I’ll be taking part in a virtual press conference that ESPLER (the Erotic Service Providers Legal Education and Research Project) will be holding later this morning at 11am Pacfic time to release the group’s new report on the practices of police departments and others. You and other members of the media and public are invited to attend. Details below or online at:
Love & Liberty,
((( starchild )))
···
View this email in your browser https://mailchi.mp/575b42426b50/californians-for-privacy-how-the-war-on-sex-work-is-stripping-your-privacy-rights?e=1aaca1de00
CALIFORNIANS FOR PRIVACY:
HOW THE WAR ON SEX WORK IS STRIPPING YOUR PRIVACY RIGHTSThe Erotic Service Provider Legal, Educational and Research Project (ESPLER)'s report, “Citizens for Privacy: How the War on Sex Work Is Stripping Your Privacy Rights”, sheds light on massive and far-reaching technology-related privacy violations deployed by county sheriff’s departments, district attorneys, and police departments to secure prostitution and loitering citations and/or arrests.
Join our online press conference at 11am PT on Tuesday February 28 for the launch of the report. Register in advance for the press conference at Webinar Registration - Zoom https://us02web.zoom.us/webinar/register/WN_gv2877CaSl-uyJEBzP5mEw or using the QR code below.
Citizens For Privacy: How the War on Sex Work Is Stripping Your Privacy Rights
Executive SummaryCalifornia law enforcement agencies are systematically violating civil liberties and privacy rights.
The excessive use of force by law enforcement agencies is well documented by horrific images and video recordings of beatings and murders.
Law enforcement’s excessive use of surveillance technology is much harder to perceive– deliberately so.
The Erotic Service Provider Legal, Educational and Research Project (ESPLER)'s report, “Citizens for Privacy: How the War on Sex Work Is Stripping Your Privacy Rights”, sheds light on massive and far-reaching technology-related privacy violations deployed by county sheriff’s departments, district attorneys, and police departments to secure prostitution and loitering citations and/or arrests.
ESPLER’s report is based on the responses to public records requests sent to 55 district attorneys, six probation departments, 25 sheriff’s departments, and 41 police departments in California for the period between January 1, 2020, to February 28, 2022.
Despite lack of cooperation and transparency from law enforcement (no agency provided all of the requested records as required by the CPRA), a pervasive pattern of privacy violations emerges from the partial responses:
The criminalization of prostitution creates an unprotected population–suspected sex workers and their potential clients–that law enforcement can test invasive surveillance techniques on.
Using the pretext of preventing human trafficking, California law enforcement agencies are utilizing invasive surveillance technologies like automated license plate readers (ALPRs) and pole cameras (which not only capture the vehicles and their occupants, but also file date, time, and location information without consent), phone ripping (the extraction and analysis of data pulled from an individual’s cell phone), and CellHawk (software that analyzes vast amounts of data collected by cell phone towers).
Local law enforcement also cynically invokes the commercial sexual exploitation of children to justify misspending taxpayer resources on expensive and invasive surveillance technologies, and routinely creates fictitious social media profiles to entrap citizens.
Police departments are building, and sharing with other agencies, databases with biometric profiles of individuals perceived to be sex workers or clients.
Because these invasive surveillance techniques are not capturing enough actual traffickers or rescuing enough traffic victims to meet the demand created by law enforcement’s trafficking narrative (the vast majority of these of cases are federal not local and were discovered through reports by the victim or their family), the law enforcement community has worked to broaden the definition of trafficking to inflate their perceived efficacy and justify their budgets.
Instead of helping or saving trafficking survivors, victims are being coerced to “consent” to warrantless searches. Police department training materials obtained through the California Public Records Act list numerous instances of police officers manipulating and deceiving sex trafficking survivors into engaging in sex acts with them, along with the admonishment for police officers not to have “too much fun”.
Training materials also use images of condoms as items to search for and document, a violation of state law that jeopardizes the health of sex workers and public health more broadly.
Every step of the process of enforcing prostitution laws disproportionately targets and egregiously harms minority and gender non-conforming communities. Training materials used by law enforcement agencies to secure prostitution and loitering citations and/or arrests rely on harmful racial stereotypes. Surveillance cameras indiscriminately record individuals and license plates in areas that often overlap with traditionally marginalized communities. Transgendered and gender-nonconforming people have been profiled, harassed, and arrested simply for existing in public spaces. The highly selective enforcement of prostitution laws illustrates the inherent bias of the system. For instance, in the City of Los Angeles (the LAPD is one of the only departments that provided information on the race of those arrested for prostitution) 42% of those charged were African-American despite L.A.’s population being only 9% Black.The Erotic Service Providers Legal, Education and Research Project (ESPLERP) is a diverse community-based coalition advancing sexual privacy rights through litigation, education, and research.
Erotic Service Providers Legal, Education and Research Project (ESPLERP)
https://gmail.us20.list-manage.com/track/click?u=64fada79cd30e22decf2177cb&id=c112c63fa1&e=1aaca1de00
https://gmail.us20.list-manage.com/track/click?u=64fada79cd30e22decf2177cb&id=b4769c53a7&e=1aaca1de00
https://gmail.us20.list-manage.com/track/click?u=64fada79cd30e22decf2177cb&id=208374d037&e=1aaca1de00
Copyright © 2023 ESPLERP, All rights reserved.
You are receiving this email because you opted in via our website.Our mailing address is:
ESPLERP
2261 Market St # 548
San Francisco, CA 94114-1600
