A friend of mine shared their excitement over the local showing of
The Long Night that is co-sponsored by the local police department. The event is wrapped in a a popular law enforcement meme,
Human Trafficing. My first inclination is "since when do the police do anything right?" So I looked into it. Well I still pretty much see it that way but that is not what's going on here. Documentary film maker
Tim Matsui is on a mission to make a difference in policy in addition to film making. I applaud the effort and if as was the case in the state of Washington it moves toward de-criminalization of prostitution that's a good thing. The title of the article he wrote about his odyssey sums up a very good question and the answer is sometime it doesn't make you "dirty".
Over coffee one day, Richey described his vision of King County owning a leadership role on this issue. He was working on an “end demand” program, a de facto decriminalization of sex workers paired with a targeting of sex buyers.
This quasi “Nordic Model” is a marked improvement from the traditional American approach to prostitution and lies roughly in the middle of the political spectrum of sex work. However, its efficacy relies not only on prosecutorial and law enforcement changes, but also on a strong social services safety net; something that the King County region is still building.
Over in the Sheriff’s office, things had shifted too. Both the Prosecutor and the Sheriff were now saying “we’re not going to arrest our way out of this.”
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