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Krause called out the name of the 37-year-old woman, who like other prostitutes arrested in this South Side neighborhood bordering the Beltline between South Park Street and Fish Hatchery Road is barred from the area as a condition of her bail.
The woman stopped, then slowly turned to face Krause and officer Tammi Droessler, who could arrest her on the spot.
Instead, Krause asked her if she is OK, then reminded her about a new drop-in program where prostitutes can get a hot meal like the hot wings Krause cooked up and sent to a recent gathering along with help to get off drugs and away from the street.
“And we don’t want to see you out here again tonight,” Droessler added.
The drop-in program, run by ARC Community Services’ Respect Project on Prostitution, is part of a wide-reaching effort to confront the prostitution that police say exploded last summer near the intersection of Badger Road and Cypress Way, just around the corner from the South Police District headquarters.
“Lieutenants were being solicited, the captain,” Droessler said.
One man was picking up prostitutes in a van emblazoned with the name of the South Side construction company where he worked, said Krause, who spoke to the company president repeatedly before the employee stopped showing up in the van. He later was cited in his own vehicle.
It wasn’t just the amount of prostitution that prompted Det. Rosa Aguilu to urge the area’s community policing team to do more to address the problem. It was the brutal assaults last spring and summer on three women, two known to be prostitutes.
“They’re victims, too,” Aguilu said. “We can’t send a message this is OK. ... One of them is going to get killed.”
Because prostitutes are involved in illegal activity, Aguilu said, “they’re an easy target to be victimized” because people either think they won’t go to the police, or say, “Who’s going to believe them?’”
Though activity has lessened some, Krause said, prostitution still goes on in the neighborhood night and day. She and Droessler have a file of more than 50 prostitutes known to work the loop traced by West Badger, Cypress, Magnolia Lane, and Catalpa and Fish Hatchery roads, or to venture a few blocks south to Petra Place and Ann Street, along the Beltline. The officers can point out the parking lots and back stairwells where the women turn tricks, and the flop houses where they do drugs.
Simply arresting the prostitutes and the johns who patronize them isn’t solving the problem, Krause said, adding, “You have to get creative.”
No sex for money’
Last month, Krause put up yard signs in the area symbolically warning “no sex for money” depicted by the word “sex” surrounded by dollar signs in a red circle with a slash through it the day before a prostitution sting that netted 14 arrests, nearly all of them alleged johns. When she went to remove the signs about an hour and a half later, Krause found a condom hanging from one of them.
Police also plan a “john school” for men arrested in such stings. By opting to attend the class, offenders could have a $676 city fine waived and keep the charge off their records. They also would learn about the legal and health risks of prostitution, and hear former prostitutes tell how paying for sex keeps the women addicted to drugs.
When a panel of former prostitutes spoke at a similar john school attended by eight men in 2005, Aguilu said, “you could see” the effect the women had on the men. They asked the men “to see them like they would see their daughters, their mothers, their wives, their sisters.”
Krause has also sent “Dear John” letters to owners of vehicles observed “curb crawling” in the neighborhood, with a warning to avoid the area unless they have legitimate business there.
And if johns are using vehicles registered to their significant others, Krause said, “I will call wives and girlfriends.”
Police are also discussing posting offenders’ photographs in a “John Hall of Shame” on the police department’s Web site.
Getting the message out in Spanish
Because of the high number of Hispanic men arrested for soliciting in the West Badger neighborhood and the incidence of sexually transmitted diseases, such as gonorrhea and chlamydia, among Latina women who may be contracting them from male partners who patronize prostitutes police also have enlisted the help of Madison’s Spanish-language radio station La Movida.
The station recently began running public service announcements and aired a call-in program with representatives from the police department and Latino Health Council.
“There’s lots of white old men trolling around, too,” Krause said. “We’ve got all types of people out here.”
Prostitution occurs in different forms throughout the city, police say. Some johns find prostitutes on online sites such as Craigslist. Others arrange standing dates with the same woman. Police say the prostitutes in the West Badger neighborhood are there because the drugs are there.
“Gammon Road, Raymond Road that’s big money over there,” said one former prostitute who is now in a drug and alcohol treatment facility and spoke on condition of anonymity. “Badger’s the last place you go.”
