When Will Cops Slap the Cuffs on David Vitter?

Here's a lovely use of local resources.

It was Rocio Palacios who first noticed the woman who appeared to need help. It was 8 a.m. when she and her husband, Erasmo, dropped their 6-year-old daughter off at school and had picked up their 22-year-old daughter to go out for breakfast when they saw the woman waving her arms at 53rd and Kedzie last November. The couple laughed, realizing this wasn't a woman in distress after all. 

Rather, the arm-waving woman was a streetwalker. Or at least, pretending to be one.

[W]ithin seconds, Chicago Police swarmed the family car, hauling Erasmo Palacios out in handcuffs. He was charged with solicitation of a prostitute. ... Eight hours later, Palacios, who has no criminal record, was released from custody. And weeks later, charges against him were dropped. 

Wow. So we have an undercover police officer dressed like a hooker, and "swarms" of colleagues standing by to entrap and arrest those who even appear to succumb to her lure.

It's puzzling enough that you can get arrested for a 'crime' in which no one gets hurt, and that's entirely consensual. But it's a full-bore plunge through the looking glass that the cops will still slap the cuffs on you even if you neither planned nor committed anything of that nature.

Speaking of nature: there's a reason why prostitution is called the 'oldest profession.' It's an ineradicable phenomenon, and twenty or thirty centuries of waging Wars on Whores (and often their johns) hasn't done one whit to lessen the so-called problem.

In a sane society, prostitution would be legal. Legalizing commercial sex between consenting adults would provide surefire boons to public health and safety (workers can get medically tested without fear of arrest, for one thing); and it would provide communities with substantial income tax revenues, instead of saddling them with endless law-enforcement expenditures (including the taxpayer money spent on such preposterous police shenanigans as the Palacios arrest).

The other thing that pisses me off no end is that Wars on Whores, just like Wars on Drugs, almost invariably end up targeting citizens at the bottom rungs of the socio-economic ladder — especially minorities. Given Chicago's diverse ethnic and demographic makeup, it's astonishing how few local middle-class white people are arrested on prostitution charges. Just take a look at this little photo gallery that the Chicago PD, with all the restraint of a nya-nyaing frat boy, maintains on its website. What, white guys don't fuck? They don't visit prostitutes? (For evidence to the contrary, you could think back to John Profumo, and Jimmy Swaggart, and Ted Haggard, and on and on. None of them went to jail for their sexual exploits.)

If Erasmo Palacios and all the sad, disheveled men on that web page allegedly committed an arrestable crime (though they're innocent until proven guilty), how about a guy who only recently confessed in public that he'd been to a prostitute? What do you reckon the chances are that DC cops will "swarm" Senator David Vitter's tony residence, handcuff him, and haul him to the paddy wagon in front of his wife and kids?

If you said 'nil,' you're on to something.

[thanks, Bill!]

Comments

[somebody]

Hey, neither the WoD or the WoW is beneficial to us. But the crusaders would rather have us turn into a police state than give those up. One example is the continuing militarization of local police and increased use of swat teams. The government is paying less and less attention to individual rights because they have drug dealers/users to catch. You can't manipulate liberty, either we have it or we don't.

[Dave]

I would think that this could be challenged in court since the police don't put a picture of everyone they arrest on a website. This basically is punishment before conviction as it stands now. While arrests are a matter of public record and should not be hidden from the public it should be everyone's picture or no one's picture.

Another funny thing about these kinds of websites: A couple of years ago someone sent me a link to our state's (NC)sex offender website so for grins one day I checked it out. I noticed that there were a good number of men that had been convicted of incest but no women. If children had been involved there would have been charges that made that apparent but I didn't see any. If there had been gay sex involved for sure there would have been the old reliable crimes against nature charges but I didn't see any of those. Are there double standards for women or am I missing something here?

[George Arndt]

Um, if a woman marries a man for money, isn't that prostitution?