Getting Screwed (30 page)

The report by the San Francisco Human Rights Commission, a city-funded group that examines local human rights issues, raised similar concerns. That draft report noted that the way the measure's fines are being dispersed might create an incentive for law enforcement to focus on sex trafficking and ignore other types of labor trafficking, which are actually more common in California and everywhere else. According to a 2012 International Labor Organization study, labor trafficking constitutes 68 percent of trafficking, whereas forced sexual exploitation constitutes 22 percent of the 90 percent of forced labor situations that occur in the private economy. But since Proposition 35 imposes stricter penalties and much higher fines on convicted sex traffickers than on labor traffickers, it may be detrimental to the “victims of labor trafficking, as they can potentially be ignored or given less attention,” the commission concluded in its report.
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Some prosecutors don't buy that argument. Nancy O'Malley, the district attorney for Alameda County (which encompasses Oakland and other towns across the bay from San Francisco), says her office prosecutes both labor and sex trafficking cases. Indeed, Alameda County (population, 1.5 million) prosecutes fully 50 percent of all the trafficking cases in California (population, 25 million), and O'Malley is known throughout the state as a woman on a mission. “We've been very aggressive about trafficking for a number of years,” says O'Malley, who became Alameda's district attorney in 2009. “My consistent effort has been to say that if trafficking is not in your community, you're just not looking.”

Yet even O'Malley acknowledges that most police departments do not take labor trafficking very seriously. “I think law enforcement doesn't have the tools to look at labor,” she says. “They don't investigate it as a crime. But we're investigating it as a crime.”

O'Malley is the first to admit, however, that most of her office's energies go into combatting the sex trafficking of underage youth, through a program she has dubbed
HEAT
(Human Exploitation and Trafficking)
Watch. Her office is working with a coalition of antitrafficking proponents to further increase penalties and fines against pimps and clients who exploit underage youth, in a measure known as Senate Bill 1388. According to sex worker advocates, most of the lobbying support for this measure has been paid for by Demand Abolition, a group that is aimed at ending the demand for commercial sex and funded largely by Swanee and Helen Hunt, Texas sisters who are heirs to the Hunt oil fortune.

“There are very well-funded groups like the Hunt sisters working with the Justice Department, the
FBI
, and other law enforcement on an antiprostitution campaign, and [Senate Bill 1388] is just one small piece of that agenda,” says Rachel West, a longtime community organizer with the
US
PROS
titutes Collective (
US PROS
), a nonprofit that serves mostly streetwalkers. West served on the original San Francisco Task Force on Prostitution in 1996, and her organization is working with Doogan's group to defeat the bill.

The sex worker advocacy groups recently managed to convince the sponsors of Senate Bill 1388 to remove the provision that would have criminalized clients and made it harder for sex workers to negotiate safe sex. In its current incarnation, however, Senate Bill 1388, like Proposition 35, may still create perverse incentives for law enforcement. In a recent analysis of the bill, the state Senate Committee on Public Safety concluded that the payment of criminal fines under the proposed law “raises the issues of an improper bounty — an incentive for law enforcement agencies to pursue investigations based on financial interest, rather than public safety.”
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O'Malley waves aside such concerns. “The challenge is not inflating numbers or creating incentives. It is getting people to recognize the problem,” she says. If anything, she believes the problem of pimps sexually exploiting underage girls (which she considers synonymous with trafficking) is an under-recognized crisis. “On any given day on International Boulevard in Oakland, you can see kids on the street and traffickers lurking in the background,” she says. “It's a real problem.”

San Francisco city officials agree that underage prostitution is a problem that demands attention, but they have a different approach to
dealing with it. “If you acknowledge that these youth are victims of trafficking, we shouldn't be treating them as criminals,” says Minouche Kandel, a spokeswoman for the San Francisco Department on the Status of Women, a city agency.

