Live-Tweeting Prostitution Raids Is a Terrible Idea, But It's Happening Anyway

Next week the Prince George’s County, Maryland police department will live tweet prostitution stings in some weird attempt to create a social media version of "To Catch a Predator." This is a horrible idea, for so many reasons, not least of which is the county’s horrible record on not screwing up things of this nature.

I’m from the county, a lovely place that borders Washington, DC and doesn’t necessarily aim too high with its motto, a “livable community.” With 881,000 people, it’s not small by any means, but still, it seems like the county shows up in national headlines a little more often than it should, whether it’s because of its reputation as a professional athlete development hotspot, its place as the richest majority-black county in the country, its status as Barack Obama’s favorite speech-giving spot, or its police department’s severe missteps.

This prostitution news is certainly one of those. Here's how the police department explains it:

"We won't tell you when or where, other than it's somewhere in the county sometime next week. The PGPD's Vice Unit will conduct a prostitution sting that targets those soliciting prostitutes and we'll tweet it out as it happens. From the ads to the arrests, we'll show you how the PGPD is battling the oldest profession. Suspect photos and information will be tweeted. We're using this progressive, and what we believe unprecedented, social media tactic to warn any potential participants that this type of criminal behavior is not welcome in Prince George's County."

When technology has been used as a window into the, uhh, process of certain PGPD officers, the results haven’t been favorable. Take for instance that time a surveillance camera caught three PGPD officers beating the living shit out of a University of Maryland student who was celebrating a basketball win over Duke.

Then, there’s the raids. With the level of corruption and occasional mayhem in the county, the PGPD is no stranger to raids. That doesn’t mean that they pull them off correctly:

• In 2008, a SWAT team raided the home of Berwyn Heights Mayor Cheye Calvo because a package of marijuana (which was later found to be addressed to the wrong home) was delivered there. In doing so, the police shot and killed his two labrador retrievers.
• In August 2007, police had raided a family’s house, looking to arrest a couple’s son. They handcuffed both of his parents at gunpoint, only to find that the boy had been in police custody for 12 days.
• In November 2007, the police raided a house, shot and killed a family’s dog, handcuffed a family, then realized they’d raided the wrong house.

In another incident, the police raided the home of then-County Executive Jack Johnson on corruption charges. During the raid, Johnson had his wife flush a $100,000 check down the toilet and stuff $79,600 in cash in her bra. That one’s not necessarily on the police, but that’s the kind of nonsense that can happen in Gorgeous Prince George’s—the man in charge of the county can get caught destroying evidence during a police raid, and people aren’t necessarily shocked. For the record, Johnson once said that, because this is America, the PGPD didn't need to worry about apologizing to Calvo for killing his dogs.

But even if you’ve got a police force with a sterling record, does it really make sense to live tweet prostitution raids? It doesn’t, not really. But taking the PGPD—a department that regularly botches raids—and giving them yet one more task to do during the whole thing seems overly reckless. And it’s completely unnecessary, and potentially harmful to sex workers, according to Darby Hickey, a former sex worker who has turned advocate in recent years.

“They said that tweeting it sends the message that prostitution isn’t welcome here. ” Hickey told me. “Well, they’re actually sending a creepy voyeuristic message about how they do their work. No one is doing sex work because they think it’s ‘welcome.’ They’re doing it in order to get money to feed themselves and their families.”

Hickey and groups like Helping Individual Prostitutes Survive say that, while live tweeting prostitution busts is a horrible idea, the negative press the PGPD has gotten over the whole thing—like the press that the New York Police Department got with its #myNYPD campaign—has helped start a conversation about the sex work industry (or, in New York’s case, police brutality).

“In a bizarre way, by being so ridiculous, it has drawn public attention to the issue. It’s showing people that maybe criminalization is not the right approach, that human rights and public health should be the right approach,” Hickey told me.

The PGPD has already had to respond to the negative outcry that has come from the whole stunt, but it says it still plans on going through with the plan sometime next week. But they probably shouldn’t.

“There’s been so many issues of corruption and violence in that department,” Hickey said. “It’s like, get your house in order—then maybe we can talk about this in a valuable way.”