Watching a Horrifying Crisis in Los Angeles, the New York Times...Almost Kind Of Sees It

Long and detailed story in the New York Times Magazine, today, about “the Blade,” the long stretch of a South Los Angeles boulevard that serves as the site of a shocking amount of child prostitution. In recent years, the story warns, “officers had seen the magnitude of child sex trafficking explode.”

The Times reporter embeds with LAPD vice officers who try to rescue minors from their pimps, and she watches the horror of that daily grind. Sample observation:

In the shadows, Figueroa had become more violent. The younger the girl, the more customers would pay, which meant preteens were often being robbed and assaulted by groups of older girls trying to make quota. The traffickers who governed the street were worse. Tonight Ana was waving at cars in front of a tire shop when a trafficker pulled up on the wrong side of the street, climbed out and beat one of the girls near Ana over the head with a pistol. The girl had probably looked at him wrong, Ana decided. She knew better than to intervene.

Watching 12 year-olds get beaten by their pimps on the sidewalk, reporter Emily Baumgaertner Nunn suddenly finds some things that she can’t quite see, hazy things waaaay off in the distance. Here’s a description of a problem cops are having as they try to intervene:

Their jobs grew even more challenging when California repealed the law allowing the police to arrest women who loitered with the intent to engage in prostitution. The repeal, known as SB 357, was intended to prevent profiling of Black, brown and trans women based on how they dressed. But when it was implemented in January 2023, the effect was that uniformed officers could no longer apprehend groups of girls in lingerie on Figueroa, hoping to recover minors among them.

Who repealed the law? California did. Spontaneously, as a geographic area. The mountains and the deserts decriminalized loitering with intent.

Back on earth, SB 357 was authored by Senator Scott Wiener, a consistent advocate for laws that make sex between adults and minors less risky for the adults. Wiener is extremely pleased that 12 year-olds in California can get their abortions, contraception, and STD medications without mommy and daddy finding out:

By the most remarkable coincidence, Wiener’s bill made it much harder for police to stop child sex trafficking. The bill was signed into law by Governor Gavin Newsom. Wiener is now running for Congress, and Newsom is pretending that he hasn’t decided yet if he’s going to run for president in 2028. So start there: This is a policy choice made by Senator Scott Wiener, legislative Democrats as a whole, and Governor Gavin Newsom. Child prostitution exploded into a crisis when they intervened.

Now, watch the fog descend again:

As trafficking grew, the means to deal with it shrank. In 2021, the Police Department’s central human-trafficking unit was disbanded following budget cuts, leaving each division fewer resources to tackle the problem. According to Navarro, the 77th Street Division was supposed to have six investigators at Armendariz’s rank in its vice unit. Instead, she was the only one.

The police budget was cut, and the central sex-trafficking detective section was disbanded, leaving far fewer police detectives working on sex crimes involving children. Suddenly, one day, people in Los Angeles city government came into work and found that the budget had changed itself.

Why did the Los Angeles police budget suddenly shrink itself without apparent human intervention in 2021? Huge mystery, but let’s try to penetrate the haze:

Ahh, 2021. The LAPD lost tens of millions of dollars and a specialized sex crimes unit during the height of the fashionable “defund the police” trend, because George Floyd. True justice for Saint George Floyd can be found in the wonderfully progressive development of a bunch of pre-teens on Figueroa Street being pistol-whipped by their pimps. Where did the cash go? To the “Care First” agenda, to social justice programs like “universal income programs.”

Councilman Curren Price, who is running for reelection in 2022, called the reprogramming of the LAPD funds part of a “continuing down payment in our quest for equity and reimagining public safety.”

So a series of policy choices — deliberate, intended, publicly debated and well-covered in the news — have led to a crisis on Figueroa Street, but the story doesn’t quite manage to cover the politics of those choices.

Remarkably, a story about the sex trafficking of minors makes no mention at all of two of the ugliest recent contests in the California legislature, which both centered on precisely that topic.

First, Republican Senator Shannon Grove’s SB 14 made the trafficking of minors a serious felony, strikable under the state’s Three Strikes law. But Grove had to shame the bill into law, launching a blistering publicity campaign after legislative Democrats tried to keep the thing from a vote.

More recently, Democratic Assemblywoman Maggy Krell, a former prosecutor, introduced AB 379, which made the solicitation of a minor for sex a felony. But again, the bill was shamed into law with a publicity campaign after Krell’s Democratic colleagues tried to smother it in committee:

Krell aside, you have to back California Democrats into a corner to make them support laws that restrict the sexualization of childhood. They don’t want to.

And so on. On the list of things not mentioned in the story, child sex trafficking took off in Los Angeles at the moment when the Soros-backed social justice DA, George Gascon, was passionate about not charging people with crimes.

Changes in the law that made it much harder to detain prostitutes and question them about their age, police budget cuts that eliminated specialized sex crimes units, sharp reductions in the prosecution of street-level crime…and then a child prostitution crisis on the streets. Massive surprise. Who could have guessed?

So there’s the answer to the question the New York Times asks: “Can Anyone Rescue the Trafficked Girls of L.A.’s Figueroa Street?” You can rescue those girls if you can shove California Democrats out of the way. They are the cause.