Hawaii cops have reached an
agreement with state legislators that will limit the exemption
that allows them to have sex with prostitutes. Police originally
insisted on an open-ended license to fornicate, but now they
are willing to settle for petting, handjobs, blowjobs, and other
activities that fall short of penetration.
Hawaii’s current
prostitution law includes a blanket exemption for law
enforcement officers “acting in the course and scope of duties.”
That covers both agreeing to pay for sex and actually having sex.
As you may recall, some members of the state House of
Representatives, who apparently were surprised to discover this
exemption existed, wanted to remove “sexual penetration or
sadomasochistic abuse” from the list of things cops are allowed to
do with prostitutes. Police objected, saying that change would put
a damper on their work., and the bill that the House ultimately
passed left the exemption alone. But news of the nixed amendment
generated enough outrage that police are now willing to
compromise.
Yesterday state Sen. Clayton Hee, who chairs the Senate
Judiciary and Labor Committee,
told KHON, the Fox station in Honolulu, that the Honolulu
Police Department (HPD) “agrees that the sexual penetration
language in the law that they are exempt from should no longer be
an exemption for police officers.” HPD Maj. Jerry Inouye told the
station that the department “has never allowed police officers to
have sex with prostitutes and that HPD only wanted to keep ‘the
part that allows an officer to make a verbal agreement for sex for
money because that’s the crux for most prostitution
investigations.'” But that is not what Jason Kawabata, captain of
the HPD’s Narcotics/Vice Division,
told the House Judiciary Committee last month (emphasis
added):
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.
Yes, Kawabata wanted to make sure it was legal for officers to
promise money for sex, including penetration. But he also wanted to
preserve the exemption for actually having sex with hookers, even
though Inouye insists that has never been allowed, because
“codifying the limitations on an officer’s conduct would greatly
assist pimps and prostitutes in their efforts to avoid
prosecution.” As I
said last week, that argument does not make a lot of sense,
since it depends on a scenario in which a prostitute has sex with
her customer before striking a deal. In any case, if
police regulations are as strict as Inouye claims, knowledge of
them would have the same effect on the behavior of pimps and
prostitutes as knowledge of a statutory restriction would.
Apparently that has occurred to the SPD, which decided not to
send any representatives to a Senate hearing on the prostitution
bill last Friday. Inouye explained that the first rule of the
department’s policy regarding sex with hookers is not to talk about
the department’s policy regarding sex with hookers:
Maj. Inouye also addressed the department’s absence at last
Friday’s hearing, saying they have to be very careful about what
they say publicly about policies when it comes to their undercover
investigations. “We felt at that point, if I went to the hearing, I
might be subjected to questions about our undercover polices that I
might not be able to answer,” he said.
Kawabata and Inouye talk about their work as if they are
catching terrorists and dare not tip them off about police methods.
But in reality, cops enforcing prostitution laws are not protecting
the public from dangerous predators; they are trying to stop
consenting adults from exchanging sex for money. There is nothing
noble or worthwhile about that work, and it surely does not deserve
the sort of deference the state House showed when it unanimously
agreed that police need the leeway to have sex with prostitutes so
they can stop people from having sex with prostitutes.
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