Disband the NYPD virtueless vice squad
As New York City’s budget talks kick into high gear, lawmakers have a choice to make when it comes to true public safety. They can meaningfully fund services for sex workers, massage workers and trafficking survivors, or they can continue business as usual, spending $18 million a year on the NYPD’s vice squad.
This NYPD unit is rife with corruption and malfeasance. On the campaign trail, many City Council members and even Mayor Adams supported disbanding it. Now they must live up to those campaign promises.
Vice is tasked with policing socalled quality-of-life offenses that include consensual sex work, massage work, narcotics use and gambling. In reality, vice officers have far too often weaponized their badges to sexually exploit and assault sex workers, while entrapping and harassing alleged clients. Former vice officers have even admitted they were motivated by earning overtime. One sergeant boasted, “The undercover can have a nice, cold beer and watch a girl take her clothes off — and he’s getting paid for it.”
Almost 90% of those targeted for sex work by vice officers are people from marginalized groups. For years, young queer workers, transgender workers, Black and Brown streetbased workers, noncitizens and workers in massage parlors have complained vice officers steal their money, coerce sexual favors, mock them — and ultimately arrest them anyway.
Vice’s abuse is also costly. In the past 15 years, the city has paid nearly $1 million, mostly to men of color, that were falsely arrested and prosecuted for patronizing sex workers. Vice’s misconduct also cost the city nearly $500,000 for targeting gay men.
Human rights organizations and hundreds of researchers note that vice-style policing of sex workers and their clients only drives the sex trade further underground, contributes to the spread of sexually-transmitted diseases, isolates workers and makes consensual sex work more dangerous. The arrests and criminal convictions fueled by vice also make obtaining housing, education and employment outside of sex work much harder. This only perpetuates cycles of poverty and makes survivors of trafficking who have been arrested and prosecuted more vulnerable to exploitation.
Efforts to reform and rebrand vice have failed. In 2017, the unit allegedly changed its mission from targeting sex workers to preventing trafficking. However, that same year, Yang Song, a 38-year-old noncitizen sex worker and massage worker, fell nearly 40 feet to her death during a vice raid. She had filed a complaint against one of the raiding officers for sexually assaulting her at gunpoint during a prior raid. The NYPD never took corrective action.
That same year, Officer Michael Golden was suspended after being accused using his position to get sexual favors from sex workers in massage parlors. The next year, a former vice officer, Ludwig Paz, was convicted for running an exploitative prostitution ring worth over $2 million with the help of fellow cops.
We are former sex workers, and we organize with many current and former sex workers, massage workers and survivors of trafficking. In spite of vice’s abuse, workers have formed organizations and collectives focused on harm reduction and providing resources. These efforts ramped up during the worst of the pandemic, and kept many workers alive. Imagine how much good they could do with even half of the $18 million budgeted for vice, and the additional taxpayer money wasted on overtime and lawsuits.
Funding must be repurposed to serve the communities that have suffered most from vice’s reign of terror. This includes increased funding for LGBTQ+ economic opportunity programs, particularly for gay, lesbian and transgender runaway and homeless young people, who are estimated to be seven times more likely to sell sex to survive.
The city also needs to fund peer-led outreach to massage workers, streetbased sex workers, and trafficking survivors in multiple languages. Peers should be used for noncarceral responses to community complaints, and they can also connect workers with competent mental and medical care, as well as legal assistance for housing, immigration, and wage theft.
The city should create widely-publicized hotlines led by peers who speak multiple languages that connect sex workers and trafficking survivors to harm-reduction services and support.
To better combat trafficking, we need to invest in the people who are most vulnerable. A lack of resources makes people more susceptible to becoming trafficked, and it makes it more difficult for people to leave coercive and exploitative situations. The city needs to meaningfully invest in noncompulsory services and supports for survivors of intimate partner violence, including housing. Uninsured workers and noncitizens should not be excluded from any of these services.
Budgets are moral documents. Mayor Adams and the Council have a moral imperative to keep communities safe. They must fulfill their campaign promises to disband vice and invest in services for sex workers, massage workers, and survivors of trafficking.