is bad enough when the government criminalizes a
transaction—a wager, a drug purchase, the exchange of money for
sex—that violates no one’s rights. When cops go out of their
way to enforce that prohibition by tricking people into talking
about transactions that will never occur, they manufacture “crimes”
that are doubly phony. So how should we view armed agents of the
state who invite people to engage in peaceful exchange, only to
pounce on them with guns and handcuffs?

New York Times columnist Nicholas Kristof thinks
they’re heroes. Consider the breathless opening of his
latest column equating prostitution with “human
trafficking”:

Several police officers are waiting in a hotel room, handcuffs
at the ready, when they get the signal. A female undercover officer
posing as a prostitute is with a would-be customer in an adjacent
room, and she has pushed a secret button indicating that they
should charge in to make the arrest.

The officers shove at the door connecting the rooms, but somehow
it has become locked. They can’t get in. The undercover officer is
stuck with her customer. Tension soars. Curses reverberate. A
million fears surge.

Then, suddenly, the door frees and the police officers rush in
and arrest a graying 64-year-old man, Michael. His smugness
shatters and turns to bewilderment and shock as police officers
handcuff his hands behind his back.

Exciting stuff. It takes a brave cop to join with several of his
heavily armed colleagues in ambushing a defenseless 64-year-old who
has committed the unpardonable offense of being smug in the
presence of a fake prostitute.

How does Kristof justify this unprovoked violence? In his usual
slippery way. “Some women sell sex on their own,” he concedes, “but
coercion, beatings and recruitment of underage girls are central to
the business as well.” Then he mentions “a 14-year-old girl in
Queens” who ran away from home and was “locked up by pimps and sold
for sex.” Although they threatened to kill her if she tried to
escape, “after three months she managed to call 911.”

What exactly does that 14-year-old girl have to do with poor
Michael, the john arrested in a Chicago hotel room after responding
to an online ad placed by the Cook County Sheriff’s Office? Unless
the ad referred to an underage girl held against her will, there is
no reason to think that Michael or any of the other men arrested in
prostitution stings are complicit in such crimes. But they must
suffer, Kristof says, because “police increasingly recognize that
the simplest way to reduce the scale of human trafficking is to
arrest men who buy sex.” He insists “that isn’t prudishness or
sanctimony but a strategy to dampen demand.”

This strategy—cops posing as prostitutes—has been a joke and a
cliché for as long as I’ve been alive, but Kristof considers it the
cutting edge of innovative policing. If targeting customers is all
it takes to eradicate black markets, why do they still exist?
People have been buying and selling sex for thousands of years, but
Kristof seems to think they will stop if only we can get enough
pretty police officers to impersonate hookers. He calls sting
operations “marvels of efficiency”—which they are, assuming you
want to produce futile arrests and gratuitous humiliation.

Kristof claims men who pay for sex, even when the transactions
involve consenting adults, “perpetuate” crimes against women,
because some prostitutes are forced into the business by threats of
violence. By the same logic, people who buy automobiles perpetuate
car theft, and people who hire domestic help perpetuate slavery. If
anyone is perpetuating prostitution-related violence, it is
prohibitionists like Kristof, who insist on maintaining a black
market in which both buyers and sellers face unnecessary risks and
victims are treated like criminals.