Nearly naked prostitutes brazenly advertising their services have been plaguing California cities ever since a radical law to ban arrests for loitering while soliciting, signed by Democratic Gov. Gavin Newsom, went into effect in January.
Sex workers wearing only “g-strings” in front of schools, highways, and local businesses have caused real issues in National City, a working-class town outside of San Diego, Mayor Ron Morrison told Fox News.
“They’re waving to people on the freeway or, just to be honest with you, they are bending over for the freeway. I don’t know how else to put it; they’re showing their wares,” the mayor, who says he is “non-partisan,” said.
California’s Senate Bill 357, which went into effect in January after being signed last July, overturned a previous law that banned loitering with the intent to engage in prostitution. The bill, authored by far-left state Sen. Scott Wiener, claimed this would help protect “black, brown, and trans women” from being targeted by police.
“[The previous law] allowed police officers to arrest a person, not based on what they did but based solely on how a person looks,” Wiener told ABC7. “So, an officer could arrest someone because they were wearing tight clothing, high heels and extra lipstick.”
However, Mayor Morrison says the “idiotic law” should be known as the “Safe Streets for Pimps Initiative.”
“The moment it was signed by the governor, boom, everyone knew the rules were out the window,” Morrison said.
As Breitbart News reported, the effects of the law were immediately felt on the streets of Los Angeles as prostitution rose.
According to Wiener’s bill, the law “aims to remove the social stigma of sex work.”
Mayor Morrison told Fox News:
Those that are out there on the street, most of them are wearing less than what you would consider a scanty negligee. It is just flaunting in everybody’s face. And so a lot of people are screaming, ‘Hey, you know, can’t you get them on indecent exposure?’ And the problem is the way our laws read in this state. The definition of indecent exposure is as long … as the genitals are covered. Anything else is fair game out in public.
Local businesses, including mom-and-pop shops as well as national chains, have complained to Morrison about the advertising of sex outside of their locations harming business. He even reported that a local school was forced to cover over its windows due to prostitutes loitering right outside.
According to the mayor, public prostitution has become “very much beyond brazen” in National City. He noted that another recent state law which legalized jaywalking has worsened the issue, as some women will stand in traffic to hunt down a buyer.
Morrison gave an example:
I was driving on one of the streets the other day, and there’s this young lady standing there in the middle of the street wearing basically a G-string, and that was it, and a couple pasties… So, I did ask her very politely, ‘Would you please move out of the street?’ And she looked at me and says, ‘If you don’t want to talk to me, you can go around.’
From what he has observed in National City and other municipalities around California, the law has even opened the doors to “sex trafficking” and “child sex trading.”
While prostitution is still illegal in California, Newsom’s new law “basically tells the police your hands are off,” Morrison said, noting that some of the girls on the street appear to be underaged.
“A lot of the times [police] found out that these were juveniles … or that they were basically being sex trafficked, and they could get them out of that. Now, they basically have no legal opportunity to even talk to them,” Morrison said, adding that law enforcement has previously gotten girls as young as 12 years old off of the streets.
As Fox News reported, “other crimes have also followed, including shootings and assaults,” due to the uptick in prostitution. Only weeks ago, a heavily pregnant prostitute was kidnapped, beaten and raped.
“Those [crime incidents] go on our crime stats. We’ve had shootings, everything else involving the prostitutes and the pimps,” Morrison stated.
“People here are not happy about this in the least. And the problem is they expect us locally to do something about it. And we’re sitting here with our hands behind our back with handcuffs on that Sacramento was [sic] placed on us.”
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