Judge Rejects Santa Ana Ban on Prostitutes

In a major ruling that thwarts Santa Ana’s efforts to rid its streets of hookers, a Superior Court judge Wednesday rejected the city’s plan to declare more than a hundred prostitution suspects “a public nuisance” and ban them from a notorious strip of Harbor Boulevard.

Judge William F. McDonald found that the city had failed to conclusively establish that the people cited by police in recent weeks had done anything wrong.

Constitutional Victory

An attorney for the American Civil Liberties Union in Orange County, who argued against the plan in court Wednesday, called the judge’s ruling an important constitutional victory.

City officials and police, meanwhile, said they will have to revise the plan or scrap it altogether.

The ban was a key element in the city’s latest push to clean up Harbor Boulevard between Sunflower Avenue and 17th Street.

Under the city’s plan, women suspected of repeated prostitution would have faced--in addition to criminal penalties--a ban on appearing within 100 hundred yards of the problem spots along Harbor as a “public nuisance.” Anyone violating the ban could have been jailed for contempt of court and assessed civil fines of up to $5,000, city officials said.

Police had named 116 people suspected of engaging in prostitution before Wednesday’s court hearing but had hoped to target hundreds more if they had been successful in gaining an order from Judge McDonald.

City officials described the anti-prostitution effort as the first of its kind in the state, perhaps in the nation.

Sympathy for Problem

McDonald, voicing sympathy for the city’s goals, acknowledged that an apparently increasing number of prostitutes along Harbor Boulevard has created “a serious problem” for local residents, who complain about noise throughout the night, traffic jams and finding used condoms strewn along the street.

But the judge told attorneys for the city: “I can’t give you a solution. All I can say is keep trying, but this is not the right way to go.”

To allow the city to impose an all-out ban on people suspected of prostitution is tantamount to asserting that “every attractive woman on Harbor Boulevard is assumed to be a hooker,” McDonald suggested in quoting a declaration that he had received from an area resident.

“That’s what you’re asking me to do,” he told the city’s attorney.

In an interview after his ruling, McDonald said his grounds for rejecting the city’s request were “purely procedural”--namely the difficulty linking the suspects to prostitution. But he quickly added that the plan raised broader, constitutional problems of due process as well.

Decline Is Claimed

The judge’s derailment of that plan hit city officials and police especially hard because, they said, there had been a marked decline in prostitution activity since police began notifying suspected prostitutes of possible civil penalties.

“I’m extremely disappointed by this ruling,” Santa Ana Mayor Daniel H. Young said. “This (plan) could have produced a dramatic improvement, and the proof is in the pudding. We’ve already seen a big drop in the problem along Harbor in just the last few weeks.

“The professional hookers and their pimps that do business in Orange County know we don’t have enough jail space (to detain them for prosecution), so they realize the criminal statutes have no teeth,” the mayor said.

Deputy City Atty. Terrence Grace made the same argument in court in seeking McDonald’s approval. While criminal citations generally “are just scoffed at--they’re laughed at” by prostitutes, Grace said the threat of a civil ban seems to have had “a very powerful effect” in curbing prostitution.

Grace could offer the court no concrete explanation for that phenomenon. But Santa Ana Police Lt. Jim Davis, who heads the department’s anti-prostitution efforts, suggested later that those women cited may have been scared away, at least temporarily, by the novelty and bulk of the 121-page civil warnings.

Back on the Street

Grace, quoting reports that he had heard from police in the field, told McDonald that the prostitutes “intend to go back on the boulevard (today) if this injunction is not granted.”

The judge, however, remained unconvinced. McDonald had issued his intended decision even before hearing oral arguments on the question, and he stood by that decision.

The judge, challenging one of the city’s main assertions, said there is no guarantee that civil penalties will prove any more effective in keeping prostitutes off the streets than have criminal statutes.

He added that the city’s 73 court declarations from police and Harbor Boulevard neighbors who had been bothered by the prostitution problem did not amount to proof that the 116 people named were, in fact, involved in prostitution.

“Where’s the factual basis for that conclusion?”’ McDonald asked Grace. “What can I look at?”

Grace urged the judge “to recognize reality.” Citing the many aliases used by some suspected prostitutes, he said, “the attempt to (better) identify these people . . . is virtually an impossible task. The court is simply asking too much.”

Rebecca Jurado of the ACLU told McDonald that the recognized need to combat prostitution in Santa Ana does not justify circumventing the suspects’ rights to due process on prostitution charges.

McDonald had rejected the ACLU’s request to file papers on the case as a “friend of the court,” but he did allow the group to present its arguments Wednesday.

None of the 116 people named as prostitution suspects were known to have attended the hearing.

Lt. Davis, department commander for the Harbor Boulevard area, said after the ruling: “This puts a dent in our efforts, but we’re just going to have to regroup and come up with another plan. We’re certainly not going to walk away from this problem.”

The Police Department has already spent $8,000 in officers’ overtime pay in the last month as part of its recent prostitution roundups, Davis said.