This is part of our “LA Views” series — commentary that provides perspectives on our neighborhoods and the issues facing them.
Several years ago, the night before a local election, I was arrested for prostitution outside of a Koreatown motel. The customer who made the appointment with me twirled his wedding ring a lot and made small talk about sex toys. When he stood up, I followed him towards his motel room, which was across a parking lot. Once outside, I was handcuffed and shoved into an unmarked van by the “customer” and another cop, who flashed his shiny gold badge. After a few hours, I was dumped like a stray dog at the Twin Towers Correctional Facility in downtown Los Angeles. Unlike many other sex workers who have been routinely rounded up in prostitution stings, I was not misgendered, raped or beaten by cops. But the subordination ritual of the arrest itself, and the feeling of being caught in the jaws of a likely publicity stunt before an Election Day, stuck with me.
A majority of the other women in jail with me that night were half my age and were Black or brown. One of them fell asleep with her head on my lap after she showed me how to use the phone. Then, and now, the LAPD brags about making the city safer, but for sex workers, more arrests only mean more fear, abuse, trauma and poverty. Incarceration only exacerbates these conditions. For sex workers, cleaning up the city means erasure.
Getting arrested for prostitution didn’t stop me from doing sex work, but it changed how I did sex work. After my arrest, I stuck with clients I trusted, and continued writing and teaching memoir at UCLA Writing Extension. But the young women I shared a jail cell with may not have had the luxury to refuse new clients or obtain access to opportunities and resources outside of street economies they had come to rely on for survival. For sex workers who experience police violence or who witness trafficking incidents, reporting is scarce due to fear of retaliation, impunity, maltreatment or public exposure.
More arrests are coming, and they will make life worse and harder for sex workers, harming and endangering our community.
The World Cup/Super Bowl/Olympics trifecta is slated for Los Angeles in 2026, 2027 and 2028, and already, authorities have announced the largest deployment of officers in decades, increased surveillance and aggressive prosecution. In response to questions for this piece, LAPD Capt. Rachel Rodriguez denied that police tie enforcement to elections or other major events and said there won’t be a repeat of what department officials previously called efforts to “sanitize the area” ahead of the 1984 Olympics, making it more appealing on the world stage. “Our current work is to ensure public safety for Angelenos and tourist alike and not ‘sanitize’ any area,” she said. Yet in Koreatown, not far from the motel where I was arrested, police surveillance cameras are set to go up next month. The crackdown is part of a social cleansing displacement process that sex workers understand best. In fact, we have been tracking it around the globe.
At the Paris Olympics in 2024, sex workers reported an increase in evictions, deportation orders and police brutality in the months leading up to the event. In her article “How the Paris Olympics is Impacting Sex Workers in the City,” Brit Dawson interviewed sex workers and advocacy groups about the sanitization effort resulting in sex workers being harassed and targeted by the local police. Sex workers in Rio de Janeiro organized to protest several evictions leading up to the 2014 World Cup and then documented their own experiences to counter sensationalist stories in mainstream media.
Here in Los Angeles, LAPD Chief Jim McDonnell has recently appeared on multiple news outlets asking for a staggering $1.15 billion for surveillance and overtime for law enforcement for the Games. Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents will be working at the World Cup, prompting SoFi Stadium workers to call for assurances for their safety. Meanwhile, the Los Angeles Homeless Services Authority shows that 72,195 people are experiencing homelessness in Los Angeles County, with most of them unsheltered or staying in tents, RVs or cars. I fear, with law enforcement literally working overtime, sex workers, immigrants and unhoused people will be the targets to be “swept.”
And even as vast resources are being put towards crackdowns and sweeps, conversations about state-funded services that could improve the safety and well-being of sex working people don’t happen. The people most impacted by arrests that are supposed to make streets safer are completely excluded from the discussion. In response to this ongoing erasure, sex workers have aligned with scholars and allies to conduct research that reflects our experiences and opinions.
Amanda De Lisio, an assistant professor in the Faculty of Health at Canada’s York University, served as principal investigator on a project with sex worker organizers in Los Angeles. “What we are seeing in Los Angeles reflects patterns sex worker organizers have documented in previous Olympic and FIFA host cities: intensified policing, expanded surveillance, and the reframing of routine vice enforcement through anti-trafficking frameworks,” she wrote. De Lisio reports that sex working participants repeatedly described routine negotiations with police that involved financial coercion, extortion or sexual exploitation targeting women, femmes and trans people suspected of sex work.
Maxine Doogan, president of Erotic Service Providers Education and Research Project, is an advocate whose research has spanned decades. She has provided testimony and written letters to oppose California bills that claim to promote safety but, based on her years of experience, use tactics that she has seen target commercial sex workers and conflate sex trafficking with consensual sex work. “We must have a complete repeal of the anti-prostitution laws,” explains Doogan, “so that we can negotiate for our own labor and safety work conditions without being arrested.”
If the goal is to make Los Angeles safer and more welcoming for tourists and locals, then providing legitimacy for the sex working community should be a top priority, not surveillance and erasure. Several local sex worker-centered advocacy groups are busy offering reasonable solutions that don’t involve locking people up: affordable housing, childcare and peer-led community-based models that center harm reduction are just a few examples of the life-sustaining work they are doing. Los Angeles lawmakers should listen to them.
Sex workers — like me — get arrested because cops and politicians have something to prove. It’s Election Day, it’s the World Cup, it’s whatever. We are not dirt to sweep up when they clean up the streets. We are a part of the vibrant tapestry of Los Angeles culture, and we are participating in street economies that are available to us as a means for survival. Instead of arresting us, why not ask ourselves why so many people use sex work as an economic safety net in one of the richest cities in the world?
Antonia Crane is an author, queer sex worker, filmmaker and doctoral candidate at USC. She is the author of the memoir, “Spent.” Her recent essay collection “Une Travailleuse (A Worker)” was published in 2026 by Tusitala Press. Her essays can be found in The New York Times, The Nation, LA Public Press, N+1, Knock LA and lots of other places. She is the founder of both Strippers United and Stripper Worker Center, organizations that focus on labor organizing, education and legislative reform.
