New Orleans decriminalized sex work for crime victims | News

The city council of New Orleans passed a city regulation on Thursday that makes it easier for sex workers to report crimes without fear of prostitution.

The unanimous vote was a victory for supporters who worked on behalf of sex workers and transgender people, although some business owners feared that this would tighten cases of prostitution in certain parts of the city.

“It is a pretty precarious job,” said Natalie Rupp, Executive Director of the Trans Income Project, which is committed to transgender people and sex workers. “We are more at risk than many other attacks and different other crimes. This calculation should at least give us recourse if something happens to us.”

In New Orleans East, Peter Gardner, President of the Chef Downman Business Association, and other business owners who represented by the association, support the protection that the Law Present for Victims provides for crime, but this fears that this will be practically an attempt to contain prostitution near her jobs near her jobs for years.

“I theoretically agree with what they do, but I also live in reality,” said Gardner, adding that the business owners have already paid around 10,000 US dollars a month to patroy police officers from New Orleans and other private security officers in the region and have little to do with the money to eliminate the activity.

He said the police had trouble tackling the problem in his neighborhood, and his fear is that this regulation will make it even more difficult for the police to answer concerns about prostitution in the community.

The regulation sponsored by Council member Helena Moreno and Lesli Harris does not legalize prostitution directly. But it makes crime victims and witnesses against arrest and local persecution of prostitution and advertising or lying around in connection with sex work. This would apply to the police department of New Orleans and with the support of this agency and the support of the district prosecutor of Orleans Parish Jason Williams. But Attorney General Liz Murrill, who works with this office to pursue arrests by the State Police in New Orleans, said that every regulation that is more permissible than the state law that prostitution would never be decriminalized.

The police would have excluded the confiscation of most of the property of sex workers, and courts could not issue sanctions if sex workers violated the conditions of release or probation before the procedure. The police were also unable to arrest people based on outstanding state arrest warrants in connection with prostitution, local, state and state crime. Sex workers could still be arrested under federal and outside the state.

Rupp, who interviewed the dozens of sex workers and helped the draft law based on the concerns that arise from these conversations, understood the concerns of the business owners and others, but said that it was about promoting security, no longer sex work.

“This is not a complete decriminalization,” said Rupp. “This only offers a fundamental level of legal recourse in the course of a crime. This is not an open season for sex workers.

Rupp said she hoped to bring the legislative template to other cities to determine whether protection in neighboring cities can be expanded, and plans to finally bring the bill to legislation, in the hope that it becomes a state law.

Further information on this developing history.