De Blasio says sex workers should not be arrested
/
Family and friends of Layleen Polanco speak at a rally following her death in solitary confinement in June 2019. Eagle file photo by Phineas Rueckert
By David Brand
NYPD officers should not arrest people who perform sex work, Mayor Bill de Blasio said Wednesday, days after the city agreed to pay $5.9 million to the family of a woman who died while jailed on Rikers Island as a result of a two-year-old prostitution charge.
De Blasio explained his perspective on sex work decriminalization when asked about the case of Layleen Polanco, a transgender woman who was arrested in 2017 after agreeing to perform oral sex on an undercover NYPD officer in exchange for $200. Two years later, she was arrested for assault and held on Rikers based on the 2017 prostitution charge. She died in a solitary confinement cell in June 2019.
“To the question of whether sex workers should be arrested, my broad answer is no,” de Blasio said. “The people who are organizing and profiting from that sex work are the people who should be arrested.”
“Anyone who's exploiting folks who do sex work, those are the people we should be arresting,” he added.
De Blasio called Polanco’s death “horrible” and said the city would review NYPD protocols around sex worker arrests.
Polanco, he said, “never should have been in jail and she never should have been in solitary.”
De Blasio’s perspective on sex work seems in line with the so-called “Nordic Model,” a policy that makes it illegal to buy sex but does not criminalize the person selling sex. The model is in use in Canada and several European countries.
Critics of the Nordic Model say criminalizing johns drives sex work into the shadows and makes people who sell sex vulnerable to assault, rape, theft and murder.
“The Nordic Model stigmatizes and criminalizes many parts of the sex work industry and continues to put people who engage in sex work at grave risk,” said Jillian Modzeleski, a senior staff attorney at Brooklyn Defender Services.
“Real change means disbanding the Vice Squad, which has engaged in abusive policing for decades, ending arrests for sex work, and ultimately decriminalizing the sale and purchase of sexual services, and it must come now.”
