[KirinDave]

What's most vile about police enforcement around prostitution is that it focuses quite proactively on punishing all the wrong people.

Women with few choices who need help? Proactive arrest. ESPECIALLY if they're women of color.

Free, safe people who are willingly selling a service to customers? Why, that's a crime!

But pimps? Well that's just way too much work. I still remember an Oakland cop I talked to telling me, "The best way to stop a pimp is to arrest his girls, and then he has no money and gets in trouble with his boss."

It's a truly sad state of affairs when the literal slavers are the people law enforcement feels least inclined to catch, instead focusing on punishing people who for the most part are harmless (often with profound racial biases in enforcement, e.g., the "black women in a parked car with one man is suspicious" policy in many major cities).

[Pxtl]

The problem is that anti-pimping laws have impeded prostitutes' ability to operate safely without pimps.

Most anti-pimping laws ban any kind of profiting from the proceeds of prostitution. So if a prostitute tries to arrange an apartment to work out of, or hire a legitimate bodyguard, the law sees those people as pimps. As a result, she ends up having to work with a criminal that offers protection and a workplace: IE a pimp.

[KirinDave]

I'm pretty sure that's a problem, but not THE problem.