March 29, 2024

Florida's Vice Economy

Prostitution: A Florida snapshot

Most enforcement efforts these days focus on services advertised online — most particularly on human trafficking.

Mike Vogel | 12/13/2017

But in some neighborhoods, streetwalkers still become enough of a nuisance that police crack down. (You can use Google maps to find out where prostitution arrests occur in a given locale.) Lake Worth, a city of 37,000 in Palm Beach County, saw 103 arrests last year. Miami city police, covering 456,000 people, made fewer — 96. News reports through recent years chronicle Lake Worth’s attempts to rid itself of the problem.

Law enforcement agencies in metros that seem to have relatively small number of prostitution arrests say it’s because they’ve moved from racking up busts of prostitutes to treating them as victims, getting them job and drug counseling or other social services, and going after pimps on human-trafficking charges.

“That’s a big change in the philosophy of law enforcement,” says Ron Stucker, director of the Orlando-area Metropolitan Bureau of Investigation Task Force, a multi-agency group, the website of which says it “maintains Orlando’s family oriented reputation by monitoring the Adult Entertainment industry, as well as targeting narcotics trafficking organizations, vice enterprises, and organized crime.”

Judd too sees some prostitutes as victims and says Polk works to get them social services and into a new life. He says his prostitution round-ups discourage johns — who generally are charged with a misdemeanor — and get women and girls into custody where they can receive help and become wit- nesses against their pimps.

“Our true focus,” Judd says, “is the pimp, is the human trafficker. In order to get to him, we have to get to her. You’ve got to identify these victims. These victims don’t come forward.

“The reason I’m proactive is because I have a passion to protect young women from human trafficking. At the end of the day my heart breaks for these young women, as young as 14 and 15 years of age, who are treated this way.”

‘Below Polk Standards’

At a time when a lot of police departments don’t even have something called a vice squad and arrests for gambling and prostitution have fallen dramatically, Polk County Sheriff Grady Judd posts arrest numbers that make the central Florida county look like a relative den of iniquity.

Judd, 63, Polk’s sheriff since 2004, hammers vice crimes — to copious media attention. Despite having only 420,000 people under his office’s jurisdiction, his office is in the top five in Florida for prostitution and gambling arrests.

Judd says he’s just doing his job, staying ahead of crime, whether it’s violent crime, non-violent crime — both down — or vice crimes. “I don’t have streetwalkers in this county. You know why? Because we don’t allow it,” Judd says. “You stay out there (enforcing the law) and do it often enough, they do something else.”

The same goes for gambling. He tells the story of an internet cafe that opened this year on U.S. 27. Within days of it opening, he had undercover investigators inside. Within a couple weeks he made arrests, seized equipment and shut it down.

He says you also won’t find strip clubs, illegal massage parlors and XXX-rated bookstores on his watch. “We don’t allow that here,” he says. He references a famous U.S. Supreme Court case that tied obscenity enforcement to community standards. Such places are below Polk standards, he argues. “If you want that, go to Tampa or Orlando,” he says.

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