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In the era of social media, Tulane Avenue's streetwalkers are a relic of the past

 

On a recent Wednesday night around 10 p.m., two young women were hanging out in front of the Sweet's Inn on New Orleans' Tulane Avenue. One sat on a step while the other danced to music bumping out of a cell phone pushed halfway down her bra.

 

The dancing girl said she had been living at the motel for a month. Her companion was a relative newcomer, having been there only three weeks. The Sweet's Inn, they said, was a nice place to stay and rooms were just $60 a night. They also recommended the Mid-Town Hotel and the Crystal Inn just a few blocks up the street. But they warned to stay away from the Capri Motel because the owners recently hired a police detail.

 

When asked what she did for a living, after making sure she wasn't talking to a "cop," the dancing girl said for $50 she would do "everything."

 

This is a common scene along Tulane Avenue after dark, but in many ways it's a relic of another time.

 

"Being 'out on the street' is a rather archaic depiction of prostitution," said Stella Cziment, a staff attorney with the Orleans Public Defenders office. "With the use of the Internet, solicitation is not limited by any particular neighborhood or area. It is extremely mobile and this is represented in the arrests (which) are happening everywhere."

 

The typical model for prostitution these days is based on an eight-city circuit, said Jefferson Parish Sheriff Newell Normand. Prostitutes advertise on Internet sites, set up all their appointments, move into a city, stay for three days, then leave for the next destination. Many travel among Pensacola, Fla., Mobile and Birmingham, Ala., Biloxi, Miss., New Orleans, Shreveport, Houston and Dallas, Normand said.

 

On Tulane Avenue, men and women still stand on street corners, typically in front of a select number of low-rent motels, selling themselves for cash. The problem has gotten so bad at times that the New Orleans Police Department, the City Council and the business community have recently joined efforts to crack down on the thriving sex trade.

 

In the first five months of the year, there have been seven prostitution arrests on Tulane Avenue and 130 citywide, according to the NOPD. Commander Henry Dean with the NOPD's specialized investigations unit said they would like to have more of an impact, but given their resources it is impossible to focus on prostitution full-time.

 

The focus on law enforcement, however, does have it critics. Deon Haywood, executive director of Women with a Vision, a nonprofit group that works to improve the lives of the men and women in the sex trade, said the city needs more community outreach programs rather than trying to arrest its way out of the problem.

 

"I get the growth of Tulane Avenue," Haywood said. "I'm a taxpayer and I want to see this city do well, but I don't want to see us lose any more than we have when it comes to human beings. People matter. I know it's a cliché, but it's a fact: People matter."

 

To be arrested for solicitation, money doesn't have to be exchanged; there only has to be a conversation about the buying or selling of sex, police said. If the officer can't make a solid case, he or she can arrest the suspected prostitute on a charge of solicitation for a ride, otherwise known as hitchhiking, said Cziment.

In many situations, people engaged in the solicitation of sex are arrested on more serious charges such as possession of drugs or drug paraphernalia. So while the statistics may not appear to show a high level of prostitution arrests, it doesn't mean the men and women engaged in the sex trade aren't being targeted by the police, Cziment said.

 

Orleans Parish District Attorney Leon Cannizzaro has aggressively pursued prostitution cases because of the criminal activity that often accompanies the practice, said his spokesman, Christopher Bowman.

 

"It's not that we're puritans," he said. "It's the violence that comes with it, violence against the johns and violence against some of the women by the so-called pimps."

 

A person charged with a first offense for solicitation of prostitution can be fined up to $500 or imprisoned for up to six months; a second offense, which is a felony, carries up to $2,000 in fines and two years in prison. A third offense brings a penalty of up to $4,000 in fines and between two and four years in prison.

 

If the person is arrested for prostitution on a public right of way such as a sidewalk, their sentence comes with a mandatory 90 days in jail or 240 hours of community service.

 

The majority of people arrested for solicitation appear in municipal court, spending up to two days in jail before seeing a judge. Their bonds are set relatively high, sometimes up to $35,000, because they are seen as flight risks, Cziment said.

 

That's too high an amount for the sex workers to pay, but sometimes there are people behind the scenes, such as a pimp, who might pay the women's bonds and force them to leave the jurisdiction, Cziment said.

 

Men and women get into prostitution for a variety of reasons--economics, drug addiction, sometimes through coercion and for a small number, by choice. When Haywood was 19 years old and doing street outreach, she met a woman on South Rampart Street who told her she had a regular job working in a French Quarter hotel. She didn't make enough money to provide for her family but made too much to qualify for food stamps, so the woman turned to prostitution to earn some extra cash, Haywood said.

 

"If I was 19 then and I'm 45 now and I'm still hearing that same story, how are we making a difference for people?" she said. 

 

Source Richard A. Webster, nola.com The Times-Picayune on August 10, 2013