Victory: Marlyand Police Department Planning To Tweet Arrests Of A Vice Sting Arrests Nobody

from the mission-accomplished dept

We had just discussed one Maryland police department's stupid plan to tweet out the arrests made during prostitution stings the other day. I had several problems with the plan, including that the police offering up pictures of the accused, not convicted, "johns" seemed like an overreach. Add to that a somewhat confusing use of pictures in their blog announcement making it unclear as to whether the accused prostitutes would be put on public display, not to mention the horrified rebuke of some social workers, and this whole thing looked like a poor plan that should be squashed. But it wasn't squashed. The department went forward with the sting-to-be-tweeted. So how did it work out?

It was a complete and total success, by which I mean that they arrested absolutely nobody. I'm going to tell you how the department spun this less-is-more outcome, but you've probably already guessed.

"I've participated in hundreds of stings, and I've never seen what happened today. By advertising this days ago, we wanted to put johns on notice to not come to Prince George's County," Dave Coleman, head of the county's Vice Intelligence Unit, said in a statement. "That message was heard loud and clear. We just put a dent in the human trafficking business without making one arrest."

Yup, they're going with the idea that this widely-mocked threat to tweet out pictures is what kept away everyone who might be seeking a prostitute on the day of the sting. It's an interesting theory, which relies on the idea that somehow getting your picture tweeted by a handle followed by a grand total of twelve-thousand people in the whole wide world was somehow more of a deterrent than getting arrested in the first place. There is such a thing as social shaming, but there's also such a thing as having to go to jail, and I'll leave it to you to figure out which would be worse for most people.

On top of that faulty logic, this idea that declaring victory over human trafficking because nobody showed up to your advertised whores-as-bait party is the stupidest thing since, oh, I don't know...

Yeah, that sounds about right. Some experts agree.

Darby Hickey, an activist who promotes sex workers' rights and spoke to me for our piece last week told me that the department is delusional.

"If 'putting a dent in the human trafficking business' was as easy as threatening to live tweet, imagine what a better world we'd live in," Hickey wrote in an email to me. "I'm glad no one was arrested and I think it was a good moment for conversations about the need to change the approach to sex work, as well as recognize that even if it's still criminalized, furthering stigmatizing is not helpful but dangerous."

Or, I suppose the department could continue with this insane little experiment and plan a tweet-sting every single day for the rest of existence. Assuming they believe their own hype, they kind of have to, don't they? If this is all it takes to end prostitution and human trafficking, it'd be a crime not to, and then we'd have to put their pictures up on Twitter or something.

Filed Under: maryland, prince george county, prostitution, shaming, social media, sting

Maryland Police Dept. To Live Tweet Prostitution Vice Stings

from the you're-not-helping dept

Prostitution, they say, is the oldest of professions, which sort of has to be bullshit, because if selling sex was the first job ever, how could anyone ever pay for the sex? But I digress. Even if it isn't the oldest profession, it certainly has a grand tradition of being used to whip up moral panics, such as when Congress freaked the hell out when they discovered, gasp, prostitutes can use Twitter! Who'd have thought? (Doesn't syphilis make your thumbs fall off or something?) In any case, we've also recently seen that some police departments mistakenly believe that they too should be peddling themselves on social media, never mind how little they think through their campaigns.

But where prostitution and police using social media intersect results in the really terrible idea one Maryland department had to live-tweet/blog police prostitution stings. From the department's own blog:

We won't tell you when or where, other than it's somewhere in the county sometime next week. The PGPD's Vice Unit will conduct a prostitution sting that targets those soliciting prostitutes and we'll tweet it out as it happens. From the ads to the arrests, we'll show you how the PGPD is battling the oldest profession. Suspect photos and information will be tweeted. We're using this progressive, and what we believe unprecedented, social media tactic to warn any potential participants that this type of criminal behavior is not welcome in Prince George's County. You can follow @PGPDNews and search #PGPDVice as we take you along for the takedowns.

