Activists Back Plan to Curb Prostitution

San Fernando Valley residents, exasperated with street prostitution in their communities, are turning to a controversial weapon to use in their war on the world’s oldest profession: shame.

Activists are backing a proposal by Los Angeles City Councilman Hal Bernson to take the list of those arrested or convicted of soliciting and broadcast their names over the same local cable channel that airs the City Council’s meetings. The list would also be released to news organizations willing to publish it.

Supporters of the idea believe the specter of public embarrassment would discourage people who furtively cruise the streets in search of sex.

“If the names get in the paper or on cable TV, a guy knows that if he goes into an area looking for prostitutes (and) gets caught, it’s going to be known all over,” said Don Schultz, president of the Van Nuys Homeowners Assn.

But even proponents acknowledge that the impact of such a policy would be small if major news outlets refused to carry the names. Thorny legal issues threaten to entangle the proposal, which is scheduled to come up before the City Council this week. And the experience of other cities does not suggest that publicizing offenders’ names would result in any appreciable drop in street prostitution.

Still, the problem has become such a blight on communities like Van Nuys and North Hills that any potential deterrent is worth exploring, activists say.

“It can’t hurt,” Bernson said. “If it works, fine. If it doesn’t work, then we gave it a try.”

Bernson’s proposal grew out of constant complaints from residents and merchants along Sepulveda Boulevard in Van Nuys, where prostitutes trolling for business and the customers who seek their services are easy to spot throughout the day. About a dozen people are arrested every week on suspicion of soliciting in the Van Nuys area, according to police.

“When it reaches epidemic proportions, we all get sick and tired of it,” Schultz said. “We’re trying to maintain the integrity of our neighborhoods.”

City officials had originally suggested restricting the hours of neighborhood shops whose parking lots were being used as pickup spots. But Bernson said the shop owners would be unfairly penalized for the peccadilloes of others.

The proper targets of a crackdown should be the offenders themselves, Bernson said. “I’d rather put the prostitutes and johns out of business than the property owners, the homeowners and the business owners.”

Bernson insisted his efforts do not represent the start of “a crusade” against prostitution but rather are directed toward alleviating a longtime nuisance in a particular area. But he added that if name publication could help the mid-Valley, the city as a whole might also benefit from such a program.

The concept of threatening johns with public embarrassment is not a new one. In 1982, then-City Atty. Ira Reiner embarked on a similar campaign, handing out a list of arrestees’ names to the media. Only two news organizations agreed to publicize the list, while others, including The Times, declined “to be used as the punishment arm of the justice system,” as one local radio executive put it.

Weeks later, a judge forbade Reiner from releasing the johns’ addresses--information that editors and news directors said was crucial to avoid any confusion between the arrestees and people with similar names. The effort to publicly shame customers of prostitutes eventually faded.

And the same issue of possible mistaken identities that sank Reiner’s campaign dogs Bernson’s proposal now. Civil libertarians contend that without clear identification through ages and complete addresses--information that many news organizations decline to give out--the potential for mix-ups is too great.

“It could paint with a really broad brush all the ‘Bill Joneses’ of Van Nuys,” said Albert I. Kaufman, an Encino civil rights attorney. “Just go to the phone book and see how many repetitions of names there are, sometimes in the same communities.”

Even more troubling, opponents say, is the invasion of privacy caused by printing the names of those who have only been arrested and not convicted, especially when the crime in question is considered by most people to be far less heinous than violent acts like murder.

Bernson’s office has asked the city attorney to look into the legal ramifications of naming johns. Police officials are also scrutinizing the proposal, which could add to the workload of a heavily burdened force.

“It could prove administratively to be a nightmare and just not cost-effective,” said Ted Goldstein, a spokesman for the city attorney’s office.

In Long Beach, the city attorney supplies the local newspaper, the Press-Telegram, with a list of those convicted of soliciting, which it has published monthly for nearly a year at the request of a community organization trying to combat prostitution along Pacific Coast Highway.

Reporter Helen Guthrie Smith, who compiles the information for the paper, said she checks out each court docket to prevent misidentification. Full names are printed; addresses specify block numbers.

“We’ve been very, very careful” not to misname people, said Jim Crutchfield, executive editor of the Press-Telegram.

But whether the program has caused would-be johns to think twice about seeking illicit sex is questionable.

A Long Beach Police Department spokesman said the number of arrests has remained at the same level as before. Those arrested are not told that their names will be published upon conviction. Moreover, many of the customers do not live in Long Beach, which may further diminish the impact publication in the local newspaper is supposed to have.

Similarly, when the names of johns were first given out in Los Angeles 13 years ago, a survey of other cities that had such programs, including New York and Phoenix, showed there was no discernible drop in prostitution arrests.

And even advocates of publicizing names in Los Angeles acknowledge that the city’s cable channel reaches a tiny audience. Major news outlets would have to join the effort to lend the threat of public shaming any real credibility.

But Harold Peskin will take anything he can get.

Peskin, general manager of the Carriage Inn, a hotel on Sepulveda, has been pushing for years for the media to publicly name those caught soliciting.

“Hey, if a guy is stupid enough to pick up a prostitute on the street, and he gets arrested, and he knows his name is going in the paper, then he deserves to get his name in there,” said Peskin. “If the media did get involved, it would help reduce the problem.

“Any deterrent we can get would help.”