NHPD arrests eight prostitutes
Recently appointed New Haven Police Department Chief James Lewis plans to make New Haven streets safer by tackling the world’s oldest profession: prostitution.
Undercover officers from the NHPD arrested eight prostitutes and 12 “johns” in two separate stings over the last two weeks in Fair Haven and the Dwight/Kensington neighborhoods. The stings were part of a strategy engineered by Lewis to combat prostitution in New Haven, which he immediately identified as one of the city’s biggest problems, said City Hall spokeswoman Jessica Mayorga.
Anti-prostitution stings and “more...
Okay, heads-up on the writing--the headline should reference the arrest of both the prostitutes and the Johns. That is the point of the whole story and yet you leave it out of the headline and that results in the business-as-usual perception that the only criminals to report on are the prostitutes. By skipping over the Johns in the headline, one must conclude you don't think the Johns play a role in the story. Since you both decline to print the photos, addresses and names of the Johns and yet report on the police's efforts to get the information out into the public, it seems as though you are confused about how to write this story at best or trying to manipulate the information to downplay the John component. As a journalist (and this point to the editor as well!!) you need to review writing and the presentation of the material for bias and presumption. It is a reasonably well written article devoid of the strangled prose the YDN sometimes dishes out, but it is damaged by the evident preconceived notions.
Prostitution is basic capitalism--without demand there would be no service. The demand is the issue if one wants to stop prostitution. That is what the police at attempting to work on and that is the story. You chose to recast the story of the new police strategy by trumpeting the prossies' arrests but not the johns'. Something to think about.
if none of the constituents have complained about the 'problem' of prostitution, why is the chief's spokeswoman claiming it is "one of the city’s biggest problems"
the police chief looks like a total perv and should be focusing on the crimes that people ARE complaining about.
by the way, studies show that children of divorced couples are more likely to engage in illegal activity later in life, so maybe you should outlaw divorce too.
56 year old prostitute? Wonder if she is a retiree and if this is her second career.
I believe the newsworthy aspect of this story is the arrest of Johns and the publication of their names. In fact, more johns (12) were arrested than prostitutes (8). Why, then, does the headline reflect the arrest of prostitutes only?
Bad start to the year, folks.
On 1984 the dilemma of a New Haven prostitute dubbed "Helen" by 60 Minutes, and the dilemma of New Haven itself, became the occassion of informing 25 million viewers of that program that AIDS was not a gender specific disease.Ironically, this prostitute's very life may have saved thousands of other lives and sparked massive world wide research, rivaling the greatest achievements of Yale scholars.
At that time HIV had not been discovered, and there was no way to prove one had AIDS until its final stages when the patient was dying.
In addition to that problem was the inorant public and scholarly perception that the disease was exclusively the problem of males---not females---and specifically males who engaged in same gender sex.
"Helen" proved that wrong. A prostitute and heroin addict, she had given birth to an infant with AIDS who never left the hospital and who later died before age two. The unproved but highly likely hypothesis was that the baby contracted the illness in the womb through the mother's body fluids.
Ergo, the mother --who was obviously not a homosexual male -- was at least a carrier of the illness if not ill herself and certainly a transmitter.
That television broadcast was the first time Americans realized the absurdity of believing that whatever microbe it was that caused AIDS, it had a sexual preference.
Since at that time HIV had not been identified and therefore no medication was available to treat it, this alarming information that AIDS was not confined to those who practiced the still socially unacceptable sexual unions of homosexual males, was a shocking revelation.
Its alarm and the resulting proliferation of safe sex information circulated -- nay, even promotoed --nationally may have saved thousands of lives.
Ironically and paradoxically, this New haven prostitute may have performed a public service which resulted in the saving of thousands of lives among heterosexual males who suddenly considered the wisdom of practicing safe sex and the massive expansion of AIDS research after it became known that the disease did not only target small and socially unaccepteable groups at the time: homosexual males and needle using drug addicts.
In short, this tragic New Haven practitioner of the world's oldest profession, may have unleashed more "learning" in the nation and the world than many an Ivy league Nobel Laureate.