A new billboard went up earlier this year on Main Street in Barrio Logan.
“Buyers of Sex - Beware,” it warns. “California law, AB 379, makes it illegal to loiter in an area for the purpose of purchasing sex.”
The law went into effect in January. The city of San Diego and Mayor Todd Gloria sponsored it. Proponents argued it was needed to combat sex trafficking.
On the left of the billboard, a man’s pale wrists are handcuffed. On the right, a faceless pale woman huddles in the shadows.
The images might not be the best reflections of how the new law is playing out in San Diego.
Police data show they are mostly citing Latino and Black men for this new crime. Only 12 of the 95 citations and arrests through July were of white men.
And while proponents argue the law is necessary to save trafficking victims, it may be harming non-trafficked sex workers trying to survive a dangerous industry and an increasingly costly economy.
Mayor Todd Gloria did not respond to KPBS’s questions sent to the city’s communications office.
For those in charge of enforcing the law, the line between trafficked and non-trafficked sex work isn’t so clear.
“Think of street level prostitution and human trafficking as hand in hand,” said Lieutenant Daniel Hall, who oversees San Diego Police Department’s enforcement of the law. “Chances are no one woke up and said, this is what I want to do with my life and try and become a street level prostitute. Like I stated before, chances are there was abuse involved, coercion involved.”
Hall said going after street prostitution makes San Diego less appealing to traffickers.
SDPD data only show a single citation under the general law against buying sex in the first half of this year.
Hall said that’s because this new law — against loitering with intent to buy — is a more efficient use of resources. It’s easier to bring cases to court.
“Since the beginning of this year, we have made a concerted effort to employ this new law to hopefully create a better and more efficient impact,” he said.
Of the 95 citations made through July, nearly all were in Barrio Logan and National City. It’s a mostly Latino and low-income area that surrounds Naval Base San Diego.
Hall said it’s a known area of prostitution. It’s also zoned for mixed use — businesses and homes sit side by side.
“You have kids trying to get to school that are seeing this. You have businesses that are trying to operate with this activity going on,” he said.
Police data show they cited mostly Latino and Black men, in proportions far greater than their share of San Diego’s population.
Hall said that’s not intentional.
“There's no identity of the driver of the vehicle that's known in advance. You just have the actions of the vehicle,” he said.
Those actions include circling around, or stopping to talk to someone who looks like they could be a sex worker.
“We find out who the race and the gender can be once we go up to the car,” he said.
Studies show no connection between race and the likelihood of being a sex client.
“Everybody wants to have sex work services. It’s not only specific Black or brown community,” said Jamie Arangure, a local sex worker.
She advocates for other workers through her organization Proyecto Trans Latinas.
She said this law targets San Diego’s most vulnerable workers.
“The streets is like more like dangerous but more cheaper,” she said.
It’s more dangerous, and cheaper, than finding clients online or operating out of motels, she said. Street workers are often desperate for income. Many don’t have access to traditional employment. Some, like Arangure, are trans immigrants.
“They want to find a job, but they've been discriminated, so they cannot pay the bills. And how they gonna survive? They need to eat,” she said. “They don't have any other options.”
Arangure said business has slowed since the law went into effect.
The law is endangering workers, too, said Minouche Kandel, Senior Staff Attorney in the LGBTQ, Gender & Reproductive Justice Project at the American Civil Liberties Union of Southern California.
“They cannot take the kinds of safety precautions that they need to, because their clients are worried they're going to get arrested, and are saying, ‘Get in the car, get in the car!’ so they might not have the time to check, ‘Oh, does the car open from the inside? Does it have a handle? Am I going to be trapped?’” she said.
Kandel points to a long history of loitering laws like this one being used in America to control minorities.
The first loitering law, enacted by the first California Legislature in 1850, enabled law enforcement to arrest Indigenous people “found loitering and strolling about” and place them into forced labor.
Post-Civil War Black Codes made it a crime to be “strolling about in idleness,” functioning to force newly freed Black Americans into low-wage labor and reemerging as Jim Crow era loitering and vagrancy ordinances.
Kandel said solicitation laws have also been used for decades to police sexual activity by LGBTQ+ people.
Sexual orientation and transgender identities aren’t always tracked in police data. They’re not present in the SDPD data released to KPBS for citations and arrests under this new law.
Anecdotally, Kandel said the last iteration of this law — loitering with intent to sell sex — was used so often against trans people it became known as the “walking while trans” law.
That law was repealed in 2022. An analysis by the ACLU of Southern California found that it was overwhelmingly enforced against Black women.
ACLU staff found that between 2019 and 2021, 79% of SDPD arrests for loitering with intent to sell sex were of Black people, despite them making up only 6% of the city’s population.
Before lawmakers passed the new law against loitering with intent to purchase sex, advocates warned the vagueness of “intent” opens the door for racial bias in policing.
For Kandel, the line between non-trafficked sex work and trafficked sex work matters deeply.
Not all sex work is trafficked sex work. This law targets potential clients, not traffickers.
Kandel shared a hypothetical.
“When we see trafficking in other industries, let's say, like, in agriculture or the garment industry,” she said, “we don't say, ‘Oh, we're gonna outlaw the manufacture of clothing, or we're gonna arrest people who are purchasing things at the Gap.’”
If the city’s goal is to reduce sex work, Kandel said research supports a public health approach: providing sex workers with housing, mental healthcare and paid job training. Not policing.
Ultimately, though, she sees sex work as an issue of autonomy.
“Two consensual adults engaging in sex work is, you know, having control over your body,” she said.
Arangure doesn’t think any law can get rid of an ancient industry.
“No matter how many bills they can make or any laws they’re going to do, is still going to be the sex work,” she said. “Because sex work is work.”
