Kamala Harris wants to put us in jail. She would target customers of sex workers. Here's an excerpt from a recent article about her,
https://reason.com/2019/06/03/kamala...-be-president/
Kamala Harris vs. Sex Workers
Some of Harris' most revealing work has been related to prostitution. As a prosecutor, she ramped up stings in immigrant communities, opposed measures to legalize sex work (or simply to stop sex worker arrests), spread misinformation about human trafficking, ignored sexual misconduct by police, and aggressively targeted websites where sex workers advertised.
So it was a surprise last February when, asked by The Root whether she supports the "decriminalization of sex work," Harris said: "I think so. I do."
Had she evolved? Not really. Decriminalization advocates believe that neither selling nor buying sex should be subject to criminal penalties unless force, fraud, coercion, or minors are involved. But in the same interview, Harris spoke about the need to go after "johns," a.k.a. prostitution customers, along with "pimps and traffickers." At a CNN town hall in April, she again emphasized the importance of targeting customers.
What Harris was describing was a version of the "end demand" model, which treats buyers of commercial sex as criminals while allowing sex workers to avoid arrest under some conditions. It's an approach that replicates almost all of the problems of full criminalization, and it has been criticized by everyone from sex workers themselves to human rights and health groups such as Amnesty International and the World Health Organization.
Harris has talked about sex work this way for a long time. In January 2005,
she told the Examiner that she agreed with "the spirit" of a proposal to impound cars belonging to those convicted of soliciting prostitution, because it's important "to hold accountable the true perpetrators of prostitution—the johns, the pimps, and the traffickers."
Despite her supposed openness to decriminalization, Harris has long advocated the arrest of adults selling sex, too. A 2008 measure in San Francisco would have stopped police from arresting adult sex workers. "It will allow workers to organize for our rights and for our safety," one advocate told the Associated Press at the time. It also would have prohibited the city from taking state or federal money for the racial profiling of Asian businesses.
The local Democratic Party backed the measure. Harris fought against it, saying it was a mistake to consider prostitution a victimless crime. She also encouraged local police to intensify crackdowns on adult prostitution, especially at Asian-owned massage parlors.
Harris did help launch a "safe house" for minors in the sex trade, modeled after Lois Lee's long-running Children of the Night program in Hollywood, which provides a shelter and services to teenagers picked up for prostitution. It was a step in the right direction—exactly the kind of tangible, noncarceral program needed to address underage sex work. But it could house only six girls at a time, at a cost of about $1 million per year. And while she spoke out against arresting minors for prostitution offenses, it still happened in practice.
Harris' attitude on these issues seems to stem from early in her career. In the '90s, she worked closely with nonprofits and fellow city officials on several anti–domestic violence campaigns. In 2003, when she was first running for D.A., coalitions "built up around issues of domestic violence and juvenile prostitution" were "central to the Harris campaign effort," the San Francisco Examiner noted at the time.
In the late '90s and early '00s, many groups concerned about domestic violence began shifting their focus to "human trafficking." Soon, Harris started pushing for a law to make human trafficking a crime in California.
This was largely redundant: Forcing others into labor or sex was already illegal under a host of state laws. Still, the new legislation, enacted in 2006, was at least nominally concerned with coerced labor.
When it passed, "detectives dramatically stepped up their investigations, helped by federal grants aimed at finding trafficking rings," the Los Angeles Times noted in 2006. Police forces received money for training officers, buying "sophisticated surveillance equipment," and paying informants.
These federal-local police partnerships to "fight trafficking" were mainly used in undercover prostitution stings, with the bulk of arrests focused on sex workers themselves or their customers. Contrary to the stated purpose of the law, prosecutions and convictions for actual human trafficking were rare. But as the moral panic around what Harris called "modern slavery" heated up, she would join a coalition demanding that Craigslist, Backpage, and other classified-advertising sites and web forums that host user-generated ads be blamed and punished.
Harris was sworn in as state attorney general in 2011, just as calls to "end demand" for prostitution were getting a turbocharge from celebrity campaigns, federal funding, and a few motivated ideologues. In 2013, Harris joined 46 other state attorneys general in asking Congress to amend Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act, a measure the Electronic Frontier Foundation calls "the most important law protecting free speech on the Internet."
Section 230 says that digital platforms and service providers shouldn't be treated as the speakers of user-generated content and that they are thus immune under state (but not federal) law from legal liability for things that people use their products to say. At the time, this factored into an array of state cases against web platforms: Prosecutors were routinely shot down by judges on the grounds that their prosecutions were illegal.
It wasn't long before some members of Congress took up the A.G.s' request, presenting various bills to gut Section 230 under the guise of fighting "the growth of internet-facilitated child sex trafficking."
It would be a few years before the effort saw success. In the meantime, in January 2015, Harris announced her candidacy for the U.S. Senate. She also acted, in her role as California attorney general, like Section 230 didn't exist.
A month before the 2016 election, Harris and Texas A.G. Ken Paxton had Carl Ferrer, the CEO of Backpage, arrested on a warrant for pimping, pimping of a minor, and conspiracy. The site's founders, Michael Lacey and James Larkin, were also arrested and charged with conspiracy.
Backpage had become the most visible target in the political fight against sex trafficking. The A.G.s behind the operation worked from the theory that because the site had failed to filter out all instances of teenagers posting ads while pretending to be adults, and because some of these ads eventually led to minors getting paid for sex, the owners and managers of Backpage were guilty of "child sex trafficking."
In December 2016, a judge tossed the case. "Congress did not wish to hold liable online publishers for the action of publishing third party speech," wrote Sacramento County Superior Court Judge Michael Bowman. "Congress has spoken on this matter and it is for Congress, not this court, to revisit."
By then, Harris had won her Senate race and would soon be on her way to Washington. Once there, she would indeed push Congress to revisit the law. But she had three days left in the California A.G.'s office; she used them to bring another case against Ferrer, Lacey, and Larkin, this time alleging pimping and money laundering. (A judge would again reject the pimping charges, though the money laundering case is still open.)
Even as Harris was building her case against Backpage, she was ignoring growing documentation of sexual exploitation by police officers in the place where she had started her career. Multiple cops in Alameda County had had inappropriate contact with a teen girl going by the name of Celeste Guap. At least one of them had engaged in a sexual relationship with her before she was of age.
The daughter of a police dispatcher, Guap got involved early with drugs and prostitution. Officer Brendan O'Brien first encountered her in 2015 as she was fleeing an abusive boyfriend/pimp. But rather than treat her like a victim—or at least like a minor not old enough to legally consent to sex with an adult—O'Brien started sleeping with the girl himself.
After he committed suicide, leaving a note that mentioned Guap, other officers helped cover up their relationship—and then began pursuing the newly 18-year-old girl themselves. She would eventually claim to have had sexual relationships with more than two dozen Bay Area officers and prosecutors. Guap does not allege that they forced themselves on her, but they did have the power to arrest her for prostitution if she didn't give them what they wanted.
In the end, more than a dozen officers were disciplined or fired, Oakland's police chief resigned, Oakland's next police chief was removed after less than a week, and a judge shipped Guap off to Florida for counseling.
During this saga, Guap's lawyers repeatedly asked the attorney general's office to investigate what was happening, expressing concern that local officials alone couldn't fairly or competently handle charges involving so many of their own. The A.G.'s office—helmed by Harris—declined. The case, which occurred just as she was making the transition to the national stage, demonstrated her priorities as both a prosecutor and a politician.
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