Give this plan the red light
In these woke days of pulling one’s punches, or rather pausing one’s punches, while you decide what your moral position is, I wondered what the politically correct stance is over plans by the Amsterdam council to relocate the city’s prostitutes.
Apparently the legendary and ancient practice of red light district prostitutes sitting in windows to beckon customers inside has attracted too many drunk and rowdy tourists.
The council says that, in order to protect and keep the prostitutes and inner-city residents safe, they have come up with a couple of innovative ideas to relocate the ladies and men of the night. What’s the world coming to? I mean, is there nothing sacred?
Sorry to think in cliche´ s but, apart from the Anne Frank House and the Van Gogh museum, tourists go to Amsterdam for three things – to ride bikes, smoke dope legally in cafes, and to take a walk on the wild side of the red district.
The two choices the council has come up with are a) a sex hotel or b) an erotic centre, the latter sounding decidedly un-erotic. But that’s the language of councils. If this were local city councils trying to relocate prostitutes from one edifice to another, they would call it an erotic ‘‘hub’’.
The Amsterdam erotic centre would not only offer sex; clients and tourists lured to the approved area could also visit beauty, hair and tanning salons.
Why not have your nether regions waxed before a pleasure-of-the-flesh sesh, and while you’re at it, offer up a tanned bod and coiffured head to the prostitute. After all, nothing’s too good for the workers.
Amsterdam’s green mayor, Femke Halsema, acknowledges that sex work is normal and therefore shouldn’t be banished or herded into the outskirts of the city, where it would be difficult to supervise.
The sex complex could also include a bed and breakfast for prostitutes, a sex theatre, and cafes. And the hotel would have indoor windows from behind which, I presume, the sex worker could safely show off their wares and talents. I do hope, in the interests of health and safety, that the windows have anti-drool coatings to keep them clear from the sudden escape of bodily fluids.
I can’t think of a better example of partypooping. Instead of relocating the prostitutes and taking all the fun out of having a naughty experience, surely it is the intoxicated tourists the council should be concentrating on.
Perhaps grossly intoxicated tourists running amok in the red light district should be treated like European soccer hooligans, who have to surrender their passports.
Possession is nine-tenths of the law, and the prostitutes have a historic right to keep their spot and sit behind windows in the red light district. Their street theatre is the eighth wonder of the world, up there with the Great Wall of China, the Colosseum, and the Taj Mahal.
Surely tourists would feel short-changed if they had to visit prostitutes behind indoor windows in a controlled area where they were being encouraged to have their tickets clipped for add-on experiences of grooming and meals.
Is it too much to ask to see the prostitutes in their natural habitat, rather than have the sanitised municipal-minded version served up cold and clinical?
There is something broken deep down in the thinking of this do-gooder scheme. If it goes ahead and the sex centre and hotel becomes a reality, tourist numbers will drop and other things will droop.
Talk about a recipe for erectile dysfunction.
Four days before New Zealand’s most deadly gun attacks, my opinion column on police carrying guns was published. In this letter to Canterbury District Commander John Price, I recalled the prevalence of guns in my American childhood and argued that, despite the low-level shootout that had triggered the temporary arming of Christchurch cops, we should be wary of the small steps that normalise the use of firearms.
Then the March 15 massacre happened. Guns were instantly everywhere. Armed cops from all over the country came to Christchurch in the police’s remarkable response. Guns were visible outside shopping malls, throughout the central city and hospital area, and Al Noor and Linwood mosques.
We started getting used to the sight of firearms. At public gatherings to commemorate the tragedy, police faced the crowds carrying rifles, pacing back and forth with backs to the stage, eyes scouring the masses.
I was spending more time at Al Noor mosque, where several armed officers were posted for months. It was weird having a chat to a friendly cop at the mosque gate as he clutched his semi-automatic rifle.
Many Muslims felt a greater sense of security with this heightened visibility of firearms – there was nothing else to do but respect that.
But for many other New Zealanders, it made us nervous, jittery, as if something really awful was about to happen again. It eroded our inherent trust in other people, it poisoned the peace we hope for in our city streets.
Our nerves in the aftermath of the mosque attacks may have somehow picked up on what social scientists call the ‘‘weapons effect’’. When people see or have access to a gun, their behaviour becomes more aggressive.
A review of more than 50 published studies reported that just the sight of weapons increases aggression in both angry and non-angry individuals. In one study, drivers with guns in their cars were significantly more likely to follow another vehicle too closely, make obscene gestures, or both. In other studies, having a gun was associated with more aggressive thoughts and more hostile views of the world.
Cops, like the rest of us, have brains that link weapons with aggression too, and despite the firearms training that is supposed to mitigate the risk of an armed police officer getting trigger happy, there have been too many deaths – about 40 – in the past decade from police gunfire.
Jude 1:20
When people see or have access to a gun, their behaviour becomes more aggressive.
One of these was just two weeks ago, when a Tauranga man was shot dead by police after he riddled a police car with bullets.
Another was David Cerven, the unarmed 21-yearold killed in 2015 after pretending to wield a gun in Myers Park, Auckland.
Barrister Nicholas Taylor, a specialist in firearms law, said the scene immediately before the Cerven shooting was chaotic, and that ‘‘there was a cowboyish attitude, the talk of ‘tooling up’, and the spraying of rounds’’.
Of course, most trained police officers aren’t like this, but if lethal options of policing are instantly at hand, they are more likely to be used instead of the many other policing tactics, such as negotiations, dogs, handcuffing or other restraints.
In their response to the police’s new armed response teams, those roaming, gunned-up units now being trialled in three districts, researchers from Victoria University’s Institute of Criminology laid out the evidence against this approach.
Mutual escalation was one – the idea that when police carry guns, criminals think they need to as well, resulting in more shootouts. The more criminals respond violently, the more police think they need to arm themselves. And on it goes.
There is no better example of this than the US, where 36,000 Americans die each year from gun violence, generating a growing call for removing firearms from the police altogether.
But the researchers argue that ‘‘disarming an armed police force is much more difficult than not allowing arms to be routinely used in the first place. Once the genie is out of the bottle, it is hard to put back in’’.
These experts concluded that based on the evidence, ‘‘cops in cars with guns makes communities less safe, not more’’.
March is nearly here. We’ll commemorate the 51 lives lost and hundreds of lives forever damaged due to the accessibility of guns. We’ll reflect on the changes made since that bloody day, including new restrictions on gun ownership and perhaps a national firearms registry if the Arms Legislation Bill is passed, as planned, by March 15.
Maybe for a few days police will routinely carry guns to help ensure our Muslim communities feel better protected over the anniversary weekend.
And hopefully, we’ll remind ourselves that we cannot, step by step, cop by cop, justify having guns as a part of the experience of living in New Zealand.