Back in February of 2023, I wrote about an upswing in prostitution that was plaguing one particular neighborhood in San Francisco. There were noise complaints and concerns about the girls being trafficked into this line of work but the good liberals of San Francisco had mostly decided the noise was the bigger issue because no one wants to say anything bad about “sex work.”
“There’s rampant prostitution on Capp street,” said one resident who did not want to reveal her name out of fear. “I wake up multiple times a week at night. My kids have missed school. I miss work. It’s the John’s in their cars, racing back and forth, turning their music on, having sideshows with their cars.”…
Neighbors told KTVU they realize many of the sex workers are being trafficked and are victims. But they want enforcement and accountability so they can simply walk outside their homes at night and raise their kids in a safe community.
“Most of us, if not all of us, don’t really have a problem with the sex workers or even their business itself,” said one neighbor. “It’s really the fact this is a residential neighborhood.”
Police eventually did come up with a plan which involved blocking off certain streets to make it harder for the cars to circle the block. But here we are three and a half years later and residents say not much has changed.
A stretch of Capp and Shotwell streets in the heart of the Mission have been a prostitution hot spot for decades, but a few years ago, residents said the issue had spiraled out of control. The city responded with traffic posts and barriers, warning letters sent to so-called johns based on their license plates, and more recently, police enforcement of a new state law that targets people loitering to buy sex.
But residents say the measures have failed to stop the sex trade or address deeper concerns about human trafficking, instead simply pushing the activity several blocks down the street. The migration highlights the challenge that San Francisco and other Bay Area cities face in trying to deal with seemingly intractable issues like sex work, the open-air drug market and homelessness.
Multiple sex workers, who spoke to the Chronicle on the condition of anonymity or declined to give their full names out of safety concerns, said the traffic barriers and the police have done little to interfere with their business.
Residents, some of whom grew up on these blocks, have had enough.
One resident, who did not want her name used due to safety concerns, said she passes sex workers every morning while walking her kids to school and often finds used condoms in front of her home. She calls the non-emergency police line most nights but gets little reaction.
“I would like it off our block,” she said. “I don’t want to live like this.”
One prostitute told the Chronicle, “I would be pissed if I lived here, too.”
Why does anyone have to live like this? Well, in this case there’s a pretty clear answer. His name is Scott Wiener. He’s a state senator and a few years ago he pushed through a law that prohibited police from arresting prostitutes for loitering.
San Francisco police say changes in state law have made it more difficult to deal with sex work because officers can no longer arrest sex workers for simply loitering. In a 2022 bill authored by state Sen. Scott Wiener, the state decriminalized loitering with the intent to commit prostitution, an effort to prevent discriminatory arrests of women based on their appearance.
That summary doesn’t fully capture how crazy this law is. Wiener has claimed that it was necessary to prevent trans women from being unfairly arrested.
Why would anyone propose such a law? Why would the California State Legislature pass it? I asked the bill’s author, San Francisco–based state senator Scott Wiener. The answer he gave is the one that he supplies for so many of the bills he authors: it was necessary to advance the rights of LGBTQ people. “If you are standing on the sidewalk with high heels, and you wear your hair a certain way, and you wear tight clothing, an officer can say, ‘I think you’re loitering with the intent to commit prostitution’ and arrest you,” Wiener said. “That is not how we should be doing things in the United States of America—arresting people for how they look,” he continued. “And when you do that, not surprisingly, it’s only certain kinds of people who actually get arrested: it’s trans women. It’s black women. . . . It’s an inherently profiling law,” he said. “Randomly arresting a bunch of black trans women for how they look is not protecting potential victims of human trafficking.”
But were the police indeed “randomly arresting a bunch of black trans women”? The anti-trafficking advocates I spoke with dispute this. For starters, Wilson, Powell, and Russell (all of whom are African-American) say that biological women and girls—not transgender individuals—constitute the vast majority of those trafficked. Nearly every report on human trafficking by global human rights organizations confirms this observation.
Wiener made up a mostly imaginary problem and managed to create a very real problem for police and many residents in San Francisco and elsewhere. Last year even the New York Times Magazine wrote about what a blunder this was. This is a description of anti-prostitution efforts in Los Angeles.
For the 77th Street Division, which covers the northern half of the Figueroa Corridor, prostitution had always been a problem. But in recent years, the officers had seen the magnitude of child sex trafficking explode. Part of that boom happened during the pandemic, when many girls were out of school and immersed in social media, where traffickers lurked…
Their jobs grew even more challenging when California repealed the law allowing the police to arrest women who loitered with the intent to engage in prostitution. The repeal, known as SB 357, was intended to prevent profiling of Black, brown and trans women based on how they dressed. But when it was implemented in January 2023, the effect was that uniformed officers could no longer apprehend groups of girls in lingerie on Figueroa, hoping to recover minors among them. Now officers needed to be willing to swear they had reason to suspect each girl was underage — but with fake eyelashes and wigs, it was nearly impossible to tell. One girl told vice officers that her trafficker had explained things succinctly: “We run Figueroa now,” he said.
Soon every intersection from Gage to Imperial had girls waving and waiting to be rented out, some of them imported by traffickers from Oregon or Texas or Alabama. By the end of 2023, the city attorney had taken to calling Figueroa the Kiddie Stroll because so many of the girls weren’t even 13.
Scott Wiener helped create the Kiddie Stroll. Wiener is currently running to replace Nancy Pelosi in the U.S. Congress. How anyone can justify voting for Wiener is truly beyond me. You like to hope that even people in San Francisco retain some amount of common sense but he has a real chance of winning.
