Mayor Adams' Office To Oregonian: "Stop Helping Pimps."

Portland Mercury:

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• Jon Sperry

</div>Mayor Adams usually uses his massive email newsletter list to tout the city's newest green-sustainability-eco experience or publicize his take on city council measures. But this morning, his office sent out a lengthy email to citizens slapping the Oregonian for its recent article debunking Portland's reputation for human trafficking.

The letter says that the article, “Story of ‘Pornland’ is a Myth”, is irresponsible, misleading, and "minimizes the gravity of Portland's human trafficking problem, and unfortunately emboldens pimps and johns." Serious charges to levy at a paper.

The issue that reporter Nikole Hannah Jones keys in on in the story is that there are very, very few hard number showing that Portland is a hub for sex trafficking. Instead of having arrest records or case files to back of the reputation, the mayor's office, police, and victims' advocacy groups rely on anecdotal evidence from police officers who say they see about two cases a week of child sex trafficking in Portland. That's not two prosecutions a week or two arrests a week, but just officers who work on sex crimes cases reporting back that they've talked with two underage people a week that they believe are being forced to work as prostitutes.

As Adams' letter notes, "the data is hard to validate because the victims, mostly young girls, fear for their lives if they do approach authorities, or call for help. That imperfect data doesn’t justify inaction. If anything, it justifies a redoubling our efforts, making it easier and safer for victims to get help and law enforcement to take down criminals."

Asked about the reliability of anecdotal evidence on these issues, police spokeswoman Kelli Sheffer said, "There's no way to get hard numbers on cases because cases are hard to make. It's not about statistics. It's about knowing that we have a problem here and addressing it."

This back-and-forth from the mayor, police, and Oregonian leaves me with these questions:
— Clearly the heinous crime of underage sex trafficking is present in Portland, but to what extent? Is it more of a problem here than in other places?
— Does whether we're a "hub" or not even matter? If there's even one girl a month, let's say, who's forced into prostitution in the city, should we devote major resources and money to helping her?
— Should city hall rely on the police officer's anecdotal evidence to guide public policy on prostitution, or should they have to get hard numbers on prostitution (through more prosecutions or arrests) to prove there's a problem?

Public defender Chris O'Connor notes that sometimes the police accounts of prostitution are unreliable. He points to a case heard in court (pdf) this November where a judge declared that it was not acceptable for Portland officers to assume that a woman was a prostitute because she was walking along 82nd Ave, wearing jeans and a sweater, making eye contact with traffic, and got into a car.

"You cannot run a system of law and order on anecdotes," says O'Connor. "Either the police are going after prostitution and following it up the chain, in which case there are hard numbers, or the anecdotes are unreliable and that's why they're failing to prosecute."

Mayor Adams' full email below the cut.

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