Nonprofit groups that work with sexually exploited youth agree. They say arresting these teenagers simply retraumatizes them and makes them even more distrustful of authority and thus more dependent on pimps. “A lot of [exploited] children have been abused by police, and they don't feel comfortable with you if you work with law enforcement,” says Ellyn Bell, executive director of the
SAGE
Project, the oldest antitrafficking organization in the country (founded in 1992). Her organization, which works mostly with underage sex workers, has received funding from private donors, the city of San Francisco, and the U.S. Department of Justice's Office for Victims of Crime.

Bell says she supports the decriminalization of prostitutes, regardless of their age. “Our goal at
SAGE
is to provide people with trauma-informed services and options to change their lives, if that's what they want,” Bell says. “And if they're not ready to change their lives, we try to give them options to live safer.”

In line with this more prevention-oriented approach, San Francisco police make far fewer arrests for adult or underage prostitution than Alameda County does. “We're trying to be mindful of not pursuing policies that would harm sex workers,” Kandel says. “Some people feel that all prostitution is by definition violence against women. But if we're honoring women's autonomy and adult women are choosing to do this, then we should respect that and make sure they're not harmed.”

The Legacy of a Corrupt Cop

Maxine Doogan has seen this movie reel before — in her own life. She began doing sex work at age twenty-five in Alaska, as a divorced single mother struggling to make ends meet. She had grown up in Fairbanks, a town in central Alaska, part of a large politically connected family. The Doogans lived in a state where prostitutes, historically, had been a
respected part of society (much like in the Old West). Indeed, until the early 1960s, Fairbanks had a fairly visible red-light district, what Alaskans called the “working line.” But once oil was discovered, the federal government began pressuring state officials to rein in the brothels and introduce antiprostitution laws similar to those that had already been implemented in most of the other states. Even then, most Alaskans remained pretty laissez-faire about prostitution.

“There's a lot of acceptance in Alaska for different types of people and not as much prying into people's personal lives,” Doogan says. She herself had read
The Happy Hooker
, by Xaviera Hollander, when she was twelve and liked the famous madam's adventurous attitude toward sex. So when Doogan found herself divorced and in financial straits, she followed Hollander's lead and began working in the brothels of Anchorage, which she continued to do until the price of domestic oil plummeted and took Alaska's economy down with it. In 1988, Doogan came to Seattle and began exploring the sex trade there. But it was the height of Gary Ridgway's murder spree, and police had also mounted a huge sting of escort agencies around the city. “There was no place to work in Seattle besides the streets, and the streets were really dangerous,” Doogan says.

Having obtained some training in construction at a women's center in Seattle, she found a job first as a union pile driver and then as a certified welder. In the process, she learned a lot about labor organizing and the power of working collectively. But although her construction job had great health insurance benefits, she still wasn't earning enough to support herself and her three children. (She was also paying child support to their father, who helped with child care.) So Doogan, who by then had come out as a lesbian, began working as a dominatrix and running an escort service called the Personal Touch (which hired gay men and women doing domination work). Along with dozens of other sex workers, she ended up being arrested in another series of police stings in the early 1990s. But by then she had begun traveling to San Francisco on a regular basis to see whether she wanted to move there.

“I had already started doing some organizing with sex workers in Seattle, and I knew some escorts were working as [police] informants, so
I saw the arrests coming,” she says. “And San Francisco had a history with
COYOTE
.”

Doogan was one of only two sex workers arrested in King County's massive sting operation who did not plead guilty. “I never worked with any of the informants,” she says. Doogan and her attorneys were thus astounded when, during her first trial on felony charges of promoting or profiting from prostitution, two escorts got up on the witness stand and said they had given her portions of the proceeds from their sex work. “These women all lied on the stand,” she says. “I never received any money from them.”

