nothin Renewed Sex Stings: Community Policing? | New Haven Independent

Renewed Sex Stings: Community Policing?

Paul Bass Photo

Face got into the pick-up truck. The driver ordered a half and half.” They agreed on a price; Face doesn’t remember if it was $50 or $60. He shifted into gear. Then they heard a siren.

An open can of beer, a pack of Newports, a couple of nips sat between them on the front seat.

Face (pictured above) would remember noticing that the liquid in the can didn’t smell like beer. She would remember the driver getting hyped” as the cops pulled the truck over.

And she would remember what he said: You’re not police, are you?”

You are,” she responded. Stop playing.”

The driver stopped the car in the New England Linen parking lot on Derby Avenue. Officers came to arrest Face. And the john — indeed, an undercover police officer — sped away.

It was around 7 o’clock on the night of Oct. 25. Face — that’s her nickname (“Everybody tells me I’m pretty, so they call me Face’”) — had just begun a shift selling sex on Derby Avenue near the Boulevard in the West River neighborhood. They day before she had turned 39 years old For most of those years, she said, she has struggled with crack addiction and, on and off, sold her body to pay for it.

Until Oct. 25, she said, police had never arrested her for prostitution. Now she was caught up in a sting. Acting on complaints from weary neighbors, the New Haven police department’s Narcotics and Criminal Intelligence squads sent decoys like Face’s fake john into Dwight/West River and Fair Haven to get solicited by prostitutes. The night ended with arrests of 14 women, 13 on prostitution charges, one on drug charges.

They ranged in age from 27 to 56 years old. Many of their faces looked old and worn and damaged when the cops took their mug shots. Then the state saw those faces prominently displayed on the TV news.

The cops said they had a good reason to do that. Neighbors were fed up with seeing, and their kids seeing, sex acts or used condoms, in alleys or on the street.

It’s a quality of life issue,” said Assistant Chief Archie Generoso, who oversees the divisions that undertook the operation. The department, he said, wanted to show the community we’re making some kind of an effort. And try to get [the prostitutes] some kind of services.”

Released, like the other arrestees, back to the streets, Face saw her face on the TV news, which also placed all the arrestees’ desperate mug shots on their websites. WTNH created a gallery with full-sized versions.

I felt bad,” she said. Embarrassed.” But not necessarily enough, she said, to kick her habit. She said she doesn’t believe the arrests will keep prostitutes off drugs or off the streets.

Some researchers and other police departments raise similar doubts. So did Mayor Toni Harp when asked this week about the sting: The real question is: How do we get to the root of it? Is this not another way that society victimizes poor women who really have no other way to make it?”

Community Policing

Sherman: Shaming doesn’t work.

Stings aren’t new in New Haven. But for a while, New Haven stopped doing them.

Back in the 1990s, the city launched community policing under a plan Harp (then a city alderwoman) helped draw up. Police officials decided that locking up street prostitutes didn’t address the root of the situation. It didn’t stop low-level offenders or users with related drug and other health problems, the same way that focusing on corner dime-bag slingers removed the visibility of a problem temporarily, but didn’t stem it long-term. It just clogged the criminal justice system with society’s most vulnerable people, who then had new barriers to overcome in straightening out their lives.

The police then worked with an advocacy group called Streets Inc., which distributed condoms to prostitutes and helped them get drug treatment, housing or other needed help. One top-ranking cop would visit prostitutes off-duty to urge them to enter treatment programs. Meanwhile, a citizens group in the Edgewood neighborhood started a john of the week” campaign, publicizing the names and photos of suburban johns who came to their area to buy sex. That cut down on the problem.

Most of the cops involved in the alternative 1990s approach have long left the department. The stings eventually returned. The police no longer work with any advocacy groups for prostitutes; Generoso said he doesn’t know of any in town. (It does work with outside groups to combat sex trafficking.) The Oct. 25 sting occurred at the request of the district managers of the Fair Haven and Dwight/West River neighborhoods, under the direction of the new head of New Haven’s detective division, Lt. Herb Johnson.

During her weekly Mayor Monday” appearance on WNHH radio, Mayor Harp suggested that cops replicate a part of their Project Longevity” strategy with drug dealers: Hold a call-in.”

Everybody knows who the prostitutes are. You call them in. Before you arrest them, you say, Look , we know this is what you’re doing. We want you to stop it.’ You provide the services they might need. You say, If you don’t, if you’re not willing to give up your john,’” then the police will arrest them.

It’s really a form of slavery if you think about it,” she said of prostitution.

Some other cities have already embraced the call-in idea. Seattle calls it the Law Enforcement Assisted Diversion” (LEAD) program. Working with other agencies, cops bring in low-level prostitutes and instead of arresting them, offer them help finding housing, health care, job training, drug treatment, and mental health support.”