In the past five years, the number of city citations issued to prostitutes and johns has increased steadily, from five in 2003 to 32 through October of this year 25 in the West Badger area alone. Those arrests, mostly made in stings, do not include cases referred to the Dane County district attorney.
“You can always clean up a neighborhood by pushing the problem somewhere else,” Aguilu said. But, she added, “we haven’t done anything to solve the problem.”
Instead, police are hoping to change the behaviors of both prostitutes and johns through education and outreach, Krause said.
Enforcement
But that doesn’t mean they’re letting up on enforcement, Krause said.
In the November sting, 11 men and one juvenile, ranging from 16 to 60, were arrested for loitering for the purposes of soliciting prostitutes. They included a University of Wisconsin student, a recovering addict and a man who was on his way to get medicine for his pregnant girlfriend. Two of the men had children’s car seats in their vehicles.
They started showing up soon after two female undercover officers hit the street posing as prostitutes, and the traffic never let up throughout the cold, rainy and snowy night.
Russell E. Green, 51 who Droessler said had the neatest glove compartment she’d ever seen was picked up after offering to pay an undercover officer $20 for “lovin’,” Droessler said.
He told police he was grateful they had stopped him from doing something he shouldn’t, Droessler said. “He admitted he made a mistake and felt it could save his life,” she said.
UW student Jamal S. Dirie, 30 whose numerous bumper stickers, including a depiction of Che Guevara, combined messages of anti-oppression and Islam left the police station in tears after his arrest. He told police he had an exam the next day and had just had a fight with his fiancee.
Circling the block
Juan Carlos Rojas Torrijos, 27, of Middleton, told Aguilu he heard about the risk of STDs on the La Movida program. He said he had been on his way to a drugstore to get medicine for his pregnant girlfriend which the girlfriend confirmed to police when he offered an undercover officer $15 for sex.
Tim L. Peterson, 60, of Monona, who has a 2005 prostitution conviction, told police he had been at the nearby Pitcher’s Pub and was trying to find a buddy who lives in the neighborhood when he encountered an undercover officer and “just wanted to go somewhere and party.”
“We might buy that if you didn’t circle the block six or seven times,” Officer Chris Kobinsky said.
Under a city ordinance, police can arrest someone for just repeatedly driving through a known area of prostitution, as they did with Arturo Villalobos Solorio, 37, whom they observed circling the neighborhood numerous times over several hours.
“I’m surprised you don’t have the dogs and helicopters,” said Phillip T. Thomas, 18, who was arrested along with a 16-year-old companion about 12:30 a.m. Thomas told police the two thought it would be funny to drive up to a prostitute and ask what a specific sex act would cost.
Krause, who knows Thomas’ family from her work as a neighborhood officer, told him, “I think I could see your mom shaking her head now.”
“You know what my mom tells us?” he replied in a good-natured banter. “She gonna have you all over for a barbecue.”
Officer Sue’
Similarly, Krause has “a pretty good relationship” with the neighborhood prostitutes she knows by name and who know her as “Officer Sue.”
“Some of these women have been working for decades,” Krause said, adding that most were sexually abused as children and many have children in foster care. Others are pregnant.
One woman “appeared to be soliciting with a 2-year-old on her hip,” Droessler said. Another was six months pregnant when arrested.
“We’re trying to pull them up,” Krause said, adding that through Project Respect, the women can get into treatment, find housing and get jobs. “We’re trying to knit together that safety net.”
So far, Krause said, the effort “has made a little dent.” Among her success stories is a mother who was using drugs and was “in bad shape” before she got help and stopped prostituting.
Now, Krause said, “Every time her sister sees me, she hugs me. For her, it worked.”
A step forward, a step back
But for many others, it hasn’t at least not yet. During the last wave of the sting, Officer Lori Chalecki radioed to other officers: “I’ve got one of the real ones (prostitutes) working. I need someone to come out here and tell her ... to stay away.”
Then Chalecki recognized the woman as Therese N. Jackson, who had been arrested a few days earlier for violating her bail by being in the area. It was the same woman Krause had encountered on the sidewalk the week before.
As Krause frisked her before another officer took her to jail, Jackson, who wore only a bra under her winter coat, asked, “Why do guys keep (expletive) with me? All these people out here why do you keep (expletive) with me?”
Sandy Cullen is a reporter for the Wisconsin State Journal in Madison.
