New Law Forces Harbor Blvd.’s Streetwalkers to Take a Hike

A little traffic enforcement apparently has succeeded where all else had failed.

For years, despite the efforts of Santa Ana Police, prostitutes in search of customers had paraded along Harbor Boulevard, hailing motorists and openly soliciting.

At its worst, police estimate, there would be 30 to 40 prostitutes at a time soliciting business from passing motorists. In all there were hundreds of the women, many of them traveling a circuit from city to city and congregating on busy thoroughfares to solicit.

But Robert Fitz, a designer at Harbor Flower World, 100 N. Harbor Boulevard, has noticed a difference where he works near 1st Street and near his home farther north.

“I live up by 17th (Street) and Harbor on the border of Garden Grove and Santa Ana,” Fitz said. “Lately I haven’t noticed that many (prostitutes). I have noticed the signs that make it illegal to stop along Harbor after certain hours. They’ve got to find another place to roam.”

“There are still some, but not many,” Fitz said.

In March, Santa Ana officials initiated a ban on the parking and stopping of cars along Harbor from 4 p.m. to 9 a.m., the period when streetwalkers generally solicit business. The tactic followed a clash in court with the American Civil Liberties Union over an earlier attempt by police to combat the streetwalkers.

In February, an Orange County Superior Court judge rejected the city’s plan to declare more than a hundred suspected prostitutes to be public nuisances and to bar them from Harbor Boulevard.

“The city tried to get an order declaring 350 named and 1,000 unnamed defendants declared public nuisances,” said ACLU attorney Rebecca Jurado. “We argued that was in violation of . . . due process. The court found the city’s efforts were not within its authority.”

The judge agreed with the ACLU that the proposed action would infringe on constitutional rights. Under the rejected ban, women suspected of repeated prostitution were to be barred from appearing within 100 yards of problem spots along the boulevard. The penalty for violating the court order would be fines of up to $5,000.

But in agreeing with the ACLU, the judge noted that the all-out ban was tantamount to asserting that “every attractive woman on Harbor Boulevard is assumed to be a hooker.”

City officials turned quickly to another approach. On March 6, the City Council voted to impose the no-stopping, no-parking restrictions.

Since then, there have been no legal challenges, according to Santa Ana City Atty. Edward J. Cooper. “No complaints whatsoever,” he said.

The parking ban also worked immediately in reducing the solicitation activity along Harbor, said Santa Ana Police Lt. Jim Davis.

“It decreased the number of girls hailing passing motorists, but it displaced them to private property . . . shopping centers, convenience stores, fast-food places, doughnut shops; places they can duck into if they see a police officer coming,” Davis said. “To counter that, we’ve assigned two teams of officers.”

The uniformed officers, working in pairs, patrol the boulevard and operate what police call “a tag-along program,” Davis said.

“When we have those officers working the street and the girl is on the boulevard, if there is nothing we are going to arrest them for, the officer stays right there with them,” Davis said.

“No john’s going to pick them up with a cop standing right there.”

Arrests along Harbor Boulevard have declined as prostitutes have left the area, Davis said.

“Initially we had arrests, but girls got the message real quick, and that’s when they started moving to the private property.”

The suspected prostitutes would “run on to private property when they saw us,” Davis said. “We anticipated that that might be a byproduct, so we got all the merchants to post their property: ‘No Loitering.’ ”

With the cooperation of property owners, police began arresting and citing suspected prostitutes for trespassing during the daytime and for prowling at night when they were caught loitering on private property. There were dozens of arrests for a variety of other offenses, including narcotics violations and solicitation of prostitution, Davis said.

The combination of the parking ban and the tag-along patrol officers “has really curtailed the problem,” Davis said. “I’ve received probably half a dozen phone calls from merchants along Harbor and people who use Harbor Boulevard . . . with very positive comments about the lack of prostitutes.”

Davis acknowledges that ultimately, however, Santa Ana’s success in ridding Harbor Boulevard of streetwalkers may contribute to a problem elsewhere.

“When we started this push, I got a call from Hollywood vice (division of Los Angeles Police Department) asking me what we were doing because of the sudden increase of girls up there,” Davis said.

The ACLU’s Jurado said she has heard no complaints about the police enforcement efforts.

“It’s totally within their police power to declare a particular area a non-stopping area,” she said. “They are within their authority to enforce the laws.

“As long as they stay within the bounds of that authority, there shouldn’t be a complaint.”