That trial ended in a hung jury because most of the jury members didn't find the witnesses credible. Doogan
was
found guilty after a second trial, but that conviction was overturned on appeal, again because of the questionable testimony given by the same female witnesses. Rather than undergo a third trial, which Doogan couldn't afford — “those trials cost me $10,000 a piece” — she agreed to plead no contest to the misdemeanor charge of attempting to promote prostitution. She spent twenty days in jail and another year or two on probation.

“There was this one detective who had wrangled these witnesses to testify against me, and he was really coming after me,” Doogan recalls. “Even after I pled, he kept coming after me with probation violations. At one point, my attorneys asked me, ‘Why does this guy hate you so much?' ”

Ten years later, Doogan finally learned the answer to that question. In 2004, she got a call from an officer with the Seattle vice squad. They were investigating Dan Ring, the King County sheriff's vice detective who had been on her case, and they wanted to talk to her about potential crimes Ring had been involved in, such as theft, drug distribution, and sleeping with sex workers who were informants on some of his escort sting operations. In 2005, the
Seattle Post-Intelligencer
published a three-day series that revealed numerous illegal activities Ring had been involved in, according to a three-and-a-half year investigation by the
FBI
, the King County sheriff's office, and Seattle police.
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As the Seattle newspaper reported, Ring had had sex with two of the women who were key witnesses in the cases against Doogan and
other escort service operators. The King County prosecutor was reviewing those cases, and Ring's alleged misconduct, some attorneys said, could result in overturned convictions and compensation for court costs.
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County prosecutors had charged Ring with a number of offenses, but on the eve of his trial in 2005, the detective reached a lucrative settlement with the King County Sheriff's Office, granting him $10,000, a $3,500-a- month pension, and payment of nearly $200,000 in legal fees. In return, Ring agreed to retire as a cop.
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Doogan suspects that Ring got a good deal because the sheriff's office didn't want the bad publicity from the public trial of a corrupt cop. “He was a big whoremonger — he would threaten to arrest women for prostitution and then end up dating them,” Doogan says. “Here was the police who are supposed to be your stopgap for safety, and he was harassing the women he's supposed to protect. It really exposed for me the kind of corruption that goes on in vice squads across America.”

The King County prosecutor who was reviewing the cases ultimately came up with a list of cases that had been tainted by Ring's misconduct, and it included Doogan's case, according to Lewis Kamb, one of the reporters who wrote the
Seattle Post-Intelligencer
series. But when Doogan filed an appeal to vacate her conviction, the appeal was rejected on the grounds that she had taken a plea deal and thus had waived her right to having the conviction overturned. None of the other tainted cases were contested, and Ring got off scot-free. The last Kamb knew, Ring was still living with the stripper who had lied on the witness stand in Doogan's case. Indeed, she is listed as the beneficiary on Ring's pension from the King County Sheriff's Office, Kamb says.

A Constitutional Challenge

Doogan's personal experience is not the only reason she is so intent on mounting a constitutional challenge to laws that criminalize prostitution. She has seen firsthand how easily external funding can sway the public's mind on ballot measures. The success of Proposition 35 had a lot to do with the millions of dollars that Chris Kelly, the former Facebook
executive and a 2010 Democratic candidate for attorney general, plowed into efforts to make sure the antitrafficking measure passed.
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Kelly, who lost in 2010, has political ambitions, but the sex workers' rights groups hadn't seen him coming, and they were badly outspent. Many Californians agree that the state's “proposition way” of doing government is not a truly representative approach. “It's about who has the most money and screams the loudest,” says Bell from the
SAGE
Project. “That's who wins these ballot measures.”

After Proposition 35 passed, Doogan and other sex workers drew some solace from watching their colleagues to the north take the court battle over Canada's prostitution laws to the highest court of the land. Canada's Supreme Court ruling in December 2013 cemented Doogan's decision to mount a court challenge stateside. “We figured it might cost $100,000 for a lawsuit that brings relief to people throughout the country, as opposed to bringing another ballot measure in California, which would cost at least $300,000,” Doogan says.