(MintPress) – A report from the Human Rights Watch (HRW) organization says that police officers in at least four cities in the U.S. confiscate unused condoms from suspected sex workers and sometimes use the unused condoms as evidence in cases where a person is arrested on charges of prostitution. The 112-page report examined the interaction between police officers and sex workers, including transgender individuals, in four U.S. cities largely affected by AIDS: Los Angeles, New York, San Francisco and Washington, DC.
The release of the report comes just days before the 19th International AIDS Conference that will be held in Washington, D.C. today.
While the report recognizes that police officers are responsible for enforcing laws and that prostitution is illegal in 49 states with the exception of Nevada, HRW says law enforcement should be consistent with human rights obligations, “including the right to health, to liberty and security of the person, and to freedom from cruel, inhuman and degrading treatment.”
In the report, HRW says that fear of harassment from police officers and being arrested has kept many sex workers from carrying the amount of condoms they would need to have safe sex with every client, thereby putting these sex workers at an increased risk for contracting sexually transmitted diseases (STDs) like AIDS.
One question many of the sex workers interviewed by HRW had was in regards to how many condoms they legally were allowed to carry. In all four cities, sex workers said they heard there was a rule of three and that having more than three condoms on them would likely lead to an arrest for prostitution.
The report cites the example of Carol F., 28, a transgender woman from Guatemala who told HRW she was first arrested for prostitution when she was 13 in an incident in which Los Angeles police used condoms as evidence against her.
Traumatized, Carol says she was afraid to carry condoms from that point on. “After that arrest, I was always scared. The condoms, I always found a place to hide them. And I stopped carrying three. I started carrying one or two… and then there were nights that I did have to work and I didn’t have a condom on me. There were times when I didn’t have a condom and needed one, and I used a plastic bag.”
In an interview with MintPress, Peter Newsham, Assistant Chief of Police for the Metropolitan Police Department, said that in Washington, D.C., there is no limit for how many condoms a person can carry.
Similarly, Lieutenant Patrick Shields, Officer in Charge of Detective Support and Vice Division, told MintPress that in Los Angeles, there is not a limit on how many condoms a person can carry with them either. He added that while it’s not protocol to confiscate or force sex workers to throw away unused condoms, he was curious why sex workers wouldn’t go get more condoms. “You can’t buy more? They are so easily obtainable. They sell them at liquor stores and they give them away for free. And a lot of the time the Johns will have them because they have a preference [for the type of condom used].”
In response to Lieutenant Shields’ statement, Megan McLemore, Senior Researcher in the Health and Human Rights Division for HRW, said, “The question of whether a sex worker might be able to go get another condom from somewhere is not the point. A public safety officer should not be confiscating condoms from any Los Angeles resident. I find that statement shockingly unaware of the importance of HIV awareness prevention.” McLemore says she also disagrees with the assertion that clients have a preference for using condoms, as it was her understanding clients pay more to have unprotected sex.
The HRW report also claims that police officers frequently confiscated or forced sex workers to throw away unused condoms the sex workers had in their possessions. Part of the issue HRW had with police taking away condoms was the health aspect, but another reason was that many of these condoms were given to sex workers for free by city health department programs in an attempt to lessen the number of people who contract AIDS.
When asked about unused condoms being confiscated and/or used to arrest sex workers, Chief Newsham said that in order for a police officer to stop someone on the street, police would have to suspect the person was prostituting his or herself, and in order to search someone they would need probable cause. Newsham added condoms are not used in prostitution cases except those involving juveniles and businesses-like massage parlors, where police have a search warrant.
Lieutenant Shields said the Los Angeles Police Department doesn’t typically confiscate condoms because they don’t want anyone to get sick. “If you have ten condoms we’re not going to come into your apartment and arrest you. It’s when you [solicit for sex] in public, on the street that it becomes a police matter.”
In the section of the report specific to findings in Los Angeles, HRW said that the LAPD forces all persons arrested for prostitution to be tested for AIDS and is a form of discrimination. Lieutenant Shields says that this is not a form of discrimination and that once a person is arrested they have given up part of their rights. He added that it’s up to a court to decide whether or not a person is tested and the goal is to protect the public from the spread of AIDS.
Chief Newsham also expressed concern about the reports findings. He said the report has a lot of “anecdotal evidence,” but none of the “examples are substantiated because they haven’t been investigated.”
“People need to let the police department know,” Chief Newsham added, so that a legal investigation can occur. Newsham said the Metropolitan Police Department contacted HRW to see if they could be given information to start an investigation, but their request was denied.
In response, McLemore said, “The people we spoke with were not willing to come forward directly to the police. They did not feel comfortable with doing that for fear of police retaliation…It wasn’t that we were withholding information…We explained that in an ideal world everyone would come forward and file a complaint but there is a population that has been abused by the police and don’t want their assistance.”
MintPress reached out to the New York Police Department as well as the San Francisco Police Department, but neither responded to our inquiries.