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| A screen shot of Miami chat at worldsexguide.com |
By Terence Cantarella
Special to BT
The Miami Police Department’s annual crime report for 2007, available since May of this year, is slowly making its way through sluggish distribution channels and beginning to arrive in mailboxes across the city. The sleek little booklet organizes the Magic City’s crime statistics into aesthetically pleasing graphs and colorful pie charts that would impress even the sternest grade-school teacher. But residents familiar with the streets of Miami are likely to notice something missing from the publication.
The MPD’s report separates crime into seven categories: homicide, sexual battery, robbery, aggravated assault, burglary, larceny, and vehicle theft. The first four categories (against people) are up three percent from 2006. The last three (against property) are up four percent over 2006. But no mention is made of prostitution, traditionally the Biscayne Corridor’s most visible vice.
There’s a legitimate reason for the omission. The report lists only felony offenses, while prostitution is a misdemeanor, a lesser crime. The problem with such a classification system – a system some states have changed – is that prostitution can be symptomatic of other, more serious neighborhood problems, such as drugs, homelessness, exploitation of minors, and various quality-of-life issues. So its absence from an official report results in an incomplete crime portrait.
However, when it comes to Miami’s skin trade, there’s more than one way to glean the information. Local johns (also called mongers) frequently discuss their exploits on a discussion forum at worldsexguide.com. A search of past threads provides insights far more revealing than any graph or pie chart ever could have.
Here’s a sampling by year:
2005: “79th Street is jumping tonight. I haven’t seen it this busy in a long time. I bypass this scene and head down to 69th Street on Biscayne. Some good advice, fellows. Check the back streets behind the BP station at 69th Street. There is some on-off action there. I like to have breakfast at Cafe Uva across from Starbucks on the weekends for some good lookouts.”
2006: “After a brief tour from 79th Street to 14th Street, I decide to venture into Overtown. I’m checking out the neighborhood behind Ace Hardware on 2nd Avenue and 16th Street where the bargain hoes are…. Keep away from the homeless. They need crack money and are not to be trusted.”
2007: “I first went south toward 71st Street and N. Miami Avenue as I have found that this spot is hot with wayward party girls, but the rain put a damper on all the action there. So I head north toward clear skies and decide to check out the neighborhood off I-95 and SR-84. Bingo!”
2008: “I was on the monger trail late last night. First up to Hollywood. Cops everywhere and only the hardcore skanks about. Then back down to N. Miami and Dixie Highway. One skank, not much else. Then through 79th Street. Cops, cops, and more cops. Down Biscayne, it’s a wasteland and so is Overtown…. I decided to stroll SW 8th Street from US1 to 67th Avenue and then Flagler back the other way. Wow! Uncle LEO [law enforcement officers] was having a family reunion. There’s something big going down. The cities are spending major bucks on police patrols.”
The mongers’ most recent posts from this year clearly convey a tougher market than the one they enjoyed two or three years ago. They complain they now have to rely on “massage parlors” and online bulletin board Craigslist. The pictures the men post on the forum of the streetwalkers they pick up mostly show drug-addicted women in various states of ill health. Others are just women in desperate situations. One forum member cheerfully describes a girl who couldn’t speak English who was trying to earn money to send home for her sister’s funeral.
An e-mail sent to one of the most prolific johns, asking for a “professional” opinion on the current state of prostitution in the city, only generated this succinct response: “Whores are fun! Print that.”
Whores may be fun, but according to Miami cop Darrell Nichols, who patrols the Upper Eastside, the Boulevard’s streetwalkers of yore didn’t reap many benefits from their work: “The pimps made the money, not the girls. The pimps would drive up to Georgia or Alabama in a big SUV, flash some bling, and the young girls up there would be impressed all to hell. These guys would give them a sales pitch and the girls would come back with them. We met girls down here who were 14, 15 years old. Of course, once they were here the pimps wouldn’t give them any money. They’d milk them for all they were worth because they knew that their lives were very short. I probably know of at least 18 girls who died of HIV.”
The heat may be on for hookers and mongers these days but that doesn’t mean the problem is solved. “You’ll never get rid of prostitution,” Nichols says. “You just relocate it. Many prostitutes moved to 79th street west of I-95, to 8th Street, or to Flagler. But the police in those areas have started implementing the same initiatives that we used here – prostitution mapping, community hearings, and motel inspections.”
As for the felonies, 2007’s statistics may not be very encouraging, but controlling visible prostitution seems to be one of the MPD’s successes. It’s no longer commonplace on the main thoroughfares, used condoms no longer litter residential sidewalks in affected areas, and the historic motels along Biscayne Boulevard are beginning to reclaim some of their former charm. “I’ve been on the Boulevard for many years, and I’m extremely pleased with the way it’s coming along,” Nichols says. “It’s taken a lot of people to get it that way.”
Perhaps someday it’ll be time to celebrate with a pie chart.
Feedback: letters@biscaynetimes.com
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