Predator's Paradise
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On the grounds of creating a more welcoming environment for LGBTQ youth, State Senator Scott Wiener is making California a haven for human trafficking.
While the last few decades have seen an increase in human trafficking, women at all three of the anti-trafficking groups I spoke with across California agreed: nothing compares with the stunning rise in trafficking they've witnessed in recent months. Powell, formerly a sergeant in the Los Angeles Police Department's Vice Division, knows the city's streets intimately. Over the last six months, the number of prostitutes has doubled, she says. "On Figueroa, between 68th and 75th, in an hour, you might see about 30 girls out there. Now, you can see 60 to 65 girls in an hour."
What shifted? The answer, the anti-trafficking advocates told me, is Senate Bill 357. Signed by Governor Gavin Newsom in July, the measure decriminalized loitering with the intent to engage in prostitution. The bill did not officially take effect until January 1 of this year; but, from the moment it became law back in July, these women say, the on-the-ground reality changed. "The minute the governor signed it, you started seeing an uptick on the streets," Powell said. "And on social media, the pimps were saying: 'You better get out there and work because the streets are ours.'"
The pimps were right: police stopped making arrests for crimes that would no longer be charged. The anti-loitering statute had provided the grounds for officers to question women and children whom they suspected might be trapped in a prostitution ring. "As a police officer, you need probable cause to stop and investigate," Powell explained. "So if I have a law that says you can't loiter in this area, with pasties and a G-string, flagging down cars, I could stop you for that because you're loitering. But if I just say I'm stopping you because you look kind of young, that's a little weak. So, it takes away a tool." Without the statute, police hands were suddenly tied. Henceforth, questioning the girlsand potentially provoking a violent confrontation with pimpscame to seem a Pyrrhic gamble, one that California's police officers would now avoid.
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Why would anyone propose such a law? Why would the California State Legislature pass it? I asked the bill's author, San Franciscobased 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 Americaarresting 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."
The article goes on. You really need to read it to see just what a creep this politician is.Quote:
Scott Wiener's social media antics might invite comparisons with those of Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez or Ilhan Omar. On Twitter, he has posted pictures of himself posing bare-chested at San Francisco's Folsom Street Fair, arms slung around men in bondage gear. During the monkeypox outbreak last summer, he approvingly tweeted an article encouraging gay men to cover up their bumps with Band-Aids and party on. And he threatened to make "Drag Queen 101" a mandatory part of K12 education. (He later said that the threat was "tongue in cheek.") Like other media-adroit, attention-seeking politicians, Wiener seems to delight in trolling his detractors.
Yet in a political era defined by legislative gridlock in Washington, Wiener stands out as one of the nation's most effective lawmakers. In the six years since the Harvard Law grad took office, he has managed to author, and get passed, a series of radical gender- and sex-related bills. The measures have allowed biological male felons to self-ID their way into women's prisons; assigned criminal penalties to health-care workers who fail to provide gender-affirming care; made California a "sanctuary state" for LGBTQ youth; expanded access to "gender-affirming care" for LGBTQ-identified youth, with and without parental approval; proposed jail time for health-care workers who "willfully and repeatedly" misgender a patient (i.e., refer to them in a way at odds with their gender identity); decriminalized the intentional exposure of a sexual partner to HIV; and reduced criminal penalties for sex offenders.