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Source Bloomberg
The city of Chicago began a ``shame'' campaign last month to combat prostitution by publishing photographs on the Internet of anyone accused of soliciting sex.
Chicago police have posted photos of 306 men arrested for soliciting prostitutes since the Web site went live on June 21, according to Jonathan Lewin, head of information services for the department. Photos are typically posted within a day of the arrest, and in some cases within a few hours, he said.
We're telling everyone who sets foot in Chicago, if you solicit a prostitute, you will be arrested,'' Mayor Richard M. Daley said at a June 21 press conference. ``And when you are arrested, people will know. Your spouse, children, friends, neighbors and employers will know.''
The Web page that displays the pictures has been called up more than 16,000 times a day, one of the highest averages for a site run by the city. Chicago, the third-largest U.S. city by population, is by far the biggest municipality to publish photos of suspects on the Internet. St. Paul, Minnesota, has done so since 1997.
Some defense lawyers said posting images of alleged customers, known as ``johns,'' may be illegal.
They're basically punishing people without due process of law'' and causing humiliation similar to ``a public flogging,'' said Daniel Dodson, a director with the National Association of Criminal Defense Lawyers in Washington. ``That would be unconstitutional.''
Like TV, Billboards Chicago has 16,000 to 25,000 prostitutes among its 2.86 million residents, Daley said. The city wants to discourage the ``demand side'' of the crime, he said.
Arrests for prostitution rose 15 percent to 5,523 in 2003 from 4,802 in 1998, police department figures showed. Last year, city police arrested 3,204 accused prostitutes and 950 suspected customers, for a total of 4,154.
Police will take down photos 30 days after an arrest, and most prostitution cases take longer than that to make their way through the courts, said David Bayless, a department spokesman. So far, he said, there have been no legal challenges to the Internet postings.
We've seen other cities put photos on billboards, put them on television,'' Bayless said. ``We view this as a more efficient and inexpensive way to do the same thing.''
Police in Kansas City, Missouri, and Denver have used community-access television stations to display pictures or information about people convicted of soliciting prostitutes. Charlotte, North Carolina, posts pictures of convicted johns on the police department's Web site.
Changed Profile
In Akron, Ohio, population 212,179, the city's ``Operation John Be Gone'' Web site has for more than two years displayed photos of anyone convicted for soliciting sex. The site drew more than 100,000 hits during the past year, making it the most visited police-agency site in Ohio, police department spokesman Rick Edwards said.
St. Paul's decision to publish the photos of suspects has ``changed the profile'' of those arrested in areas known for prostitution, police spokesman Paul Schnell said. ``The day of the urban professional taking his lunch break and trying to find a prostitute in some of these challenged neighborhoods, that is not the current profile of the arrestee.''
Attempts to shame people from crime have been shown to be ineffective, said Martha Nussbaum, a professor of law and ethics at the University of Chicago. Kansas City's program didn't lead to a reduction in prostitution arrests, and the city has halted the practice.
Past Publicity </p>
These punishments are actually quite unreliable,'' said Nussbaum, author of the book ``Hiding from Humanity: Disgust, Shame and the Law,'' published in 2004. Chicago's Web site ``is all the more disturbing because the people actually haven't been convicted yet.''
It's too early to tell whether the site will be effective, said Bayless, the police spokesman. Police also impound cars of people arrested on prostitution charges, he said, and the city urges judges to impose mandatory attendance at rehabilitation programs as part of sentencing.
Law enforcement officials said the photos are little different than previous disclosures in print.
Publicizing the names of the johns has been done myriad ways over the years,'' said Jim Pasco, executive director of the Nashville, Tennessee-based Fraternal Order of Police, the largest police labor organization. ``What Chicago did was just ratchet the technology up a bit.''
Fine Over Photo
Suspects already risked public humiliation because their names and addresses are part of the public record available to the news media, Pasco said.
"What person is ever arrested for anything where their name is kept out of the paper?'' he said. ``It certainly doesn't violate Constitutional rights to do it, because the public has the rights to the information.''
Akron's program has helped reduce prostitution during the past two years, Edwards, the police spokesman, said in a phone interview. He said he didn't have specific data on arrests or convictions.
Some suspects offered to do more jail time or pay higher fines in exchange for not having their picture posted on the site, Edwards said. Their offers were refused, he said.
``Men who frequent prostitutes are fairly easily deterred from doing it again,'' said Mike Scott, a law professor at the University of Wisconsin in Madison and director of the Center for Problem-Oriented Policing, a non-profit researcher.
``The difficulty is that there are so many men out there that just deterring the ones that you catch doesn't necessarily drain the pool of potential johns,'' Scott said. ``They're quite easily replaced.''
To contact the reporter on this story:
Bruce Blythe in Chicago at bblythe@bloomberg.net.
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