Manhattan’s DA has announced he will no longer prosecute prostitutes, and asked a court to dismiss nearly 6,000 related cases as part of a city-wide change in policy.
Manhattan District Attorney Cy Vance Jr. said prosecuting these types of crimes does not make the city safer, ‘and too often, achieves the opposite result by further marginalizing vulnerable New Yorkers.’
Vance appeared via Zoom at Manhattan criminal court to dismiss 914 ‘prostitution’ and ‘unlicensed massage’ cases and 5,080 ‘loitering for the purpose of prostitution’ cases dating back to 1976.
It comes after New York State’s February repeal of the ‘Walking while Trans’ law, which was originally a state loitering law designed to discourage prostitution but became too broad.
Civil rights advocates said the former statute was an excuse to allow police harassment of anyone who they viewed as looking different or suspicious.
The DA’s office will continue to prosecute other crimes related to prostitution, including patronizing sex workers and sex trafficking, the New York Times reports.
Manhattan District Attorney Cy Vance announced that his office will no longer prosecute prostitution and dismissed nearly 6,000 prostitution-related cases going back to the 1970s.
Manhattan District Attorney Vance’s Tweet of Wednesday’s announcement that his office will no longer .
‘By vacating warrants, dismissing cases and erasing convictions for these charges, we are completing a paradigm shift in our approach,’ Vance said.
‘These cases – many dating back to the 1970s and 1980s – are both a relic of a different New York, and a very real burden for the person who carries the conviction or bench warrant.’
ProPublica published a report in December that said nearly everyone arrested for these types of crimes in the last four years is nonwhite.
The publication’s data analysis of the last four years showed 89 percent of the 1,800 charged with prostitution and 93 percent of the 3,000 accused of trying to buy sex were nonwhite.
The move by Vance is part of a growing, national trend to stop prosecuting low-level, non-violent crimes.
Manhattan joins the New York City boroughs of Brooklyn and Queens, whose district attorneys made their policy changes in January and March, respectively, as well as the cities of Philadelphia and Baltimore to decriminalize prostitution.
Sex workers are largely nonwhite and already victims of human trafficking, advocates say. Decriminalizing sex work has been a decades-long fight that gained traction within the last two years.
Abigail Swenstein, staff attorney with The Legal Aid Society’s Exploitation Intervention Project who worked with Manhattan’s district attorney to make this change, told the New York Times that prostitution prosecution has been declining over the last decade.
She said there was a spike 2014, which she attributed to Super Bowl being held locally in Giants Stadium.
But this policy change is vital, she said, because many sex workers are already victims of human trafficking.
Prosecution adds layers of despair to an already unforgiving lifestyle that extend into family and immigration court, Swenstein said.
Sharifa Abdullah, a founding member of the Exploitation Intervention Project’s Advisory Board who had a first-hand experience of being arrested for prostitution after being trafficked, said she felt ‘like there was no way out.’
‘Even after leaving my trafficker, prostitution was the only job that I could get for a while,’ she said. ‘This left me with a criminal record. Until all records are vacated, all people with prostitution arrests will still be limited in their employment options. The DA’s new policy is helpful, but our hope is that the NYPD stops making these arrests altogether.’
Decriminalizing sex work has been a decades-long fight that gained traction with the formation of Decrim NY in 2019, according to the New York Times.
Decrim NY advocates for sex workers and lobbies lawmakers in New York City and New York State for the full decriminalization of sex work.
A major milestone in decriminalizing sex work came in February, when New York State repeal a loitering law known as ‘Walking while Trans,’ which Vance alluded to repealing in this June 2019 Tweet.
There’s a similar bill being discussed among New York State lawmakers, which Swenstein stressed is just as important to get passed.
‘Today’s announcement should not supplant the need to pass legislation that would fully decriminalize sex work and provide for criminal record relief for people convicted of prostitution offense,’ she said. ‘The Legal Aid Society reaffirms the need for Albany to enact S6419/A8230, legislation that would accomplish this, immediately this session.’
