Several years ago, the night before a local election, I was arrested for prostitution outside of a Koreatown motel. The customer who made the appointment with me twirled his wedding ring a lot and made small talk about sex toys. When he stood up, I followed him towards his motel room, which was across a parking lot. Once outside, I was handcuffed and shoved into an unmarked van by the “customer” and another cop, who flashed his shiny gold badge. After a few hours, I was dumped like a stray dog at the Twin Towers Correctional Facility in downtown Los Angeles. Unlike many other sex workers who have been routinely rounded up in prostitution stings, I was not misgendered, raped or beaten by cops. But the subordination ritual of the arrest itself, and the feeling of being caught in the jaws of a likely publicity stunt before an Election Day, stuck with me.
A majority of the other women in jail with me that night were half my age and were Black or brown. One of them fell asleep with her head on my lap after she showed me how to use the phone. Then, and now, the LAPD brags about making the city safer, but for sex workers, more arrests only mean more fear, abuse, trauma and poverty. Incarceration only exacerbates these conditions. For sex workers, cleaning up the city means erasure.