Operation Losing Proposition

From the NY Times:

Amid all the successes in New York City’s decades-long fight to drive down crime, street prostitution represents a stubborn exception. Though the police deploy various stings and strategies to clean up neighborhoods, prostitution-related arrests in the city continue to be logged at a fairly steady clip, averaging around 4,200 per year since 2006, according to the state’s Division of Criminal Justice Services.

Market forces and the Internet have pushed some sex work off the street, to where clients with more time and more money go. Such indoor workers include escorts, who work in brothels or independently, in their own homes; strippers who connect with prospective clients in bars and make dates for later meetings; and dominatrixes, according to a report by the Urban Justice Center’s Sex Workers Project.

But this has not diminished the vibrancy and persistence of the old-fashioned street hustle, which, in the predawn darkness of Bedford-Stuyvesant on Thursday spilled forth in all its crafty, competitive mercantile ways.

Using decoys armed with remote audio systems and aided by “arrest teams” and undercover officers, the Police Department, over a three-day stretch last month, made 195 arrests and seized 55 vehicles in what police officials call Operation Losing Proposition.

An analysis of the arrest data provided by the police shows that the crackdown spanned all five boroughs, on dozens of street corners, in 28 different precincts.