Bernson Plan Attacks Vice With Shame

After several false starts, the Los Angeles City Council is poised to begin battling the world’s oldest profession with one of society’s oldest weapons--shame.

Just print and broadcast the names and photos of men arrested for soliciting prostitutes, the argument goes, and “johns” will be so humiliated that they’ll go away and not come back--not to mention the deterrent effect on their brethren.

The plan, introduced by Councilman Hal Bernson and supported unanimously by the rest of the council, has been implemented in various forms in large and small cities across the nation.

But from Boston to tiny La Mesa in San Diego County, officials say that the program has had little measurable impact on prostitution.

The best that the city attorney of La Mesa could say is that “there’s no evidence that it doesn’t work.” The San Diego suburb pays a local paper to run ads featuring the names and photos of convicted solicitors.

In Long Beach, where the Press-Telegram regularly publishes convicted johns’ names as a free public service, arrests have remained at about the same levels, fluctuating mainly according to the size of the vice squad and the number of anti-prostitution sweeps that police are able to conduct, officials there said.

Meanwhile, civil libertarians and the Los Angeles city attorney have warned that Bernson’s plan leaves the city wide open for lawsuits, in part because the distributed names would include people accused but not convicted of solicitation.

“It really turns the presumption of innocence on its head,” said Dan Tokaji of the American Civil Liberties Union in Los Angeles.

Despite these and other potential pitfalls, the idea of distributing the names of johns has been embraced by community groups, and police say it is part of a new wave of vice enforcement aimed at attacking the demand side of such crimes as prostitution.

In Cincinnati, for example, residents of the crime-plagued Over-the-Rhine neighborhood have set up a similar program on their own. They obtain the names of convicted johns, which are a matter of public record, from local authorities. Then, with money raised in the community, they purchase newspaper ads to run the names.

Going after the consumer side of prostitution, said Boston police spokesman Lt. Robert O’Toole, means viewing the sale of sex for what it is: a business. “One of the ways you get rid of a business,” he said, “is to dry up the customers.”

But humiliation, detectives in several cities said, can go only so far. More effective, said Lt. Mike Hill of the Long Beach police, is to increase sweeps of known red-light districts.

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Another important tool has been a recently passed state law that allows police to arrest prostitutes for loitering. Prostitution in two of Los Angeles’ hot spots--the Sepulveda corridor in the San Fernando Valley and along Sunset Boulevard in Hollywood--is actually down this year, according to detectives and community leaders, who give much credit to the new loitering law.

“We don’t look at there being a single way of doing it,” said Hill. “You’ve got to keep doing things differently all the time. You change the mix constantly because if you try the same thing time after time, then people will adjust to that and maneuver around it.”

Bernson’s plan, as envisioned, would involve photographing all the men--and the occasional woman--arrested and booked on suspicion of soliciting. The names, partial addresses and pictures of the arrestees would be distributed to print and broadcast journalists, and shown on the city’s cable TV station.

The councilman plans to meet next week with the city attorney to discuss legal concerns, and if they can be worked out, the measure is likely to come up for a full council vote in the next several weeks, said Bernson aide Greig Smith.

The council approved the plan in concept last December, but still has to adopt a formal measure that would enable city employees to distribute the names. The names are already public record, available to private citizens who wish to obtain them, but they can be difficult to gather and expensive to distribute.

Bernson and other supporters of the plan argue that, far from being a victimless crime, prostitution brings drugs, guns and sexual harassment to residential neighborhoods.

Jim Tartan, of the Spaulding Square neighborhood association in Hollywood, said that before he installed a security fence around his home near Sunset Boulevard, would-be johns would screech into his driveway to turn around, endangering his two children. Pat Andrews, who was instrumental in implementing the Long Beach program, said she collected 14 condoms on her Wrigley neighborhood block in one month.

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The Los Angeles plan differs markedly from the programs in other cities, where the names of suspects are typically released after they are convicted. But Bernson argues that suspected johns should be treated no differently from any other alleged criminal.

“Why wait until they’re convicted?” asked Bernson, who as chairman of the City Council’s Land Use and Planning Committee has wrestled repeatedly over the years with problems posed by prostitution on Sepulveda Boulevard.

“How is this different than being arrested for any other crime?” continued Bernson, who represents the northwest San Fernando Valley. “We release the names of people who are arrested for assault and murder.”

But in a report to the City Council last month, City Atty. James K. Hahn wrote that the policy could open the city up to charges of libel if an innocent person were portrayed “in a false light” as a result of releasing the names. The practice could also be interpreted as an invasion of privacy, Hahn said.

In 1984, when then-city attorney Ira Reiner tried to implement a similar policy, it was forbidden by a Superior Court judge, who said it violated the privacy rights of arrestees to publish their addresses. And without the addresses, the court said, an innocent person bearing the same name as an arrestee might be unfairly humiliated.

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Even if the city limits itself to the names of people convicted of solicitation, said Tokaji of the ACLU, there could be additional liability for what might be viewed as unauthorized punishment.

For example, he said, if the city puts the photos on its own cable station or purchases advertisements in local newspapers, then it has in effect added humiliation to the government’s punishment for solicitation. By state law, municipalities may punish the misdemeanor offense only with fines, probation or jail time.

The proposal has met with mixed support among Los Angeles vice detectives.

“I think it could be a deterrent,” said Los Angeles Police Sgt. Alicia Wolan, who heads vice operations at the Van Nuys Division. “It would be more so for people who are prominent or have something to lose.”

But Lt. William Hall, officer-in-charge of the LAPD’s downtown prostitution investigators, said he doubted the program would have a significant impact.

“In some small town it would probably work real well because there’d be such peer pressure from everybody,” Hall said. “But in a big city like this, I’m not so sure.”

In Long Beach and Boston, vice detectives say that not a single repeat offender has been arrested since their “john programs” were implemented about two years ago.

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But that may not be a good gauge of success. Van Nuys’ Wolan and other detectives said that it’s highly unlikely for the same person to be picked up twice for soliciting a prostitute, whether the names are released to the press or not.

In Long Beach, for example, enforcement comes in waves, with customers targeted in some sweeps and prostitutes in others. Also, prostitution moves around, and so do customers. For the same customer to be caught twice, he would have to be in the same community during two raids, soliciting a prostitute when the police came by.

But Lt. Art Ruditsky, who heads vice operations in the LAPD’s Hollywood Division, said he supports the program even if it’s not very effective. Communities, he said, need to use every weapon at their disposal to combat prostitution.

“If you do a lot of little things, they eventually add up,” Ruditsky said. “Even if it only impacted a few people, that’s a few less people that would come to Hollywood and have an adverse effect on the quality of life here.”