Looking back at her notes, Mari Clark recalled that a good night of gift bag handouts—containing makeup, hygiene products, and Bible tracts—to prostitutes on the streets of South Los Angeles would average to 30 interactions with women per night as she and her outreach group were monitored closely by their pimps.
A year later, she and her team’s interactions have since doubled, and they expect it to get worse with the recent passage of Senate Bill 357.
“Now we hand out twice that on an average night,” the 31-year-old executive director of After Hours Ministry—a Christian organization dedicated to helping victims of sexual exploitation—told The Epoch Times. “The corners we know to be run by gangs are packed full of girls, and the streets are in bumper-to-bumper traffic with Johns.”
Introduced last year by Sen. Scott Wiener (D-San Francisco) SB 357, also known as the “Safer Streets for All Act,” was signed into law by Gov. Gavin Newsom on July 1, 2022. The law decriminalizes loitering for the intent to engage in sex work and goes into effect in January.
Now, sex workers and their controllers have been working more openly than ever before, according to Clark.
“It’s not just busier,” Clark said. “The amount of pimps on the street is brazen. The girls still sort of hide when they see cops but it’s more out of habit than anything.”
Now, law enforcement agencies say that they have one less tool to fight prostitution, along with sex trafficking.
“[The law] hinder[s] law enforcement efforts to identify and prosecute those who commit crimes related to prostitution and human trafficking,” Orange County Sheriff’s Department spokeswoman Carrie Braun told The Epoch Times. “Additionally, it could hinder the ability of identifying those being victimized.”
The law has a long list of supporters including the ACLU, the Anti-Defamation League, the City of West Hollywood, the Green Party of California, and the Los Angeles County District Attorney’s Office headed by District Attorney George Gascon.
“We hope that the Safer Streets for All Act will help people understand how policing does not create public safety,” Fatima Shabazz of the DecrimSexWorkCA Coalition said in a press release issued by Wiener. “And [it] will immediately deprive police of one tool they use to harass and oppress folks based on race and gender.”
In Los Angeles where crime has skyrocketed the last two years, the Los Angeles Sheriff’s Department remains in strong opposition.
“[The law] will take a major tool away from law enforcement, especially patrol operations … to target sex buyers,” LA Sheriff Department officials communicated in a Senate Floor Analysis for SB 357. “It is common for sex buyers to drive around high prostitution areas, which include business and residential locations and make contact with multiple prostitutes with no other lawful reason to be in the area.”
Like Clark, Stephany Powell who is the Vice President & Director of Law Enforcement Training and Outreach at Washington D.C’s National Center on Sexual Exploitation said she has also seen an increase in sexual exploitation in Los Angeles, and that SB 357 would inflame the problem; especially on what’s known in South LA as the “Figueroa Track” where she said many of the city’s pimps cycle in women for sex work.
“[SB 357] sets the community at risk because it’s legalizing sex buyers and traffickers. How can one feel safe with that type of activity going on?” Powell told The Epoch Times. “The girls are reporting violence to our workers out there as the effects of this bill increase prostitution activity and put the community at risk.”
In her outreach work along that part of Los Angeles, Powell said prostitution has doubled over the last year.
Though SB 357 states it “simply eliminates an anti-loitering offense that results in the legal harassment of LGTBQ+, Black, and Brown communities for simply existing and looking like a ‘sex worker,’” Powell said much of the black community she has connected with near Los Angeles’ major prostitution points is “not okay” with falling into a deeper risk of danger from crimes that accompany sexual exploitation.
“[SB 357] will not help children and families in these areas,” she said. “And the kids will be more at risk.”
Repercussions of the increase of sexual exploitation are not confined to Southern California.
In the state’s northern regions, Oakland and San Francisco have reported an increase of three times the number of exploited people and buyers trolling residential districts at all hours of the day and night, according to Vanessa Russell, the founder and executive director of the nonprofit Love Never Fails.
The award-winning group which has dedicated itself to the restoration, education, and protection of those involved or at risk of domestic human trafficking, is actively involved throughout the Bay Area.
“The legalization of loitering for the purpose of prostitution has created an increase in demand in cities across California,” Russell told The Epoch Times in an email. “The anti-police sentiment that was leveraged to push this bill through touting safer streets for all … [is] unfortunately harming these populations much more than it helps because the police are no longer able to conduct early intervention with violent exploiters and buyers.”
Russell said she and her team have reported seeing increased numbers of missing children, along with increased coercion by predators that have taken advantage of the negative financial impacts of coronavirus and economy.
“Sadly the populations that are most heavily preyed upon to satisfy the increase demand are the very black, Latinx and transgender people the bill promised to make safe,” Russel wrote. “In fact, exploiters have become increasingly brazen standing on corners and sitting in their cars to monitor ‘their property’ along with demanding higher quotas now that there is no police disruption.”
Russell also reported that residents in these areas have protested against the new law, and have even had meetings of up to 300 people in to express their frustrations.
She said there is intense anger from some because of “the sexual and pornographic exposure that children are experiencing in these neighborhoods along with the actual sex acts that are happening in the alleyways and cars right where they are living.”
She added: “It is not uncommon for women to be twerking almost nude in the middle of the street to solicit buyers while mothers and their small children walk home from school.”
A quick intervention is needed, she said, to combat these trends.
In the meantime, she said, California should expect more prostitution, increases in gun violence, and more missing children and vulnerable adults recruited to fulfill heightened demand.
“If we don’t intervene now that is where we’re headed and just as this bill makes false promises of safety for all, it will only get worse for the exploited and the entire ecosystem if we allow this to continue,” she wrote.
Sen. Scott Wiener (D-San Francisco) and Gov. Gavin Newsom’s office did not respond to requests for comment by press time.
