ADDICTED HOOKERS HAVE NOWHERE ELSE TO GO

His phone rings at 6:30 in the morning - naturally, it's trouble.
Nobody calls a vice cop before 10 a.m. or after dark just to say "hi."

"This wasn't that long ago," said Det. Jim Morrissey of the Edmonton
Police Service vice section. "She's a streetwalker we know, and she
was calling from some motel. She'd just woken up from a drug haze, all
these guys around her who've been screwing her and beating her up all
night.

"So she's scared. Does she want us to come get her? 'Yes, Jim,
please.' Should I drop by the office and pick up my partner and my
gun? 'Yeah, you'd better.' "

This is standard. EPS vice cops spend a large part of their week on
the street, passing out their cell numbers to streetwalkers and giving
them the standard pitch: if you work, you'll be busted - but if you
walk away, we will help you.

"That time, it seemed to stick," said Morrissey. "She told us she
looked around that room and knew that something like this was going to
kill her someday. Suddenly, she didn't want to die like that. We got
her into rehab. Last time I checked, she's still clean."

One down, about 249 to go. In the wake of the RCMP's recent IDing of a
Jane Doe corpse outside Leduc, there's been a lot of heavy breathing
in the press about the notion that a serial killer may be stalking
Edmonton's street sex trade.

Everyone knows that police clearance rates for hooker murders are
dismally low - more or less a consequence of the prostitute's
transient lifestyle and reluctance to confide in cops. If more can't
be done to keep young girls from joining the trade, Edmonton
prostitutes will continue to die by violence with sad regularity.

The role of drugs in the street trade hasn't changed, even if the
chemistry has. "The street's slowly changing over from crack to
crystal meth," said Morrissey. "That's bringing a higher level of
violence - it's a longer high, makes you more paranoid."

One thing everyone can agree on: Canada's prostitution laws, which
sanction the act but forbid "communication for the purposes of," make
no sense at all.

"Everybody agrees the prostitutes are the victims and the johns are
the exploiters," said Ross MacInnes, ex-head of Calgary's vice squad.
"But we bust the hookers and let the johns off with a fine, send 'em
to john schools instead of jail ...

"You wouldn't believe how many of these girls are working infected
with hepatitis or HIV, knowing it, still doing clients without
condoms," said Morrissey. "Same with the clients. Why not bump the
charge up from summary to indictable for the ones who are infected and
know they are?"

Morrissey would, of course, like to see a lot more money poured into
policing; his office has six detectives and, unlike the Calgary cops'
12-body vice shop, they have to cover child porn investigations as
well. But without more resources for rehab and counselling, it's just
recycling - from street to lockup to street again, with a final detour
to the morgue.

"When they start, it's for one of three reasons - drug addiction,
mental health problems or just plain old poverty," he said. "But 99.9%
end up addicted to street drugs. You get high just to live with
yourself, with what you're doing. Once you're hooked, you're screwed."

As it happens, a House of Commons committee is going to be looking at
federal solicitation laws this fall. New Democrat MP Libby Davies, who
represents Vancouver's crime-ridden downtown east side, sits on the
committee. Her idea is to lift all criminal sanctions against
prostitution, with an eye to placing the trade in policed "safe zones"
in urban areas.

"All our laws manage to do now is marginalize these women further,
push them into poorly lit areas of the city where they can be preyed
upon," she said. "As a society, we've got to stop treating them as
garbage."

But whenever the talk turns to setting up red-light districts, a
problem crops up: any streetwalker who might be licensed by government
to work a "sanctioned" hooker stroll would have to be drug-free and
minus a serious criminal record.

In Edmonton, said Morrissey, the number of streetwalkers fell by half
through the '80s as escort agencies starting setting up shop. Those
women without drug habits and criminal histories opted for safer and
better-paid work as escorts.

"It doesn't matter how many red-lights you set up, or where you put
them," he said. "The addicts, the mentally ill, the ones with violent
records - they'll still work illegally because they've got nowhere
else to go."