If you have ever wondered exactly who is watching you as you traipse through your day, you can rest easy on these stats. Across the world, security cameras are peeking at us all the time.
San Diego County, California, has just added to all the watching from on high in a most unique way. That city has just erected a surveillance tower to stop sex workers from plying their trade.
Supposedly the Skywatch tower will help reduce prostitution by recording license plate numbers of cars entering Roosevelt Avenue in the city. This section is supposedly replete with sex workers and customers coming to engage them. Like all major cities, San Deigo has their concerns in this area.
As the law presently stands (and we know when it comes to anything with even a hint of sexual possibility to it, laws change all the time) police can’t stop or further arrest a driver or their potential passenger in the mere act of the former picking up the latter. Even if money exchanges hands during the meeting between driver and passenger, it’s not a crime to hand someone cash.
Unless the surveillance camera viewed an actual sex act being performed during the meeting of driver and passenger when money was exchanged, there isn’t much police can do.
Senate Bill 357, the “Safer Streets for All Act,” protect people from discriminatory arrests based on how they might be dressed or what their profession might be.
The tower standing two stories high is quite visible and is enjoying plenty of local media publicity. It stands to reason then that even the most novice street sex worker will learn how best to avoid being seen. Most are wondering when Roosevelt Ave will lose its luster for clandestine meetups and the business San Diego so wants to shut down will simply be conducted someplace out of the tower’s watch.
Pigging-backing on the news of San Diego’s tower is the story of fourteen sex trafficking arrests being made at the recent San Diego granddaddy fandom event Comic-Con. But this seeming slam dunk attention on current sex worker concern in San Diego, might not be exactly what it seems.
Deeper investigation through California Attorney General Rob Bonta’s press release of the Comic-Con arrests does not indicate that sex trafficking actually occurred in the way it was first reported. Fourteen people were arrested, but that was when they attempted to pay another adult for sex.
That adult was an undercover cop.
Yes, this is still an arrestable offense, but hardly the rash of sex trafficking the initial report claimed it was.
In complete disclosure, the Comic-Con sting operation did find one 16-year-old selling sex.
Will Skywatch have any effect on prostitution in San Diego? Or will the presence of the tower indeed make matters worse?
