S.L. targeting root of crime: pimps

By the time 16-year-old Kelly (not her real name) was arrested for prostitution in Salt Lake City last May, she and her "boyfriend" had already toured most of the West.

"I've been in county jails so many times it's not even funny," said the Phoenix native, citing places from Fresno, Calif., to Amarillo, Texas, where police arrested her during her short career as a prostitute."All these places always let me out," she said.

In some places the teen would get arrested repeatedly on the same night with the same result: "They'll give you a citation and tell you to show up in court and out the door you go."

So with her fake ID and a boy-friend/pimp to bail her out, the most Kelly expected to spend at the Salt Lake County Jail was a couple of hours. Until the investigation began and she realized these guys were not like the others.

"Salt Lake is very strict. They take you to the police station and do all this investigation on you," Kelly said. "In other states they don't care."

Kelly's conclusion is a far cry from what most prostitutes were saying two years ago during one of the city's largest explosions in prostitution. So lucrative had the area become for the business that cops were seeing pimps with vanloads of girls pulling into town.

By fall 1995, police were finding 15 to 20 prostitutes walking the streets on any given night.

"Vice officers told me there was constant pressure to do something about the prostitution problem," said Salt Lake Police Sgt. Ken Hansen, who was assigned to the vice squad in December 1995. "After a few months, I decided that what we were doing was not working."

As in other places, officers were citing the same prostitutes over and over, but many tossed those citations in the trash and never made court appearances.

Observers blamed the out-of-control rise in illegal sex activity on a lack of jail space and a lenient judiciary. But, said Hansen, there is more to making Salt Lake City undesirable for "the circuit" - a network of prostitutes and pimps that circulates word about which cities are best for business.

The difference between then and now is in the approach to the crime, Hansen said. Instead of just going after the prostitutes and their customers, or "johns," police are now targeting the root of the crime: the pimps.