But what about those street girl sweeps?
[QUOTE=HorseTrader;2862384]Great report, thanks for writing. This is the first such post that was written well enough that it all makes sense.[/QUOTE]Thanks, Horse Trader.
Well, as long as I'm on a roll, I will add a general note about those occasional sweeps of street girls by the cops. LOL.
My previous post about this that you quoted from was regarding P4 P girls working in bars. I think that would also apply to escort agencies, massage shops, soapies, so-called Happy Ending shops and the like. It seems that is why Smooci is trying put a distance between itself and escort agencies of late.
And I should also stipulate that This Is Thailand, I could have it wrong on some meaningful detail or the law has been changed as of last month or some edict has been issued that supercedes traditional penal code and enforcement procedures. My notes are based on what I have read in the Thai Penal Code on the issue and the way it has virtually always turned out in terms of arrests and charges regarding "prostitution crimes" here.
So, about those occasions where the cops round up dozens of street girls in a single night in a surprise sweep on, say, Beach Road in Pattaya or Soi 4 or Sukhumvit Road in Bangkok. Don't the cops say they did it to "Crack down on prostitution" or some such thing and doesn't the media report it as such too?
Yes. Because they are being lazy and / or intentionally imprecise about it.
What they are really arresting the girls for is being prostitutes [I]who are creating a public nuisance of their line of work.[/I].
See, the illegal part is the italicized part of that statement. It is not illegal to be a prostitute in Thailand. But it is illegal to create a [I]public nuisance[/I] about it.
Of course, all it takes for street girls to become a public nuisance is for a nearby hotel, restaurant, residence or I suppose competing bar to lodge a complaint that it is getting so crowded with hookers out there their business' patrons feel intimidated or literally must run the gauntlet of hookers just to reach the entrance to their business.
Or the girls are getting so loud and vocal that the wives and girlfriends of male tourists are annoyed by all this shouting about "boom boom" and "blowjobs".
Anyone remember when the BJ Bars off Soi 8 in Bangkok had to close because the girls sitting outside had gotten too vocal with passersby about what was on offer inside? Then when they were allowed to reopen their style changed from shouting, waving and flagging over potential customers to whispering, "psst. Come inside. Blowjob. " For a while anyway. I think most Bangkok BJ Bar girls sitting outside their bar are still fairly low key and subdued about how they tout their offering compared to the way it was before some of those shops got busted and closed down a long while. And that was pre Covid.
They had been creating a public nuisance out of their business model and got busted for it.
Yes, sometimes those sweeps are also about suspected visa violations or age-related issues, same as some of the raids in the bars, massage shops, etc.
But, again, the busts are not exactly of legal age and properly visa'd girls and their customers for the exchange of money for sex. They are for something else only tangentially related to it.