Regaining paradise from prostitution

(Second of two parts)

Saipan residents are determined to regain their beautiful island of clear waters, white sand, green and palms that they once lost to prostitution.

Island residents discourage both male and female sex workers from doing their “business” here, a move they described a people’s initiative to preserve the image and reputation of Saipan as a peaceful and wholesome tourist destination.

This initiative helps the Commonwealth’s war against prostitution on Saipan to slowly gain ground. Lately, there has been reduced sightings of conspicuous-looking women and their promoters strutting around the Western Garapan area as they used to.

Massive crackdown on various Illegal activities employed by the government’s task force against prostitution and other crimes has, on the outset, scaled down the Illegitimate business operations to a relatively modest degree.

Authorities and local leaders have discoursed on placing more teeth on existing anti-prostitution statutes, considered crucial to seeing the end of the flesh-selling trade.

While terming the existing law as workable, Attorney General Herb Soll said legal experts are currently in the process of drafting amendments to the legislation to be offered to lawmakers in the Legislature.

“It can be improved,” Mr. Soll indicated in an interview. Amid proposals raised that lawmakers should ratify a clear-cut legislation that would define prostitution, effecting arrest and conviction, and mandatory deportation for guilty parties, Mr. Soll affirmed the particular regulation is already in existence.

“We already have ability to deport individuals who are convicted of crimes, felony and misdemeanors. We don’t need any special provision since the arrestees are all supposedly illegal. They’re deportable,” said the Atty. General.

Chief Public Defender Masood Karimipour shared the same contention, citing that the problem now rests on ineffective law enforcement.

The lawyer believes making harsher statutes will not yield better results.

“Legislating more severe laws is equally futile. Instead, use already existing and quite powerful laws to dismantle the businesses which employ the prostitutes. Arrest and charge the organizers, the owners, the people who employ and finance these rackets,” Mr. Karimipour advised.

He added that beating the Garapan prostitution problem just takes new thinking and old-fashioned police work.

Police authorities, for its part, have deployed special operations to crackdown on Garapan’s prostitution problem.

Crackdown

The Department of Public Safety was behind at least four separate undercover investigations dubbed as the Operation Red Light series, that has led to the arrest of 62 individuals in connection with soliciting prostitution since 1998.

Operation Red Light One last October 13, 1998 yielded 20 arrests, followed by another eight arrests in DPS’ July 15, 1999 Operation Red Light Two.

In November of 1999, another 14 were captured for the alleged offense. Twenty more were apprehended during Operation Red Light Four last April 18, 2000.

Last month, the Superior Court came down with a ruling that convicted an individual for promoting prostitution in the second degree. The man, a citizen of the Republic of China, was one of eleven suspects convicted of the crime stemming from DPS’ fourth Red Light undercover bust.

Alongside these efforts, the government formed a new specialized task force seen to eradicate unlawful operations enterprised by certain groups and individuals in the Western Garapan area.

“This area needed extra attention,” admitted Mr. Soll, appointed by the governor as head of the task force.

Agencies including Marianas Visitors Authority, DPS, Revenue and Taxation, AGO, Department of Labor and Immigration, Public Health, Department of Public Works, Department of Commerce, among others, are partners in this fresh move to rid Western Garapan streets of prostituted women and their promoters, thieves, robbers, and other unlawful elements.

A survey commissioned by the DPS conducted from Sept. 2000 to Dec. 2000 top-billed prostitution as the most prevalent concern in the area.

Prostitution equally tied with public parking in the list of the district’s most pressing concerns.

Purse snatching, theft, burglary, sewage, trash bins, closed roads, street market, and littering completed the roster of problems at the tourist commercial zone.

According to Mr. Karimipour, it would entail legal and more livened up steps to wipe out prostitution in Garapan.

For starters, he said police should change its priorities and targets and direct less focus at streetwalkers and their street-level negotiators.

“These streetwalkers and their street handlers are just small fishes in an organized operation. Even if they were all arrested, they would be replaced by others the next week,” said the public defender.