Yesterday, 13 women were arrested after a local prostitution sting was conducted by CMPD. According to an article by The Charlotte Observer, a team of about 12 Charlotte-Mecklenburg police officers, including some undercover officers posing as customers, worked the prostitution-free zone to gauge how the zone is working and to follow up on neighbors complaints.
CMPD has focused on the area after identifying 276 hookers who worked the streets there. Under the exclusion program, those arrested and charged with a prostitution-related crime are banned from the area for 90 days. If convicted, they are banned for a year.
The sting started just after 3 p.m. on Tuesday. Police had arrested 12 women by 9:30 p.m., including one who police said is four months pregnant. Only one of the women were arrested in the exclusion zone, police said. The others were arrested in adjacent neighborhoods.
Most of the women snagged in the sting had crack pipes on them, police said. For many, the prostitution stems from a problem that arrests alone can't solve: drug addiction.
Officer Kenny Faulkner said police used to come out to the neighborhoods and arrest the same women again and again. Now they bring along a team of specialists from the nonprofit McLeod drug treatment center and health experts who explain the dangers of sexually transmitted diseases.
Many of the women arrested will be ordered by the courts to the 14-week drug treatment program at the McLeod Center. But even that doesn't necessarily stop the problem. Caseworkers said they recognized some of the women arrested Tuesday and said they've seen some clients get re-arrested just 15 minutes after a session at the center ends.
On Tuesday, staff from the center dropped business cards into the plastic property bags where police had placed the women's purses, hoping for another opportunity to help the women change.
The 13 women who were