Project Aimed at Reducing Street Prostitution Honored by Police Executive Research Forum

BUFFALO, N.Y. -- A unique, cross-disciplinary research project involving the University at Buffalo and the Buffalo Police Department (BPD) aimed at reducing street prostitution has received recognition from a national police group.

The project, which partnered the University Community Initiative's Regional Community Policing Center, the National Center for Geographic Information and Analysis (NCGIA) and the School of Social Work -- all at UB -- with the BPD, was one of six in the country earning recognition from the Police Executive Research Forum (PERF). All of the projects sought to address a low-level crime by trying to understand its underlying causes.

Pamela K. Beal, director of the Regional Community Policing Center; Michael Drmacich, Erie County assistant district attorney and director of the Community Prosecution Unit that focuses on low-level crimes, and Lt. Patrick Roberts of the BPD presented the project at the 2001 PERF conference in San Diego in December.

The catalyst for the project came in 1997 when the BPD received a Problem Solving Partnership grant from the Office of Community-Oriented Policing Service that funded partnerships between police, community members and researchers.

Beal served as project evaluator and research coordinator between the police, the community -- in this case, the Allentown Association's Prostitution Task Force -- and a student from the School of Management's Management Information Systems (MIS) program who helped the BPD design a database for crime analysis.

Students in the School of Social Work conducted interviews with prostitutes and surveyed customers of prostitutes using instruments developed together with the police and the Allentown task force, Beal said.

"An important part of this project was that the research was driven by the community and the police. They told us what they wanted to know and we found it out for them."

Utilizing crime mapping/geographic information systems, researchers at the NCGIA were able to map and chart 911 calls between 1996 and 2000, allowing them to identify "hotspots" of prostitution activity. They also used the data to show that 10 percent of the nearly 1,000 calls received in 1996 came from just three callers. This information, combined with several strategies undertaken by police during the period, resulted in a 60 percent reduction of prostitution-related 911 calls, Beal said.

One of the key strategies, she said, was a police initiative called "Operation Johnny" -- in which "customers" were arrested instead of the prostitutes -- working in tandem with alternative sentencing for first-time offenders That sentencing included mandatory attendance in "john school" for the customers and the participation of prostitutes in the Magdalene Program, a drug and alcohol rehabilitation program operated by the Beacon Center and designed specifically for prostitutes.

The police department found that while the recidivism rate for prostitutes who are arrested was about 66 percent, the opposite was true for their customers after arrest and participation in "john school" -- fewer than 1 percent were arrested for the crime again, Beal said.