The End of Policing

Similar to the issues found in Chapter 4, many unhoused people have a form of mental illness. Vitale discusses how these PMI are further criminalized by the police by virtue of being homeless. Police are charged to minimize the impact that the unhoused have on the general public, not to support and provide assistance. Ticketing, arrest, and a lack of compassion are all compounding factors when police deal directly with the unhoused. Drawing from Kathrine Beckett and Steve Herbert (92), Vitale likens this to the medieval practice of banishment. Economic development initiatives like the Los Angeles’s Safe Cities Initiative (SCI) further serve to criminalize individuals without a home. Vitale argues that this is based on the broken-windows-oriented enforcement that has become the norm in the US as well as serving the collective desires of developers who wish to gentrify low-income areas.

A question of human rights begins to take shape. Vitale argues that local, state, and federal approaches to homelessness have continuously been criticized nationally and internationally for contravening the right to housing; for failing to place the well-being of the unhoused over the concerns about disorder and aesthetics; for failing to recognize the mental health crisis that homelessness causes; and preventing people the right to freedom of movement. Vitale adds that even anti-panhandling ordinances violate the First Amendment (98). Equally as concerning, Vitale highlights how access to needed programs and assistance is through homeless courts and diversion programs. Punitive in nature and function, these do little to help other than criminalize an already marginalized group of people.

In response, Vitale calls for income support, housing and community remediation processes. Bringing welfare payments to a suitable standard of living; the creation of low cost (or no cost) housing with services to help them integrate into their community (103); and a system of nonreligious or moral-based drop-in centers and emergency shelters equipped with case workers, mental health services, substance abuse programs, and amenities are all vital to eliminating homelessness. He argues that initiatives like the Mission Neighborhood Resource Center in San Francisco can act as a template for other cities as they continue to navigate without police involvement.

The topic of policing of sex work is filled with moral ambiguity and good intentions, but ultimately, Vitale argues that policing sex work causes more harm than good. Problems associated with this type of police work, called VICE, include harassment, violence, and entrapment of both sex workers and members of the public. The legalities become even more blurred when sex work is conducted in private homes and when city attorneys and local DAs publish client lists (e.g. Heidi Fleiss) or use laws to shutter businesses and sue landlords for allowing brothels to operate on their premises (111). Some have called for a prohibitionist and abolitionist approach to prostitution, and it is through this lens that US police enact laws surrounding sex work (109). By discriminating against sex workers, Vitale argues that the general public and the police dehumanize sex workers. The LGBTQ community is especially at risk of discrimination given how society continues to moralize their perceived “life choices.”

Marginalizing sex workers only serves to further ostracize them from supports that would normally be available, including health care services, labor laws, and access to police services (e.g., reporting theft, assault, etc.). Vitale argues that resources are being withheld where they matter most, such as housing and employment training and services (114). Vitale highlights how even police officers have extorted sex and money from prostitutes in the past. Thus, the underlying relationship between sex workers and police is tenuous at best, and it requires the decriminalization of sex work. Vitale compares the US with countries like Sweden and the Netherlands, which have red-light districts where sex work is legal. The Nordic Model, he argues, provides sex workers with access to government benefits, pensions, and social services (118). Furthermore, doing so would help circumvent the spread of sexually transmitted diseases including HIV and AIDS, the ongoing physical abuse that sex workers encounter through pimps, and human trafficking.

Vitale suggests for any approach to work, coercion and morality must be removed from the equation. Countries like Brazil, Germany, and New Zealand have decriminalized prostitution. This has created a safer and more secure environment for not only sex workers, but equally, Vitale argues that this also demonstrates that persistent fears that exposure to this kind of lifestyle, especially from liberal feminists and religious groups, could be detrimental on American society is in fact false. By removing punitive measures on both sex workers and their clients, sex workers have reported that they feel safer and are able to access services that were once kept from them.