Prostitution, which the Internet has largely driven indoors and online, has surged on the streets of New York City. Roosevelt Avenue in Queens, long littered with “massage” parlors and “chica chica” cards crudely advertising women for sale, has recently seen a sharp rise in the numbers and visibility of women openly offering sex for money in the shadow of the elevated Number 7 train. At the same time, East New York’s “Penn Track” section has emerged as a seedy open sex market, as nearly naked women strut the street and offer themselves to men in cars, supervised by pimps who use brutality to manage those who are essentially their slaves.
These scenes were familiar sights in the city three decades ago, when prostitutes walked the streets near the Lincoln Tunnel or pursued the hotel trade on Sixth Avenue near Central Park. But the era of Broken Windows policing and the rise of online “escort” advertising mostly eliminated the plague of open sex for sale.
In the years that followed, reformers insisted that many prostitutes were victims of coercion and violence. This prompted New York to divert many of those arrested in the sex trade into special courts aimed at providing services to women now treated as victims rather than as criminals.
The diversion campaign began in earnest in 2013, when New York State’s Unified Court System established the Human Trafficking Intervention Courts. These courts link women arrested for prostitution “to tailored counseling and case management services, which range from shelter and health care to immigration assistance, drug treatment, and counseling.” Compliance with these court-mandated programs often results in the dismissal or reduction of criminal charges.
The state’s approach is in line with the so-called Nordic model, which criminalizes the purchase, rather than the sale, of sex. This approach is backed by some feminist groups but opposed by organizations such as the ACLU, Amnesty International, and Human Rights Watch, which favor complete decriminalization of the sex industry.
As a result of state-led diversion efforts, the city’s annual prostitution-related arrests have trended down, falling from tens of thousands in the 1980s to just over 100 by 2022. The decline in prostitution prosecutions comes amid a broader collapse in proactive policing, driven by limitations on the use of stop-and-frisk, the decriminalization of public drinking and urination, and the elimination of cash bail for almost all crimes.
Radical advocates for the decriminalization of prostitution are nevertheless dissatisfied with what they see as the slow pace of reform. Their cause took a step forward in 2021, when New York State repealed a 1976 law criminalizing “loitering for the purpose of engaging in prostitution.” Dubbed the “walking while trans” law, it was supposedly abused by police as a pretext for harassing people identifying as transgender. The NYPD, however, claims that the loitering statute was generally employed as a response to community quality-of-life complaints, and even champions of repeal offer no data substantiating the contention that the law was enforced mostly against those who identified as trans.
Total decriminalization boasts prominent supporters. Socialist state senator Julia Salazar, who represents parts of Brooklyn with high levels of loitering arrests, is among the most radical New York advocates for the rights of prostitutes. “I think that the goal should be decriminalization,” she said at a 2018 meeting of activists. “In the meantime we have to stop this charge.” Her colleague—and 2025 mayoral candidate—Jessica Ramos, whose Queens district includes a stretch of Roosevelt Avenue where the NYPD claims to have spotted suspected prostitutes alongside members of the vicious Venezuelan Tren de Aragua gang, said that the loitering law was “no different than terrible policing policies, like Stop and Frisk, and only targets the most vulnerable populations in my district.”
Senator Ramos, ironically, isn’t entirely wrong. Even though she opposes them, laws against loitering for the purpose of engaging in prostitution are useful tools for disrupting antisocial behavior, just as stop-and-frisk was a useful tool for police to get guns off the street. Removing these tactics from the crime-prevention arsenal has predictably resulted in more gunshot deaths and the spread of human trafficking across New York City. In the name of protecting “vulnerable populations,” the Left has made New Yorkers more vulnerable to crime and disorder.
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