On May 1, Maryland’s Prince George’s County
Police Department (PGPD) smugly
announced plans to live-tweet an upcoming prostitution sting.
“We won’t tell you when or where, other than it’s somewhere in the
county sometime next week,” the PGPD said. Well, that sometime was
yesterday, though the PGPD ultimately decided not to
live-tweet the sting. And making this into an all-around win, all
the (critical) publicity the department’s plans received wound up
deterring any potential prostitution clients from falling for the
county’s trap.
Kind of delicious, no? Particularly considering the smarmy
hubris the PGPD demonstrated in first announcing the plan,
describing it as a “progressive” and “unprecedented” tactic in
fighting “the world’s oldest profession.” The
backlash to the PGPD’s announcement
was
swift
and
widespread, however. Widespread enough, it seems, that no
potential johns in PG County were stupid enough to take the
police’s bait.
In a
press release yesterday, the PGPD announced that it had
“successfully” conducted the planned sting, albeit without the
planned
prostitweeting.
The event took place over several hours in the southern part of
the county. On average, the unit arrests five to 10 johns during
similar operations. Today, no johns were arrested.
Obviously I think not arresting people for prostitution
is a happier outcome than arresting people, but how do police
justify defining zero arrests as a successful sting? Because, see,
they prevented people from exchanging money for sex in the
county yesterday afternoon. Success is a relative
concept, I suppose. Here’s how Sergeant Dave Coleman, the officer
in charge of the PGPD Vice Intelligence Unit, puts it:
“I’ve participated in hundreds of stings, and I’ve never seen
what happened today. By advertising this days ago, we wanted to put
johns on notice to not come to Prince George’s County. That message
was heard loud and clear. We just put a dent in the human
trafficking business without making one arrest.”
No, you insufferable, self-congratulatory moron, you did not
“put a dent in human trafficking.” You did not even put a dent in
prostitution. You merely convinced commercial sex clients in PG
County to cool it or head elsewhere for a week… Good job on
making your job somebody else’s problem! But, really, we should
probably be celebrating all this as a welcome chapter in
prostitution policing. Cops—or whole police departments—too dumb
not to brag publicly about their awful entrapment plans do to make
it easier for sex workers and clients to avoid arrest.
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