--- title: The Prostitution Paradox: How One County is Targeting Men Who Buy Sex | TIME description: Since 2009, Cook County has been cracking down on sex buyers and adding social services for prostituted women.Now, they're coaching law enforcement from around the country to take this new approach. canonical: https://time.com/video/ZYwLKQ32/ og:title: The Prostitution Paradox: How One County is Targeting Men Who Buy Sex og:description: Since 2009, Cook County has been cracking down on sex buyers and adding social services for prostituted women.Now, they're coaching law enforcement from around the country to take this new approach. og:url: https://time.com/video/ZYwLKQ32/ og:image: https://cdn.jwplayer.com/v2/media/ZYwLKQ32/poster.jpg?width=720 og:type: video.other twitter:card: summary_large_image twitter:title: The Prostitution Paradox: How One County is Targeting Men Who Buy Sex twitter:description: Since 2009, Cook County has been cracking down on sex buyers and adding social services for prostituted women.Now, they're coaching law enforcement from around the country to take this new approach. twitter:image: https://cdn.jwplayer.com/v2/media/ZYwLKQ32/poster.jpg?width=720 --- # The Prostitution Paradox: How One County is Targeting Men Who Buy Sex > Sponsored content. 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They are at time.com/newsletters and are separate from a paid subscription. ## Video: The Prostitution Paradox: How One County is Targeting Men Who Buy Sex [Watch (HLS stream): The Prostitution Paradox: How One County is Targeting Men Who Buy Sex](https://cdn.jwplayer.com/manifests/ZYwLKQ32.m3u8) (8:09)  _Published 2015-08-18. Since 2009, Cook County has been cracking down on sex buyers and adding social services for prostituted women.Now, they're coaching law enforcement from around the country to take this new approach._ --- Jul 27, 2023 6:39 PM UTC --- ## More From This Series [All Videos](https://time.com/video/) [Hawaii Just Became the First State to Make It Easier to Erase Prostitution Convictions](/video/pVhwrSlO/) ### Hawaii Just Became the First State to Make It Easier to Erase Prostitution Convictions [Patriots Owner Robert Kraft Charged With Soliciting Prostitution as Part of Florida Sex Trafficking Crackdown](/video/ljspZLCW/) ### Patriots Owner Robert Kraft Charged With Soliciting Prostitution as Part of Florida Sex Trafficking Crackdown [Inside a Sex Sting: Cracking Down on the "Johns"](/video/8mDDcZpw/) ### Inside a Sex Sting: Cracking Down on the "Johns" --- ## Transcript Sergent Chris Fisher from Dayton, how are you sir? Did you get the bad guy? [ INAUDIBLE ] Yeah, he's in handcuffs right now. Well that's what I'm talking about! How many arrests is it total, more than 60? This guy is number 62. 38 Johns Johns from the internet. Six prostitutes. And three we've got for felony, promoting prostitution, in other words those are pimps. [ INAUDIBLE ] [ SOUND ] All right, it's a go on the silver car east bound. [ SOUND ] [ MUSIC ] I am a survivor of Trafficking, took me about five years in my recovery process to realize that I indeed had manager, ****, trafficker involvement, because I thought they were boyfriends. There was a time I did not sleep for three weeks. These parties, or these sex and drug parties, 24 hours a day, seven days a week. For so many reasons, I should be dead. The rapes, the beatings, I think kidnapped one time. And one day God sent angels with handcuffs to rescue me. The sex trade is money driven, and there are people out there who are making money off of it. People don't see the horrible abuse. We see it everyday. I'm Michael Anton, I'm a deputy chief for the Cook County Sheriff's police and I run the special investigations unit. Hey Bill. We do two types of operations. We do a hotel operation, and we'll street operations things. We do the hotel operation yesterday. We call it a reversal. We'll rent a couple of rooms, we'll put our undercover officers in the room, we'll post ads. And then the Johns or the buyers will answer the ads. [ MUSIC ] [ SOUND ] [ INAUDIBLE ] [ MUSIC ] Before an arrest can be made, there needs to be an agreement of anything of value in exchange for sex. It doesn't have to be money. We've had people offer our under covers a bottle of wine, a bag of donuts, so it can be anything of value. That's what the line is. A lot of the other jurisdictions, to my knowledge, are concentrating on the actual women for prostitution. They're not addressing the Johns as much. We arrest about the same amount of Johns as we do the prostitutes, at this