The New York Times reports today that police in Nassau County, New York (Long Island) have made “more than 70 arrests since it began focusing on Craigslist last year, one of numerous crackdowns by vice squads . . . ‘Craigslist has become the high-tech 42nd Street, where much of the solicitation takes place now,’ said Richard McGuire, Nassau’s assistant chief of detectives.”
Duh. Had the police not visited craigslist.org before last year? Or did they only wake up recently to the likelihood that “Hot SEXXXX. Your place or mine. $255555555,” was a sex-for-money proposition?
The NYT article focuses on the arrests of women for offering their bodies for sale. How about some arrests of their male “customers?”
Same old, same old, from what I can tell, except that it is on the front page today.
-Bridget Crawford
Police attention to prostitution operations depends usually on two factors which may be interrelated. The first is the open notoriety of some prostitution and the second is the public response including, of course, media attention. Craig’s List has become both a household word in cyberspace as well as a thriving community for all sorts of activities and exchanges. So a police investigation into naked (no pun intended) salesmanship is not surprising.
Keep you eye on the ball – in New York City, for example, free newspapers dispensed from sidewalk boxes owe a substantial part of their revenue to page after page of ads for mostly female and some male prostitution. The average issue of The Village Voice has almost a dozen such pages and that revenue really counts. You won’t see a police raid on the Voice or a Grand Jury investigation.
With regard to advertised solicitation for prostitution there is no way police can determine much less arrest male customers (or female ones either as every vice cop knows that women are not infrequent purchasers of these advertised services). Arresting “Johns” in the street is viable and the NYPD has done this often. With regard to Craig’s List and other cyber-advertisers it’s impossible.
Ralph Michael Stein
the customers should be ‘outed” with even more ferver than the sellers. We had a sign on the wall of the shop to remind us of who pays the bills. “Customers make paychecks possable” Also MAYBE not ALL the customers were male. It would be very informative to see the makeup of the seller vs. customer vs. arrest vs. conviction vs. gender stats on a timeline of, say, the last 10 years.
IMPOSSIBLE? The way Googgle and Yahoo and the others collect data on all of our online activities and use this knowledge as part of their revenue stream?