VILLAGE VOICE: One block north of the boardwalk in Coney Island, a white van is parked on the windswept block of Surf Avenue, between West 22nd and West 23rd Streets. Just outside the van stands a young woman wearing a teal hoodie, her auburn hair pulled back into a tight bun with a few loose strands escaping around her ears, and an anxious expression. Jennifer Gonzalez-Hermides, 32, is a prostitute, and she is here to pick up free condoms. But there is a problem. “The first time,” she says, “was right over here on Surf Avenue. They asked me to take out what was in my pocket, and I had one in there.” Sweat glistens on her pale forehead. “They arrested me.”
Gonzalez-Hermides is talking about the cops, and her case is hardly unique. Another prostitute, a 33-year-old who goes by the street name “Tiny,” says she was arrested on Surf Avenue last year after an undercover police offer asked her, “What do you have in your pockets?” She had two condoms and was arrested for “loitering for the purposes of prostitution.” She says that several of her friends have recently had similar experiences. As for Gonzalez-Hermides, she was arrested two subsequent times, in 2009 and 2010, for prostitution-related offenses. Both times, she says, her condoms were confiscated when she was arrested, and both times she pleaded guilty. While she was serving time after her second arrest, her husband died of a drug overdose.
“This is a huge problem,” says Isaac Hernandez, an outreach worker with the Foundation for Research on Sexually Transmitted Diseases (FROST’D), a Harlem-based harm-reduction nonprofit. Hernandez has been driving the white van to its parking spot on Surf Avenue for the past 12 years to distribute food, clean syringes, and the condoms that his group receives from the Department of Health. He says that undercover police routinely park nearby—he points out their van down the street. There is no law that says the possession of condoms is illegal, of course, and yet NYPD officers routinely use the possession of condoms as arrest evidence for charges of prostitution or loitering for the purposes of prostitution… (more)
EDITOR: This occurs when the criminal justice system disregars the public health system. When they work together, as they should, common sense prevails. Mayor Michael Bloomberg deserves a swift kick in the posterior for allowing the police to exploit public health efforts.
