Nashville Police Take Aim at craigslist Escort Ads
 
Another Reason to be wary of Craigslist
February 08, 2007
 
It is said to be the world’s oldest profession. But in Nashville, it
has only recently gone digital.

Sex for sale is hardly new. But the sale of sex through the escort
ads on the well-known national classifieds website craigslist.org is
fairly new to Nashville, according to those whose job it is to crack
down on such illegal activity.

And for the past eight months, the Metro Police Department’s Vice
Squad has been quietly engaging in an operation to snuff out on-line
prostitution, and craigslist has been its primary target.

Unlike in years past where vice detectives fanned out to roam seedy
streets, hit shady strip clubs and comb though the telephone
directory looking for prostitutes, Metro’s vice squad has set its
targets almost exclusively on Nashville’s own craigslist page.

Police say they have done so because craigslist has quickly become
the primary way low end prostitutes and their clients find one
another in the Music City. “It’s like the whole escort service
industry jumped off the Yellow Pages and onto craigslist,” said
Detective Joe Ladnier, one of four vice detectives working out of
Metro’s Specialized Investigation Division.

Craigslist was born in 1995 in San Francisco as a web page listing
local community events. It quickly became one of the Internet’s most
widely utilized mediums for advertising housing, jobs, items for sale
and other services. Officially, craigslist came to Nashville in
February 2004 when the Music City became the 35th city
internationally to obtain its own page, nashville.craigslist.org

But it was not until June of last year when the police department
first realized the site was the new home for Nashville’s escort and
prostitution market. “It was pretty overwhelming when we first took a
look at it,” Ladnier said.

According to the Vice Squad, as many as 100 new escort postings
appear every day in the “erotic services” section of
nashville.craigslist.org. And every single ad cops have followed up
on has led to a prostitution arrest.

Lt. Mitch Fuhrer of the Specialized Investigation Division said four
detectives have made between 30 and 40 such arrests in eight months,
which also constitutes a tremendous increase over years past when
prostitution in Nashville was both traded and tracked via other
means. The girls are actually making it easier to find them. There
ads are screaming, “Here we are, come arrest us!”

Now police believe as much as 90 percent of the local sex industry
uses craigslist as its primary means of advertising escorts, having
all but abandoned the phone book and preferring craigslist far above
other Internet sites.

While that has made Nashville’s prostitutes easier to track, the
near-elimination of pimps and escort services has also led to more
and more women turning to prostitution, police said.

And vice detectives say the characteristics of the women – and men –
offering sex in exchange for money on craigslist has surprised even
them.

“We’ve found a few moms,” Fuhrer said. “One mother was working out of
her home and using her daughter’s computer. She said she needed
money.”

Police say they treat the women they arrest for prostitution off of
craigslist like any other prostitute they encounter.

“We warn them to take their ad down, and we warn them to get out of
the prostitution business,” Ladnier said. “Most we’ll never hear from
again, but we have made some repeat arrests.”

Despite the plethora of advertisements under “erotic service”
appearing every day, Nashville police say they are actually ahead of
the curve compared to larger cities when it comes to policing on-line
prostitution.

“It’s not just the kids, it’s the bad guys, too, who are Internet
savvy now,” Fuhrer said. “So we’ve become Internet savvy.”

Susan MacTavish Best, a spokeswoman for the Web site – which now
hosts more than 25 million user posts each month – said craigslist
still remains a user-moderated site.

“The ‘erotic services’ category is for legal escort services and
sensual massage providers,” Best wrote in an e-mail. “It was added at
the request of our users who wanted these ads separated from our
general ‘personals’ categories.”

Furthermore, the “terms of use,” which all posters to craigslist must
agree to, explains that no posting can contain pornography, nor can
it advertise “any illegal service or the sale of any items the sale
of which is prohibited or restricted by any applicable law.”

That, though, has not hindered Nashville’s prostitutes, police said.

“A hourly rate for a professional, licensed massage therapist is
somewhere in the neighborhood of $60 an hour,” Ladnier said. “These
listings are for $200 an hour. When we see that we know who to target
and what to target them for.”

Lt. Fuhrer said the deduction is often simpler than that.

“You know what you’re getting when you see some of these ads,” Fuhrer
said. “Some of them are pretty descriptive and pretty explicit.”