Almost all absurdity of conduct arises from the imitation of those whom we cannot resemble. – Samuel Johnson
On Sunday I wrote a little about this article from The Dallas News of February 7th, and promised to say more about it today. This time I’ll reproduce it as it appeared (though slightly edited for length) with interpolated comments, saving my main point for the end.
A felon from Austin forced a teenage girl and her adult sister to come work as prostitutes in Dallas because “there was big money to be made during Super Bowl,” according to police documents. But Dallas police say they busted Anthony Ladell Winn, 35, before the sisters, ages 14 and 20, arranged any weekend dates. “We’re very proud of the work on this one,” said Sgt. Byron Fassett of the Dallas Police Child Exploitation Squad. “Any time that we can identify a child victim on the street involved in this, it is exceptional work, quite frankly. It’s like finding a needle in a haystack.” Winn was arrested early Sunday on felony charges of attempting to compel prostitution by force and trafficking of persons…
You’ve gotta love the way cops like to pretend their own job is harder than it is so they can then pat themselves on the back for doing it. Cops see a 14-year-old girl streetwalking and get her to cooperate so they can catch her pimp, and then pretend some Holmesian deduction was involved. This “needle in a haystack” poppycock of course also provides a ready-made excuse for all the imaginary traffickers they didn’t catch on account of their not actually existing.
Area authorities had been bracing for a possible influx of prostitutes and human trafficking victims in the run-up to Super Bowl XLV. Texas Attorney General Greg Abbott and the FBI pledged additional resources devoted to combating human trafficking last week. Authorities say it can be extremely difficult to accurately measure whether such crimes spike and why. However, early indications in Dallas are that there was not an obvious increase in reported prostitution cases, perhaps due in part to the icy and cold conditions, police said.
Yeah, that must be it. Pimps spent all kind of money to “traffick” thousands of enslaved hookers into Dallas but didn’t bother to send them out on the streets because it was too cold. “It can be extremely difficult to accurately measure…such crimes,” but that didn’t stop cops and officials from making ludicrous predictions despite the fact that no such spike has ever been recorded around a major sporting event anywhere in the world.
Dallas police reported 23 adult prostitution arrests from Wednesday through Sunday, though they noted they do not know how many were related to the festivities or people surrounding the Super Bowl. “We didn’t see that as being a drastic increase in our normal enforcement numbers,” said Assistant Chief Tom Lawrence. “We were trying to focus much more heavily on the locations where we thought there’d be a high level of parties, activities related to the Super Bowl.”
“Areas where there’d be a high level of parties?” WTF? I mean seriously, what is that even supposed to mean? Restaurants? Bars? People’s hotel rooms spread all over the Dallas-Fort Worth area? And what did that “focus” involve, sending out cops to look for women strolling around the stadium in high heels, fishnets and miniskirts in subzero temperatures? I can tell you how many of those 23 prostitution arrests were “related” to the Super Bowl: Zero. They were just plain old streetwalker busts which happened to occur the same week. The big talkers in Arlington were too embarrassed to admit their prostitution arrest figures until yesterday: 32 total “prostitution-related” arrests (note the attempt to pad the number to 59 by quoting 2½ weeks at one time), which obviously includes clients since only 22 were hookers and 3 “pimps” (possibly drivers or boyfriends). Only 13 of the 59 were from out of town and NONE were juveniles. Imagine that.
…For Fassett, whose squad handles sex crimes involving juveniles, the Winn case was the only arrest of its kind thought to be related to the Super Bowl. “I don’t know that I saw on the street level any more activity than any other normal night that we would have run an operation,” said Fassett. He acknowledged that “there’s no real statistical data to prove it one way or the other.”
But that didn’t stop us from uttering grandiose prophesies of hordes of hookers descending on the Metroplex like a Biblical plague, of course. Obviously, Mr. Fassett doesn’t understand advanced concepts like “extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence.”
Investigators believe Winn met the sisters in Austin [and] had been prostituting the older sister for about a year and the younger sister for about a month…a few days ago, Winn and the older sister got into an argument because the woman did not want Winn prostituting her younger sister anymore…Winn punched the 20-year-old woman in the face and bit her twice on the arm, police said. He then told the women “they were going to Dallas to prostitute for him” during the Super Bowl and that “there were men that would spend a lot,” the documents said. Winn drove the women to the city Saturday morning, rented a northwest Dallas hotel room and sent them out to engage in prostitution. He told them all the money they made would go to him, the documents said. Dallas patrol officers came in contact with the sisters Saturday and investigators ran a sting operation on Winn, police said…
So, what gave this pimp wannabe the idea that “there was big money to be made during Super Bowl,” and “there were men that would spend a lot” on streetwalkers? Any guesses? It certainly wasn’t personal experience, nor anything he learned from the “organized crime” with which he obviously was not affiliated. What gave him these ridiculous ideas was the constant media repetition of them. In other words the trafficking fanatics, by their constant reiteration of the “Super Bowl as sex trafficking Mecca” mythology, put the notion into this violent loser’s otherwise-empty head. Congratulations, trafficking fetishists; all the money and effort you expended on spreading your lies actually accomplished something: You inspired a pimp to traffick an underage girl to the Super Bowl. The same mechanism was obviously at work in the minds of the fanatics who staged this little escapade, paraphrased from a report in the Washington Times of February 1st:
A Planned Parenthood manager in Perth Amboy, New Jersey was secretly videotaped by an anti-abortion activist posing as a pimp supposedly trying to hide his “underage sex ring”. A group calling itself “Live Action” was behind the scam, in which the “pimp” was accompanied by a woman who claimed to be a prostitute; the “pimp” claimed to be interested in obtaining abortions for girls around 14 or 15 years old who speak no English. The clinic manager, identified only as “Ms. Woodruff”, gave advice to the fake “pimp”, saying “so long as they just lie … we just kind of play it stupid,” and explaining that they look past this because these girls still need the help, even if they are underage.
