SHOULD THE HOUSTON POLICE BE ALLOWED TO "GET NAKED" IN ORDER TO ARREST PROSTITUTES?

SHOULD THE POLICE BE ALLOWED
TO “GET NAKED” IN ORDER TO ARREST PROSTITUTES?

Keith N. Haley

Article is copyrighted. All rights pertain.

In large cities in the United States prostitutes number in the thousands. They are easy to find and often a nuisance to law-abiding residents and businesses. Along with the prostitutes come the pimps, sneak thieves, robbers, and drug pushers. There goes the neighborhood as they say. Some police departments take strong enforcement action against prostitution and there are others that do very little since they consider the crime low on their list of priorities.

The Houston Police have chosen to enforce the law against prostitution and more power to them. Faced with a rapid expansion of sex spa businesses in Houston, Police Chief Harold Hurtt now allows undercover officers pursuing prostitution investigations to “drop their drawers” and anything else they are wearing. He says it is necessary for the officers to get naked in order to convince the sex workers that they are not cops.

How has it worked? The naked officers have gotten the goods on 56 prostitutes in 4 months according to the AP, reported on January 24, 2005. Courts have endorsed this procedure across the nation saying that it is not entrapment, but only encouragement to commit the crime, a legal procedure.

But has the Chief really thought about the implications of this new policy? First of all, this indeed gives new meaning to the idea of the police “getting in your face!” Can claims of serious entrapment not be far off? Think about it in this age, some anatomy is more attractive to the opposite sex than others. If Joe “Stud Man” vice officer is well endowed, the court may listen to a prostitute that says he was irresistible! Finally, how far will the officers go to be convincing that they are not officers when the prostitutes realize that getting nude no longer guarantees them impunity? And to be convincing what state of…., oh, forget it, you see what I mean, I am sure.

I would also be worried about the officers that have a zeal for this assignment. How do you select these officers? Excuse me, but is there an audition? Are the selection criteria fair? Do men and women officers have an equal opportunity for this specialized assignment? If there were ever a place to use informants, this may be it.

In the meantime, Houston is in a quandary. An online poll indicates that 58% (5228) are in favor of nude cops in sex crime investigations and 42% (3804) are against it. OK, so a lot of the clients of the day spas, stress-relief clinics, and massage parlors voted “no” more than once, but it is clear Houston is willing to sacrifice the modesty of its officers in order to curtail prostitution.

If you stop and think about it, how in the world could an officer enjoy this kind of work? In the vast majority of circumstances I am sure we are talking about male police officers. How many times during an 8 hour shift do they have to get naked in order to satisfy the production quotas set by their supervisors? It would seem that after about a week of stripping five or six times per evening that the assignment would grow stale.

In this age of cell phone cameras I'm sure it would not take long before the prostitutes desire to photograph the stripping male officers and pass those photos around to other workers in the prostitution business. Moreover, it is not unlikely that those pictures will show up on some public Internet site. This would not be a pleasant thing for an officer’s child to see, for sure.

The courts, of course, are interested in protecting the civil rights of the prostitutes. But the courts have a public order function also. Writing the laws in such a way that the prostitutes with no prompting from the police have to take the initiative in saying what illicit act they are going to do and how much they're going to charge for it, creates a situation where officers have to engage in this humiliating act of getting naked. Why doesn't the law move over to the side of public order? Isn't it about time? If they are convicted prostitutes and they solicit the cops into a discussion about sexual contact of some kind, why do the police have to wait in an "undressed state" in order to hear the deal the prostitute is going to make and has made hundreds of times before in this illicit business? In fact, when the prostitute asks the cop to get naked in order to prove they are not an officer, isn't that a pretty clear indication she is soliciting illegal sex, especially if she has a record of dozens of arrests? I imagine that a reasonable person would think so.

With sexually transmitted diseases rampant among prostitutes and their clients, we should not construct unnecessary legal barriers in preventing this crime and getting the prostitutes into some treatment program, thereby doing a service to them and the rest of the community.

Kudos to the Houston Police for not giving up on prostitution enforcement as many other communities have done. But the law should be changed so that officers working in this kind of undercover assignment do not have to humiliate themselves in order to bring to justice these public order criminals.