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Easy Streets?

Working girls and cops differ over just how user-friendly the county's sex business climate is

By Kelly Luker

For some sex workers, Santa Cruz is a tolerant business venue. Magdalena, who has worked in Santa Cruz massage parlors and as an independent for more than two decades, says, "There's an understanding about sex work in this town. I've never had a fear of the law." Then there's Krystal, who worked the massage parlor circuit 15 years back and returned to sex work two years ago as an independent. "Honey, the cops know every one of the girls in the business," she says. "The only time someone gets busted is during an election year or when a pissed-off neighbor turns someone in. I think the cops are extremely tolerant of it."

However, many sex workers approached for this article were understandably cautious and refused to be interviewed. They seem to share the sentiments of Andi, who admits to being "paranoid all the time." And she may or may not have good reason to be.

Sgt. Robert Hennig of the Santa Cruz Police Department has termed these women "low priority" in his department's criminal pursuits and says his officers will investigate only if there are complaints. Asked for an example, he says, "Well, we get complaints from men who go in and are shocked to find out that sex is for sale." Also, says Hennig, his department may receive calls from disgruntled neighbors.

But later, standing beside his squad car, Hennig pulls out the Great Exchange, one of Santa Cruz's most common weekly vehicles for sex-worker ads. Spreading it across the hood of the cruiser, he points to the "Massage" column. Several names are circled, with prices jotted next to them. Hennig apparently has logged a few police hours calling these women. He also dutifully reviews the wants ads in Metro Santa Cruz and Good Times. "The dead giveaway is what they charge," Hennig explains. "Would you pay a hundred bucks for a massage?"

This pressure on independent sex workers is unhappy news for UCSC professor Wendy Chapkis. As a graduate student in the fall of 1987, she became involved in sex workers' rights. At about the same time, Santa Cruz began its Red Light Abatement Program. At that time, police visited massage parlors posing as customers. They documented cases of solicitation, and the district attorney used the collected information to approach the massage parlor property owners. The owners were given 30 days to evict the parlors or the property was seized by the county.

"Before that," Chapkis recalls, "Santa Cruz had sort of a de facto decriminalization policy about prostitution. There were much more explicit ads in the Good Times and Santa Cruz Sentinel and the massage parlors around town operated pretty freely."

That all changed when then-Santa Cruz County Sheriff Al Noren and District Attorney Art Danner initiated high-profile interventions that resulted in the closure of all massage parlors and a radical change in the type of ads most papers would accept. What concerned sex workers and people like Chapkis who worked on their behalf is that the actions did not eradicate prostitution, but pushed women into working on the streets or out of their homes--isolated situations that leave women more vulnerable to violence.

Chapkis formed an ad hoc committee to address the new and dangerous policy. "We approached the sheriff and district attorney at that time and they both said that they would not go after the independents, only the parlors," Chapkis remembers. "They also said they would not go through the papers and monitor the sex workers and that they wouldn't go after the street workers unless there was a problem." That reply failed to address the isolation of independent sex workers as opposed to the more protected space of a parlor and, by all appearances, the Santa Cruz Police Department has since reneged on the deal.

Attorney George Smith thinks he knows why Santa Cruz law enforcement keeps its thumb on independent sex workers, and he believes it has little to do with protecting the community's morals. "They need snitches," he says succinctly. Smith has represented women arrested for soliciting sex out of their homes, including one independent sex worker who was arrested only a week after I spoke with Hennig. "They offer to tear up the tickets if the women will give them information on drug dealers," Smith explains.

This is not what bothers Smith, though. "I have had cases where the cops met with the women and if they did not know someone involved in drug dealing, the police would urge them into covert operations by posing as someone in a drug transaction," the attorney says. "When the request is for information on drug dealers, that's one thing. But asking someone who is not facing any real jail time and who may not understand that they are involving themselves in potentially dangerous work, then I think that is way over the line. They are being extorted to do police activity."

"That's not true," snaps Hennig, in response to Smith's allegations. "We never coerce anybody into anything. There's no promises made to them in any way, shape or form. Nor would we put somebody in a position where their safety is in jeopardy. The simple fact is that if we did, word-of-mouth travels quickly and we'd never get someone to work with us again.

But," he admits, "I'm sure there's going to be an exception, so I can't say that never happens."

Smith, for his part, laughs derisively in response to Hennig's claims that police officers only respond in the case of a complaint. "Those representations are utterly untrue and we can prove it," he says. He proceeds to quote one police officer's testimony from court records: "We start at the top of the list of the Great Exchange and go right down."

"It's very systematic," the lawyer adds. "It has nothing to do with traffic."

Chapkis has watched the political climate blow both hot and cold for sex workers over the years. "After that [Red Light Abatement] crackdown, things started to settle down," she says. "Then recently, there were all these news stories about the street workers in Beach Flats." In Chapkis' opinion, it is a largely manufactured problem that shifts with political winds. "I think it's easier to crack down on sex and drugs than to address the real problems like homelessness and the economic distress of the '90s," she says.

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