prostitutionsketch The subject line of the February 18 press release from the Long Beach Police Department is in all caps: ANTI-PROSTITUTION OPERATION NETS TEN ARRESTS.

As a civil libertarian, my immediate reaction to any headline like this is negative. The only individual actions I feel government should restrict are those that would directly impinge upon the freedoms of others. The state has no business proscribing and punishing my self-determining use of my body.

In my moral realm, murder is criminal; prostitution is not. And thus the spreadsheet of that realm finds resources that might have been taken up dealing with prostitution available to deal with murder.

In the sometime-dystopia that is the United States—except in certain parts of Nevada—prostitution falls into a legal category called vice crimes. Cast about for definitions of this term and you’ll come back with something like: A vice crime is one that offends the morals of the community.

The reality, though, is rather narrower. Murder offends the morals of the community, and yet it is not vice crime. So perhaps it’s closer to praxis to say that vice crime offends the moralistics of a community.

Vice-crime units are standard subsections of community law enforcement. Such is the case in Long Beach. And the police will tell you that their job is to enforce the law. There is a law against prostitution, so they enforce it.

But police will also name several more tangible reasons to enforce prostitution prohibitions. As stated in the press release, “Operations of this type have been due in large part to community concerns regarding quality of life issues in the area.”

According to Public Information Officer Lisa Massacani, these “prostitution abatement programs” are generally undertaken in response to resident and business-owner complaints. And Massacani expands on “quality of life issues” by referring to the general decline one tends to find in areas where prostitution takes place: blight, littering, narcotics, robbery, gang activity, etc. “Although some people may perceive prostitution as a victimless crime,” she says, “the impact on the community is detrimental.”

This kind of thinking, though, commits the logical fallacy of running together separate, distinguishable issues. Prostitution is “any lewd act between persons for money or other consideration” (California Penal Code Section 647(b)). Robbery, littering, and the like are crimes in their own rights—and can be prosecuted as such. So, too, is “engag[ing] in lewd or dissolute conduct in any public place or in any place open to the public or exposed to public view” CPC Section 647(a)). But prostitution is one thing, and one thing only: sex for monetary or similar gain.

To return to the “quality of life” claim, one might wonder whether this in itself isn’t positing a dubious causal connection, since presumably prostitution will generally take place in an area that already has “quality of life” issues.

However, complaints are complaints, for better or for worse. When police really do undertake these operations in response to complaints about this illegal activity, it’s hard to fault them. They enforce the law.

Still, in a state and city with public-service resources stretched so tight they’re warped into I-don’t-know-what shape, but not a good one, it’s fair to question how much effort police should spend on vice crimes which involve only consenting adults, since every dollar and officer-hour used on prostitution abatement programs is a dollar and hour that does not go toward abating violent crime and other pretty important shit.

And make no mistake: this is an ongoing expenditure. Announces the press release, “Long Beach Police will continue to conduct unannounced anti-prostitution operations throughout the city in an effort to end this nuisance activity and the negative effects it has on the community.”

But does prostitution more negatively affect the community than, say, littering? If you could wave a wand and eradicate either prostitution or littering, prostitution or graffiti, prostitution or texting while driving, is there really any doubt you’d be doing a greater service by in each case leaving prostitution alone and getting rid of the other?

There is no magic, of course, and neither you nor the police can completely stop any of these activities. But to realize that prostitution doesn’t as widely denigrate the quality of life in Long Beach as does litter or graffiti, and that prostitution cannot extirpate life as can texting while driving, should help us properly prioritize it. And when you’ve got less in the way of resources than you’d like, you damn well better be careful about your priorities.

Certain philosophical considerations may help us a bit here. For starters, there’s a logical absurdity at work in prostitution’s illegality. No one thinks a woman should be arrested if she asks a man for a dollar. And I’m not sure even the most vehement “sex is for marriage” religious folk are calling upon the cops to round up women who ask men if they’d like to have sex. But if a woman invites a man to have sex and asks for a dollar in exchange, somehow we’re supposed to believe that these two people have committed wrongs egregious enough to warrant carting them by force down to the police station and subjecting them to a legal system that may fine and imprison them, suspend their driver’s licenses, confiscate their cars, and even officially label them as sex offenders—even for a first offense (see CPC Section 647(b)).

Look, I’m no promoter of prostitution. I don’t relate to it. I’m not looking for anyone to consent to have sex with me because I’m paying her, and I can’t imagine wanting to make ends meet by renting out my body (despite the riches undoubtedly awaiting me there). But I am a promoter of libertarianism, of freedom—and of governmental resources being expended in the prioritized manner that will do the most good.

As such, I think it’s always worth question whether an expenditure of resources on vice crimes is the best thing the police can be doing. According to the LBPD, on average prostitution abatement operation uses up the services of ten officers over the course of two to six hours. That amounts to an average of 20 to 60 police hours each time one of these operations is conducted.

The question then becomes: Since there are a finite number of police hours per year, how many should be spent on prostitution abatement? And what do those hours really get us?

One thing we get for sure is giving the women caught up in those hours legal and financial troubles heaped on top of the difficulties they already have, difficulties that brought them to the streets in the first place. It might be one thing if these programs were abating the causes that brought the women to this lot in life. But that’s not what this is. These programs are designed to punish, to abate prostitution through punishment of the perpetrators.

“The law is the law” should not be the final word on this (or any) subject. We should consider all of the above, because in addition to the laws there are the pragmatic consequences of enforcing them, consequences not for mere abstractions, but for real people, those who are directly affected, as well as for those of us indirectly affected.

Every police hour spent in one place is an hour lost to everywhere else; and every punishment handed out is suffering for someone. We should be very circumspect about every bit of suffering we create, and every bit we fail to prevent.