Why We Did It
We know that local, state, and federal law enforcement agencies in California are increasingly turning to technology to target sex workers and our clients, from surveillance equipment to online undercover operations. What tools police use to surveil us on a day-to-day or case-by-case basis is a closely guarded secret. The victims of these overzealous prostitution investigations often never learn how digital tools were used against them.
This has led to misinformation being shared within the sex work community. For example, there is a widely held belief that sex workers are often stopped and turned away at borders because a certain advertising website is giving photos of sex workers’ IDs to police. It turns out that the way sex workers are most likely identified at borders is through a database called Traffic Jam, or one similar to it, that archives advertisemets from 14 different sex work advertising sites every hour and builds biometric profiles of advertisers, including facial and tattoo recognition, social media information, location data, emails, and phone numbers. In learning about Traffic Jam, we also learned about similar databases that crawl social media, buy location data from certain phone apps, and maintain profiles of virtually everyone who exists online. As sex workers, we are concerned about the technology that is used to hunt our data and our clients’, but everyone should be concerned about mass surveillance, doublethink, and manipulation by agencies that are paid for with our tax money.
Public records requests use laws like the California Public Records Act (CPRA) or the federal Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) to make state and federal law enforcement agencies produce records like receipts and invoices for surveillance equipment. FOIA requests can also bring to light the lesson plans, syllabi, presentations, and videos that are used to train police officers to use surveillance technology in prostitution stings. This report draws from tens of thousands of pages of invoices, purchase orders, receipts, and instructional documents obtained through public records requests: Viewed collectively, these records present a vast and alarming threat to worker and consumer privacy.
We picked the time frame of January 1, 2020 through February 28, 2022 for our public records request because it was recent and it covered the time frame of the Super Bowl that was held in Los Angeles in February 2022. Because of COVID lockdowns, we expected to see a decrease in sex worker citations and arrests, though the actual number of citations and arrests was not our primary focus here. We wanted to know what technology they used to make arrests for solicitation of prostitution (647(b) and loitering with the intent to commit prostitution (653.22). Before the rise of the use of so much digital technology in our lives, we used to know how prostitution arrests occurred.
Prostitution arrests generally occur in an undercover fashion, when the police contact a suspected sex worker under the guise of becoming a client, or the other way around. The solicitation of prostitution law in California has three parts that have to be satisfied to make a conviction but not necessarily an arrest:
The sex act, aka, the lewd act–the touching of body parts, essentially.
The compensation: this can include but is not limited to money–just anything of value.
The last part is called ‘the act of furtherance’. The first two parts are protected under the First Amendment; anyone can talk about sex acts and compensation but the last part means taking action towards manifesting parts one and two. This could be showing up at a hotel room or getting into an undercover police officer’s car, accepting or giving money, saying what kind of sex act, saying you want to use a condom, or asking to bring a condom.
These stings–fraudulent, taxpayer funded affairs–generally happen in hotels whereby the police use a hotel room with the permission of the hotel to host these stings. Another method they use is to contact a suspected sex worker in his or her home for their services followed by an arrest for prostitution; or, in some cases, a citation is issued. In either and in any case, the district attorney has up to a year to file these misdemeanor charges. Sometimes the undercover stings are generated as a result of a complaint that is lodged with police about a specific person or persons. For many of these law enforcement jurisdictions, the anti-prostitution undercover sting operations are conducted by the ‘vice’ department and have been routine undertakings prior to the digitization of everything.
The loitering with intent to commit prostitution law, PC 653.22 was repealed as of January 1, 2023 because it was most often used by police to arrest transgender women and women of color–many of whom not actual prostitutes–walking in ‘known prostitution areas’.
The general public thinks of street-based sex work when it thinks of prostitution, but the profession is not a monolith and includes escorts, massage parlor workers, professional dominatrices and submissives, and other erotic service providers. When arrested for prostitution, sex workers can go to jail, be sentenced to go to diversion programs (similar to church reprogramming for LGBTQIA+ kids), have our names and pictures in the newspapers or online, lose our employment, or be subject to discrimination in housing, employment, child custody matters, and banking for the rest of our lives.