Planned Parenthood employees reported the visit to their higher management as soon as the “pimp” left, and according to a February 1st statement by Phyllis Kinsler, CEO of Planned Parenthood of Central New Jersey, “on that same day, prior to learning that these visits had also occurred in other states, the local Planned Parenthood affiliate notified local law enforcement in New Jersey.” Upon learning that at least 12 more of its clinics have had instances where men have come in with similar stories involving sex-trafficking, the organization contacted the FBI.
But that didn’t stop “Live Action” from posting the edited video on its website and claiming it was evidence that Planned Parenthood facilitates “sex trafficking”. Kinsler said that despite the lack of any “cover-up” as alleged by the activists, “the behavior of our employee, as portrayed on the video, if accurate, violates PPCNJ policies, as well as our core values of protecting the welfare of minors and complying with the law, and appropriate action is being taken.”
As it turned out, the audio was doctored and the manager did nothing wrong. Trafficking fetishists aren’t doing anything to help real victims, but their omnipresent mythology is beginning to inspire various unscrupulous creeps to attempt to live out a sexual fantasy of being “pimps” with enslaved “hos”, either in earnest as in the Dallas case or as part of the same kind of bogeyman deception practiced by the “trafficking” fanatics themselves. I’m sure they must be proud of themselves; on a small scale at least, they’re beginning to make their warped vision of the world a reality.
We did it again. I wrote about the same thing today.
Yes, I know, and you helped me; I wrote this column last Tuesday or Wednesday, when Arlington had not yet released its arrest figures. But since you posted earlier than I did I saw that the figures had FINALLY been released and I was therefore able to alter that portion of my column before posting it. Thank you! 🙂
And here I thought it was another case of great minds and all that 🙂
Well, it still was really; I was planning to post the column anyway and neither one of us knew what the other was posting today. What you helped me do is get the Arlington figures, which I wouldn’t have had. 🙂
I wonder if the two of you shouldn’t co-operate on something bigger. Great minds who think alike working together. 🙂
WHO IS THE WOMAN IN PIC?
I’m not 100% positive because the news stories on this are a bit muddled, but I believe she is the “Ms. Woodruff” referred to in the Washington Times article.
ty
Maggie,
I saw the tape on this and it was choppy, start and stop. I just felt right then it had been redone. There was a BLACK officer pretending to be a pimp…Notice…BLACK….another clue of how they operate. There was a supossed young WHITE prostitute present. Never showed either of them I told a friend “This is Bogus!”
I hope no charges were filed, as I did not get to follow up on this. I think the lady in the photos is the Planned Parenthood worker that was set up. It sure looks like her.
Anyway, I wanted to add that I was told and shown onetime on an AUDIO tape that they can hack the middle, but not the beggining or the end and YES they do. Rotten cops!!! and others. Anyway I always say the MOST important thing at the beginning and repeat it at the end with something like, “And I again, I repeat…….” incase AUDIO is running and your scanner does not detect it. Just trying to give some helpful info.
Joyce
I love what you teach me but quite frankly..i know how they operate!
I guess I’m confused. They are accusing Planned Parenthood of facilitating abortions for under age prostitutes? And that’s bad? So then forcing the underage prostitutes to have babies they don’t want and aren’t in a position to raise would be better?
This reminds me of that campaign a while back to block HPV vaccinations because the religious right thinks the threat of HPV is a useful deterrent to keep kids from having sex. In this case, it sounds like they want underage prostitutes to have the child if they get pregnant as a punishment for having engaged in an immoral act (prostitution).
Unfortunately, our society is so devoted to its punitive mindset that it will adhere to it no matter what the financial and social cost. 🙁
I don’t think it has anything to do with the babies having babies and whether or not that’s a bad thing. To my understanding, Live Action is a pro-life group who has been trying to make abortions illegal again. To my way of thinking, they are jumping on the child sex trafficking hysteria only to further their cause.
People with something to sell always jump on any craze or fad to promote it, but it’s sad when such an ugly fad is used to sell such an ugly product. 🙁
Andrew Breitbart is the fascist (I do not use that word lightly) scumbag who started all this nonsense with his attempts to out ACORN with a highly doctored video. I’m certain PP will be cleared just like ACORN was but the PR damage is still there. I find that the mainstream media fails completely with it’s attempts be fair and not take sides. When it comes to falsifiable instances like this, committed by people with dubious histories, the media should take a side. They don’t need to abandon all journalistic integrity like Fox, but I have no problem with a journalist taking a clear side in the argument as long as they retain their intellectual honesty. If the media was doing it’s job, we would be able to read more articles like Maggie’s paraphrases and be better off for it.
Also, people like Breitbart claim to have a woman’s best interest in mind but they really just want to return to the days where women were just baby factories who minded the house.
The worst part is, neofeminists are no better; they want to create a society in which women are not women in any way but reproductive biology. The idea that women should have control over our own life-choices just as men do is alien to both extremes. 🙁
Yeah, what’s up with that? Just love liberty, it’s all good after that.
I also remembered the ACORN situation when I saw the PP attack. So what’s next — can we expect a wave of Breibart-inspired revealing videotapes showing how every institution is actually conspiring to traffic(k) more underage women?
It would be good if after ACORN and the Sherrod oopsie people would become immune to this kind of scam. Clearly people have to see this done a number of times before they get it the next time it happens.
The tape was doctored! Well whoda thunk it?
Man. It’s like the Malleus Maleficarum was convincing people to take up witchcraft.
[…] no opportunity to pontificate about "pimps" and Backpage.com. The total haul from all this effort? One would-be pimp who got the idea from hearing the myth on […]