Sweeps like New Haven’s don’t reduce the level of prostitution in a community or steer prostitutes to meaningful help, according to Johns Hopkins School of Health Professor Susan Gail Sherman, who has studied the subject in depth with both cops and sex workers. She’s currently working with Baltimore’s police department to bring a version of LEAD to that city.

Shaming never works with anyone for anything,” Sherman said. It doesn’t address root causes…. You can’t arrest yourself out of the problem.”

Foundations have helped fund the Seattle program to see how the approach works out. Studies so far have shown the program leading to a 58 – 60 percent drop in recidivism (subsequent arrests) within six months; saving the taxpayers thousands of dollars per participant; helping prostitutes find housing and other jobs; and improving the prostitutes’ lives as well as their interactions with law enforcement.

In a press release about the New Haven sweep, Johnson stated that the cops want to help the women, not just arrest them: We are hopeful that those arrested will avail themselves of social services available through the courts. We don’t want to keep arresting the same people.” In an interview, Assistant Chief Generoso said the same while acknowledging the challenges in an interview: After we arrest them we try to offer them services. We try to get them out of the life.” In the Oct. 25 sweep, he said, none of the arrestees took up the offer.

Hard-Knock Life

Face said she received no such offer when the police arrested her on Oct. 25. She’s said she’s not sure if she would have taken up such an offer or not.

She has tried treatment programs before, she said. She gets frustrated and leaves. She has quit crack on her own several times, then returned when I got depressed,” she said.

Face grew up in the Bedford-Stuyvesant section of Brooklyn, N.Y. People on the street introduced her to marijuana by the time she was 9, she said. She started running away at 11: I was abused,” she said. By 11, she said, she was smoking crack. Child-protection authorities placed her in foster homes; she would run away because, she said, I didn’t like the way they treated me.” By 13, she said, she was living permanently on the streets.

And, by 15, prostituting herself to support her habit. She had six children along the way, she said, and lost them all.

Her mother Elvira, meanwhile, moved to New Haven, where her sister lived, in 2000 to help her other kids escape the gang life. In 2004, she received word from friends in Brooklyn that Face’s life was in crisis. She traveled to Brooklyn and convinced Face to move to New Haven.

At times Face was able to start going straight, she said, but she inevitably got depressed and returned to drugs and the street life.

She talked about that during an interview this week outside an apartment where she had temporarily crashed. Dressed in a pink hoodie, torn jeans and sandals, she spoke softly, her head down, sometimes shaking.

She doesn’t have a pimp or any regular clients, she said. Asked how it feels to continually have sex with strangers for money, she responded, just numb.” (The state judicial database shows that she pleaded guilty in 2015 to a misdemeanor charge of failure to appear in court.)

Face learned years ago, she said, that she had a brain tumor. She said she doesn’t know whether or not it’s malignant; she has chosen not to see a doctor again to find out.

Why not?

I don’t want anybody to touch me,” she said.

Don’t people touch her all the time?

In my head. I don’t let them open my head.”

Next Moves

Generoso: We’re going after johns next.

Assistant Chief Generoso said that he has heard about programs like Seattle’s. He said we remain open” to the idea. The conversation prompted Generoso to take a new look at alternatives. He said he intends to reinvestigate trying to reach out again to” community groups that might want to work with the cops.

In the short term, he said, New Haven is planning to conduct reverse stings” soon on johns rather than on the prostitutes. They’re fueling the problem to begin with with their money. And they’re people we can actually affect. They can choose not to come in [to neighborhoods] and do that. These girls, they’re supporting drug habits. If we affect the johns to not coming into the city, can affect them more by exposing them, putting their photos up there.”

Whether those johns’ photos will appear on TV is an open question. The police department didn’t originally send out the photos of the women arrested on Oct. 25; they did so later because of requests from TV stations, which are entitled to them under the Freedom of Information Act. By contrast, said police spokesman Officer David Hartman, I’ve never had a press person ask me for a picture of a john.”

Meanwhile, Face said she doesn’t know if she’ll return to the streets. She’s worried for now about having a place to live.

Face has lived on and off at shelters in New Haven. Her mother Elvira said Face can’t stay with her.

I disagree with her,” Elvira said in an interview. I think she’s doing [drugs] by choice. She stopped before.”

I only use drugs,” Face put in, when I’m depressed and stressed out.” She didn’t look happy or calm when she said it.

Click on or download the above audio file to hear the full episode of WNHH’s Mayor Monday” program, which dealt with a wide range of issues in addition to prostitution stings. The episode was made possible with the support of Gateway Community College and Berchem, Moses & Devlin, P.C.

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