Hawaii Cops Demand the Right to Have Sex With Hookers

Hawaii’s
prostitution law includes an exemption for “any member of
a police department, a sheriff, or a law enforcement officer acting
in the course and scope of duties.” A
bill that the state legislature is considering originally
would have limited
that exemption to exclude “sexual penetration or sadomasochistic
abuse.” In response to police objections, that qualification was
eliminated; the current
version of the bill, which was unanimously approved by the
state House of Representatives earlier this month and is now before
the state Senate, leaves the exemption as it is.

That’s right: Cops insisted that they must be free not just to
receive blowjobs and handjobs from prostitutes but also to engage
in vaginal and anal intercourse with them. Evidently the police
also need permission to engage in “flagellation or torture by or
upon a person as an act of sexual stimulation or gratification”
(Hawaii’s definition
of “sadomasochistic abuse”). Just in case. Since an entire chamber
of the state legislature agreed to this request, the cops must have
had a pretty persuasive argument. Here it is, as
summed up by Jason Kawabata, captain of the Honolulu Police
Department’s Narcotics/Vice Division:

As written, this bill would nullify the exemption if the officer
agrees to pay a fee for sexual penetration or sadomasochistic
abuse. This would limit the type of violations law enforcement
officers are able to enforce. Even if the intent of the amendment
is merely to limit actual conduct by the officer, we must oppose
it. Codifying the limitations on an officer‘s conduct would greatly
assist pimps and prostitutes in their efforts to avoid
prosecution.

In other words, if it were generally known that police are not
allowed to engage in sexual penetration or sadomasochistic abuse
with prostitutes, suspicious hookers might insist that undercover
officers do so to show they are not cops. When those officers
balked, their status as agents of law enforcement would be
revealed. That scenario seems rather implausible, since a person
commits the
offense of prostitution as soon as she “agrees or offers to
engage in sexual conduct with another person for a fee.” For
Kawabata’s fear to be realized, a prostitute would need to have sex
first to make sure her customer was not a cop, then negotiate
payment afterward, which does not seem like a very good business
strategy.

Critics of the exemption
argue that it is unnecessary, that it invites abuse, and
that it could inflict additional trauma on women coerced into
prostitution. More fundamentally, the double standard demanded by
police highlights the utter absurdity of prostitution laws. Police
do not commit murder to catch killers or knock over banks to catch
robbers. Yet here they are insisting that they need the leeway to
have sex with prostitutes in order to stop people from having sex
with prostitutes. Even if cops never take advantage of that
freedom, they routinely commit the
crime of agreeing to pay for sex, except that in their case it
is not treated as a crime. That exemption is considered acceptable
only because exchanging money for sex, unlike murder and robbery,
does not violate anyone’s rights. But if so, why not broaden the
exemption to cover everyone?