“We’re telling everyone who sets foot in Chicago,” the mayor said last June. “If you solicit a prostitute, you will be arrested. And when you get arrested, people will know. Your spouse, children, friends, neighbors, and employers will know. . . . I don’t have to tell you how fast information travels on the Internet.”
So far, no lawsuits have been filed. But it’s turned out that the site hasn’t been humiliating sex tourists from parts elsewhere, the “everyone who sets foot in Chicago” whom the mayor seemed to be warning. It has put on display a lot of blacks and Hispanics from the city. Chicago has no data to show that the site–which was the mayor’s initiative, not the police department’s–has reduced prostitution. Computer-literate johns might actually find it helpful. Patterns revealed on the site indicate where prostitutes might be found on a given night and where the police are unlikely to appear.
We know a thing or two about men who get caught. A 2000 study by the National Institute of Justice looked at johns arrested in San Francisco, Portland, Santa Clara, and Las Vegas who’d subsequently attended intervention programs. (In this sample of 1,342 men, whites were in the majority.) They were, by and large, novices at the crime they’d committed. About a fifth of them claimed they’d never had sex with a prostitute before they haplessly propositioned a police decoy. Another fifth said they hadn’t been with a prostitute in more than a year. Only a tenth said they used prostitutes more than once a month.
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Who gets arrested in Chicago? In the last four months of 2005 the Web site, managed by the police bureau of information services, posted 524 images. According to Monique Bond, that’s everybody except the minors. I put the men into demographic categories on the basis of their names, skin coloring, and addresses. More than 80 percent appeared to be African-American or Hispanic. Suburbanites and tourists accounted for less than one mug shot in five, and even in this group nearly three johns in five were black or Hispanic. The wealthy suburbs north of Evanston had not a single representative. Only 13 men came from out of state. Of the 425 men who gave addresses in the city and could be classified, 50 were white, 187 black, 186 Hispanic, and 2 Asian. Among the white city dwellers, eastern European names were common–Tomaz, Lukacz, Stanislaw, Jacek, Ziolo, Varimants, Dusko, Josip, Jovan. Other white ethnic groups were either rare or missing entirely.
For example, at his press conference last June, the mayor said the police had arrested 3,204 prostitutes in 2004 and cited an estimate that 16,000 to 25,000 women are involved in prostitution in Chicago over the course of a year. Sobczyk says the vast majority of prostitute arrests take place on the street. For the sake of argument, let’s be very conservative and say only half of those 3,204 women were arrested on the street and that each of them worked only 30 days in the year. According to DePaul law school professor Jody Raphael, who has been studying prostitution in Chicago since 1989, a woman working the street serves between 12 and 20 customers a night. Let’s underestimate and say five. That’s still 240,300 customers served in a year’s worth of prostitution, an average of 658 a night. In the last four months of 2005, the greatest number of men arrested for solicitation on a single night was 26.
What all this means, and what the Web site reveals, is that on a given night the number of officers out on the streets trying to arrest johns might be zero. Consider last October. According to the display of faces on the Web site, on six days that month no arrests were made, on eight days one arrest was made, and on three days two arrests were made. That’s a total of 14 arrests throughout Chicago during those 17 days. On the other 14 days of the month, 137 arrests were made. The pattern had been much the same in September (15 arrests in 15 days, 131 arrests in the other 15).
I tried to contact 16 men whose photos had appeared on the Web site. Two agreed to be interviewed. One manages a small business; the other, an immigrant, works in construction. Both are white. Neither had a previous criminal record, and both said they hadn’t been shopping for a prostitute and the first move was made by the decoy approaching the car. The arrest reports indicate that the manager offered $20 for oral sex and that the construction worker $40 for oral sex and intercourse. The business manager found out about the Web site when a friend who’d seen the photo called to offer sympathy. The construction worker didn’t know his photo had been put on a Web site until I mentioned it, three weeks after his arrest.
