No license to love

>> East-End residents combine to drive johns out of their neighbourhood

by KRISTIAN GRAVENOR

On an April evening this year, a resident of the Ontario East and Berri area posted a notice on a street lamp listing the license plate numbers of cars driven by men picking up prostitutes from local streets. The act was such a hit that on June 19, police launched Operation Cyclops, a project that invites East-End residents to note the license plates of drivers who have picked up street workers in the area.

François Robichaud, who leads a local residents’ group (L’Association des résidents et résidentes des faubourgs de Montréal), likes the project. “The police gave us a tool and it’s helping,” he says.

Robichaud says that unlike the prostitutes who meet clients discreetly behind closed doors, those on the street frequently have drug addiction problems that go unaddressed by authorities. “We’d like to see more detox and other services made available for them,” he says. “I can’t send my kid to the park across the street for fear he’ll stumble across condoms and syringes.”
But not everybody thinks Operation Cyclops is a great idea. “It’s worrisome because there’s nothing that proves these people are clients of prostitutes,” says André Paradis of local privacy group La ligue des droits et libertés. “Police accumulate that information and we don’t know what they’ll do with it. It can lead to false accusations and penalize or discredit people, or ruin reputations.”

Maurice Beaudoin, Commander of Station 22, says that since Operation Cyclops began, cops have notified the owners of 237 vehicles to call the station. The johns that call are then warned of the future consequences of such behaviour. “They’re usually embarrassed but not shocked,” says Beaudoin. Only two of that total have been spotted again picking up women after being warned, he says.

Robichaud, a 15-year resident of St-Christophe, notes that much flip-flopping on the street-worker issue has emanated from city hall since Peter-McGill councillor Louise O’Sullivan-Boyne took over the dossier.

“First she said that the exit to the Jacques Cartier Bridge would be a good place for a red light zone… we were like this,” says Robichaud, making an expression of extreme shock. “But [last] week she hinted that in her upcoming January report, they would not be recommending the creation of any street prostitution zone. Whatever they end up doing, they have to make sure not to put prostitutes on the street of a residential neighbourhood.”

Centre-sud residents have made street prostitution their central priority since April 2001, when citizens forced an almost-immediate end to a police project that, Robichaud says, “transformed our sector into a red-light zone.”

But that’s a reality that some people think residents will have to get used to if authorities keep chasing prostitutes out of traditional red-light districts. “I think it’s unfortunate that some people present themselves as the only residents of a neighbourhood,” says Lillian Robinson, a strong critic of the province’s prostitution policy and principal of Concordia’s Simone de Beauvoir Institute. “[Residential prostitution] is a problem that should be worked out without reference to law enforcement.”

Commander Beaudoin meanwhile concedes that Operation Cyclops has resulted in a “strange side-effect.” “Now that the prostitutes have fewer clients, they have to stand out in the street longer to make the same amount of money.” :