Neither of which describe the situation at hand.
The morality is more important than the terminology, though many, including victims, may disagree with you about the usage of the term. Until now you seem to have been arguing that it was morally okay for cops to get sex as a bonus while doing a job you don’t even think they should be doing, all because it’s legal. If you’re not saying it’s morally okay, you’re at least saying that being immoral is okay as long as you’re acting “legally,” which is it’s own kind of fucked up.
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Let’s draw a new line in the sand.
What happens when the “prostitute” is a minor?
In addition to the prostiution charge, is the cop (and the rest of his sting detail) also prosecuted for statutory rape?
Is the prosecuting attorney also prosecuted for condoning statutory rape by city/county employees?
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Only by your definition, where cops screwing people to arrest them doesn’t, in your mind, count as rape.
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No, I’ve not argued morality at all. Please don’t put words in my mouth.
Why would you argue to support something you morally disagree with?
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No it’s not. It’s an argument for making anything illegal without a real plan for enforcement. Criminalizing bad police behavior means nothing, if no bad cops are ever punished.[quote=“r3cgm, post:10, topic:92278”]
In fact, I don’t see why existing entrapment laws don’t apply here.
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They absolutely apply, but they are not taken seriously by police or the courts or anybody else with authority.
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I’d call it theft of services, but I wouldn’t call it rape. Even then, it’s not really theft, since it’s illegal. Just like how I wouldn’t call cops making a drug buy, then confiscating the drugs and the money theft, but would if I was selling lemonade, or if the money and drugs were taken by someone that wasn’t law enforcement. To paraphrase Ol’ Tricky Dick: when law enforcement does it, that means that it’s not illegal.
I’m receptive to the rape by deception argument, but it doesn’t seem to apply here. The examples being tossed around about a pretending to be a boyfriend or pretending to be a doctor are different. The perpetrator is pretending to be someone who the victim knows, or is pretending to a doctor. Here, there’s no such deception. He’s pretending to be some random dude on the street, and that’s exactly what he is. If you’re selling illegal services to random folks, you have to expect that you’ll eventually run in to a cop.
The reason to ban the practice of arresting after sex, is because it’s about person not a thing, and that you don’t actually have to complete the act to get the evidence. We don’t let a hitman actually kill a guy to before we arrest him right?
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Um, criminalizing something is the first step to dealing with it. You have to have laws in order to enforce them. Breaking the law is, sadly, not always a way for a cop to lose their job (much less be charged and convicted), but it can be. Why not give Internal Affairs one more tool to use to get rid of bad cops?
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What I disagree with is an inappropriate application of rape-by-fraud. It is long established law that the police may have to lie in the performance of their duties and are allowed to do so in certain cases such as prostitution stings. Prostitutes have no expectation that any client may in fact be a police officer, and their consent to sex-for-money is made with that in mind. You don’t get to call backsees when you get caught. I’m not arguing whether or not the petition is a good or bad idea. I just don’t think anyone should be using magical time-travel logic to support it.
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How do you propose we punish cops for something that isn’t even illegal yet?
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You wouldn’t be the first to make that sort of claim.
By your definition raping a prostitute at knife point wouldn’t be rape either, it would just be armed robbery. However, sex is not an object to be stolen off a shelf, nor are sex workers stores to be robbed. They are people. And to the human mind, screwing them to arrest them is rape.
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It seems like you’re still mixing in morality with legality. Just because a prostitute legally isn’t considered to have a defensible expectation that a cop wouldn’t go all the way through the act of sex for the purposes of securing a charge of prostitution (in some jurisdictions), that doesn’t mean it’s not morally rape by deception. It doesn’t mean it’s okay in any way, shape, or form.
But you said yourself that you don’t think prostitution should be illegal, so why would you have a problem with a prostitute using entrapment and charges of rape by deception as defenses? If a police chief tells a cop to kill a suspect (who poses not physical threat to the police), that’s state-sanctioned murder, regardless of whether the suspect was factually a person who committed a crime. The method of enforcement is a part of due process. The same way a cop isn’t supposed to beat a suspect beyond necessary force to apprehend them before it gets into the territory of punishment, which cops aren’t supposed to administer.
In the same respect that it’s rape if a person willingly participates in an orgy but then you force yourself on that person outside of the context of their consent, a prostitute practicing prostitution doesn’t nullify the significance of his/her consent. Getting consent by deception, regardless of whether it’s sanctioned by law enforcement, is immoral and should be illegal. It’s not okay, even if it might be considered legal in some jurisdictions.
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If A had expressly asked B about B’s sign and B had lied, then A would have a case. A case based on stupidity, but also a case based on deception.
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Well, they’d be sleeping with someone who impersonated someone they did give consent to sleep with.
This is actual rape by deception, but I’m not sure how this relates at all to not telling someone what you do for a living.
There is no consent of a sexual act of any kind in this case, so if one happens, it would be rape regardless of if the person was impersonating a doctor or really was a doctor. If there was no sexual act, it would probably be considered molestation, not rape. Plus impersonating a doctor is fraud.
Frankly, if lying about oneself made consent of a sexual act void, then it is very likely that not only do prostitutes rape their johns, but the vast majority of Americans were raped by their significant others the first time they slept with each other.
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If a prostitute would not agree to sex with a cop, and a cop who knows this this has sex with the prostitute and then arrests her, he has just used his authority under the law to coerce that woman into having sex with him. That’s rape.
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It’s not just that one party deceived the other about what he did for a living, it’s that one party deceived the other about the nature of the sex act itself. You can’t have consent when one party doesn’t understand the terms of what they are consenting to.
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The nature of the sex act? What do you mean? We’re talking about selling sex for money.
Do you mean the reason why each party wanted to have sex?
Edit: Frankly, putting the “rape” thing aside, I’m not sure why police officers are having sex with prostitutes in order to arrest them. Surely prostitutes get paid in advance and that would be enough to arrest them.
Exactly. One party thought they were having transactional sex. The other knew that they were not. The sex worker “consented” to something completely different than what the cop intended.
Surely they aren’t just abusing the power of their position to score sex under false pretenses from members of a vulnerable population. Surely.
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They did have transactional sex. That is literally what the cop is arresting the prostitute for, isn’t it?
