On police and Prostitutes

Steven Leavitt (author of Freakonomics) and a collaborator have just released a working paper at the ASSA conference on prostitution in Chicago. They present some pretty shocking findings (from Foreign Policy):

What's particularly interesting is the authors' section on bargaining and the law. They estimate that roughly 3 percent of all tricks performed by prostitutes who aren't working with pimps are freebies given to police to avoid arrest. In fact, prostitutes get officially arrested only once per 450 tricks or so, leading the authors to conclude that "a prostitute is more likely to have sex with a police officer than to get officially arrested by one." When freebies given to gang members are factored in, about one in 20 tricks go solely for protection and the "privilege" of plying their trade.

It bears repeating: a prostitute in Chicago is more likely to have sex with a police officer than to get officially arrested by one.

One of the multitude of things about this paper that I find fascinating is the way they collected data. From the paper:

...through a partnership with pimps and prostitutes working in two Chicago neighborhoods, we were able to gather detailed, real-time transaction-level data for over 2,200 tricks performed by roughly 160 prostitutes.4 The bulk of these data were collected by our trackers who stood on street corners or sat in brothels with
prostitutes, recording the information immediately after the customer departed.

I would hate to have been Leavitt's poor undergrad research lackey that day.

HT: Reason Magazine, which notes that in legalized Nevada brothels "condom use is 100 percent. There's no 'protection sex' for crooked cops or gang members, and there hasn't been a single case of HIV since 1988."