Prostitution is undoubtedly a complex subject, but one where many people feel that a hardline legal approach to it is inappropriate. In some places in this country, it isn't even illegal. Where it still is illegal, many social workers will advocate a softer approach than shaming the hell out of everyone and throwing the book at hookers. That's what we've been doing all this time, after all, and it hasn't fixed a damned thing.

Also, police departments are not in the damned entertainment business. That last line on their post, about taking the public along "for the takedowns"? Screw them. Do your jobs, make things as safe as you possibly can, and leave the entertaining to the professionals. Posting names, never mind pictures, directly from the police of the accused is not fun, it isn't entertaining, and it sure as hell ain't justice. And I'm not the only one that thinks so.

But they then decided it was a good idea to live-tweet the sting as it was happening — which would include taking photos of suspects and posting them on Twitter — using the hashtag #PGPDVice. It's mystifying that the police would think that live-tweeting a sting would get them any good publicity. After all, it was just last week that the New York Police Department saw its attempt at Twitter outreach go terribly, when they tried to start the hashtag #myNYPD to get pictures of people hanging out with the cops and instead got inundated with stories of people who had been targeted by stop-and-frisk and racial profiling.

If you must attack prostitutes and their johns, at least try to keep a bit of the dignity of your profession while you're at it. You keep policing everyone, and I'll handle the entertainment bit.

Filed Under: maryland, police, prince george county, prostitution, social media, stings

Campaign Launched To Stop School From Claiming Copyright On Student Work

from the speak-out-now dept

We recently wrote about how the school board for Prince George County, Maryland, was considering a policy that would claim the copyright of everything produced by both students and faculty at the various schools in the district. That seemed extreme in so many ways. Some folks have set up a site called Don't Copyright Me, in which they're asking people to sign a petition to be sent to the school board, telling them not to take the copyrights from students and teachers.

While this may seem like a small deal because it involves a single school district, the larger concern is that it actually becomes a bigger deal in the long term, as other school districts may follow suit:

Copyright is getting out of control. Prince George's County is one of the top 25 school systems in the country. If this policy goes into effect, it could set a terrible precedent at a time when quality education is needed more than ever. Students and teachers deserve the same rights as everyone else. With this policy, a high school student could get a takedown notice from their own school for posting a video they made for class on YouTube.

Hopefully the school board realizes this would be a mistake.

Filed Under: copyright, education, prince george county, schoolwork

Copyright Insanity: School Policy Requires Students Hand Over Copyright On All Work

from the that-test-you-got-a-C-on?-school's-copyright dept

There are some absolutely ridiculous situations created by the fact that all creative works are automatically granted a copyright on being put into a fixed form. Mostly, we just ignore these situations, because the vast majority of them never matter. But, as copyright has become more and more ridiculous, some people are beginning to start to make use of the stupid fact that all kinds of things can be "owned" that probably shouldn't be "ownable." Take, for example, school work. If a student creates something, it is covered by copyright, though most people never really consider or care about that. However, the board of education for Prince George County in Maryland is apparently considering a new "copyright policy" in which all students and staff would have to assign all of those copyrights over to the school system itself.

The school board claims it's doing this to keep up with the times -- especially the growing use of things like electronic curricula created by teachers, but obviously the policy goes way beyond that. Of course, we've seen other schools get greedy and seek to copyright and sell off curricula created by teachers. And that's already a crazy idea. But to have students' work included as well is (rightfully) angering a number of people.

Either way, this is yet another example of the insanity created by "ownership society," in which people are being fed the ridiculous line that all ideas and information can and should be "owned" thanks to things like copyright and patents. Is it any wonder that now our public schools even going down to elementary schools, are seeking the "rights" to student creations in order to create for profit ventures? This is a public school system, a place in which knowledge is supposed to be shared for the sake of learning. And the lesson they're sending is that information is to be hoarded by powerful entities for the sake of profits. Shameful.

Filed Under: copyright, maryland, prince george county, students, teachers