point. [ MUSIC ] [ SOUND ] We've arrested people from every race, every religion. It ranges from young to old, economic, race doesn't matter. There's no stereotype except we're men. Did you know that it was illegal to [ UNKNOWN ] a prostitute? [ CROSSTALK ] Yeah, I mean, but I don't know I never have, like, I don't know how to explain it. When everybody says it's my first time, it's not true and you can tell. I'd say about 99 % of the people are lying. When they come into the room, they know how to act, they know what to say to our undercovers. You can tell. They just don't get it. They don't see what it took for that woman to get to where she's at. The johns say that criminal attention matters to them and that they don't want to be arrested, they don't want to be convicted of trying to buy sex, because they have jobs to lose, families to lose, and a community that may be upset with them. So when law enforcement pays attention to them, buying sex is deterred. A community will not have prostitution problems if it didn't have so many people in the community willing to buy sex. A lot of people don't have access to livable wage work, and that's one of the main motivations for entering the sex trade. Criminalizing people, or trying to eradicate one choice, are not going to create other options and other choices. You're nervous and scared cause you don't know what's going on. You have to explain everything to you Is there something better out there? I don't know, but I've worked in this kind of thing since probably '98. And from '98 to 2009, a little over 10 years, it was a revolving door. It was the same thing. We're arresting people 30, 40, 50 times. It doesn't make sense. There had to be a change and it's the change. What we do now is we still take them into custody for prostitution, soliciting a sex act. But we'll write them a ticket. We write them the citation, 500. We tow their car, which is another 500, and they have to pay for the tow fee. 60 % of that money that they pay goes to our women's justice program and 40 % goes to the juvenile justice. And the women's justice program, what they do is they talk to these women when we arrest them. And they try to get them services and help. And they try to get them off the street. That's really what the goal is. [ MUSIC ] Someone who is going to rape someone or rob someone are not going to be deterred Whereas the average Joe who has a few traffic violations might be deterred by that. I don't feel like a victim of the industry. I feel like a victim of current policy and legislation. There are less clients, but there are now more dangerous clients. People who are engaging in survival sex work have a lot fewer options and have a lot less power to say no, to turn down a client that they get a bad feeling about. Demand use of a condom. I hear it every day. It's a victimless crime. She wants to do it. Nobody's forcing her to do it. They don't see the psychological issues, they don't see drug problems, substance abuse, domestic violence. They don't see that, but we see that a lot. We talk to these women after we arrest them and that's what we see. We have had different departments come and do ride alongs with us just to see how we do it. I think it is catching on. Again it's a different mind set. Even if you don't care about prostitutes, or prostitution, or you don't care about the problem. Sometimes if you look at the bottom line. If you get a person out of the life style right now, 2, or 3, or 4, or 5 years down the line You'll save money on incarceration, on courts, they'll understand that. We want to see an end to any criminal system response to prostituted people. We don't advocate any kind of arrest or detention situation at all. The best strongest most effective way to Support prostituted and trafficked people, is to create community based services that are designed and run by survivors. That don't require any institutionalized connection or coercion to become involved in. And that is the way that prostituted and trafficked people are gonna have meaningful options. And I don't believe that we need to detain them to have that happen. Has it worked? That's the big question. It's worked in the limited sense that we haven't seen a repeat offender. Now does that mean they've come out of the sex trade business, or are they just getting better? Are they not going to this certain website, are they not going to these areas? You know what I mean? That's difficult, I don't know if that's a fact. I think time will tell. 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