Yesterday I wrote about the prostitution problem that seemed to be growing and taking over one residential street in San Francisco. Neighbors feel they can’t walk the streets at night or take their kids outside because prostitutes and aggressive pimps are everywhere. Today Fox News has a follow-up on that story.

“From the window right there, I’ll see three [people] ganging up on a girl,” one San Francisco resident told the Chronicle while pointing toward a bay window that overlooks an intersection. “They’ll be hitting her.”

“I call the cops; no one comes. There’s nothing I can do,” the unidentified woman said.

There’s a similar problem across the bay in Oakland where a local ABC affiliate recently reported on prostitutes soliciting business outside a Catholic grade school.

Parents and city officials tell the I-Team young women, some police believe may be trafficked, are walking outside St. Anthony’s K-8 grade school off E. 15th Street in Oakland at all hours of the day…

[Rosa] Vargas called the Oakland Police Department as she picked up her daughter from school requesting officers come by to check the area. Just outside her window, a young girl in black stilettos was seen walking across the street from the school.

“My daughter asked if I liked what the girl was wearing,” said Vargas. “I told her don’t turn around, don’t look. It’s not OK.”

Oakland City Councilman Noel Gallo says he gets frequent calls about the problem and what he sees is young girls, some clearly not adults, soliciting at all hours. These girls are clearly trafficking victims being controlled by pimps. He’s seen large vans with out of state plates drop off half a dozen women in the morning and then return to pick them up in the evening. The police are reportedly in the area almost every day but nothing seems to change. Oakland PD said that’s because of a new law supposedly designed to protect transgender people.

Previously, loitering with the intent to engage in prostitution was illegal. But SB 357, a bill introduced by State Sen. Scott Wiener repealed that law, in part because he found it to be disproportionately targeting transgender women.

“It allowed police officers to arrest a person, not based on what they did, but based solely on how a person looks,” said Sen. Wiener. “So an officer could arrest someone because they were wearing tight clothing, high heels, and extra lipstick.”

David wrote about this law last month. SB 357 didn’t take effect until Jan. 1 but Abigail Shrier reported that a shift could be felt from the moment the law was signed by Gov. Newsom last summer:

What shifted? The answer, the anti-trafficking advocates told me, is Senate Bill 357. Signed by Governor Gavin Newsom in July, the measure decriminalized loitering with the intent to engage in prostitution. The bill did not officially take effect until January 1 of this year; but, from the moment it became law back in July, these women say, the on-the-ground reality changed. “The minute the governor signed it, you started seeing an uptick on the streets,” Powell said. “And on social media, the pimps were saying: ‘You better get out there and work because the streets are ours.’”

The pimps were right: police stopped making arrests for crimes that would no longer be charged. The anti-loitering statute had provided the grounds for officers to question women and children whom they suspected might be trapped in a prostitution ring. “As a police officer, you need probable cause to stop and investigate,” Powell explained. “So if I have a law that says you can’t loiter in this area, with pasties and a G-string, flagging down cars, I could stop you for that because you’re loitering. But if I just say I’m stopping you because you look kind of young, that’s a little weak. So, it takes away a tool.” Without the statute, police hands were suddenly tied. Henceforth, questioning the girls—and potentially provoking a violent confrontation with pimps—came to seem a Pyrrhic gamble, one that California’s police officers would now avoid.

Prostitution remains illegal in California. But police have lost significant ground in the effort to contain it, women at anti-trafficking nonprofits in the Bay Area, San Diego, and Los Angeles all emphasized. “The only time they have the right to engage and investigate is if they hear the transaction going on between the buyer and the exploited person,” said Russell, who works closely with the Oakland Police Department. “Which means it would have to be a sting operation where there’s an undercover officer posing as an exploitive person who can actually hear the transaction. Any other scenarios would not be grounds for the police to get involved.”

Sergeant Marcos Campos of the Oakland Police Department told me that his force rescued 24 underage girls from the streets in 2021. But in 2022, that number dropped to 14—most from before the law was signed. “Since, I believe, July, when we were officially told it passed, we have been directed by the district attorney’s office to not arrest for [statute] 653.22, which is loitering,” he said.

You might wonder, at this point, who actually benefits from SB 357. Sergeant Campos wonders, too. Not the communities, he said, for whom a rise in trafficking brings more gun violence, which often attends prostitution. Not the sex workers, many of whom rely on police officers for help in escaping their pimps. “I think if anything, it probably helped the sex traffickers the most,” Campos said.

Again, all of this was supposedly done to protect trans people from being arrested unfairly. But the women walking the street in Oakland and those I wrote about yesterday in San Francisco aren’t trans for the most part. In other words the victims of trafficking mostly have nothing to do with State Sen. Wiener’s explanation for why the law exists. SB 357 amounts to forcing people to act like they can’t possibly tell the difference between prostitutes and a trans woman walking to work.

ABC 7 confronted Sen. Wiener with video of the prostitutes in the street and he denied his big, SB 357, had anything to do with it as you’ll see in the latter part of this report. It seems clear that Wiener has no interest in whether his law may have had unintended consequences. Once again, the police and the people who live in California are being ignored by the progressive legislators who are certain they know better.