LOU CHIBBARO

James L. Walls Jr. (Photo courtesy of www.districtheights.org)

News about an ongoing operation by D.C. police aimed at arresting male prostitutes and the male customers who seek their services surfaced last month when a male undercover officer posing as a hustler arrested the mayor of District Heights, Md., for allegedly offering him $40 for sex.

James L. Walls Jr., 30, considered an up-and-coming political figure in Prince George’s County, was charged with solicitation for lewd and immoral purposes about 12:30 a.m. on April 24 at Sixth and F streets, N.W., near the Verizon Center.

The arrest drew the immediate attention of gay activists, who noted that police often arrested gay men on that same charge, known as “SLIP,” up until the early 1970s. Back then, undercover officers targeted men for soliciting each other for sex in various cruising areas when no prostitution was involved, according to veteran D.C. gay activist Frank Kameny.

“It was based on the sodomy law, which has long since been repealed,” Kameny said. “With the repeal of the sodomy law, the SLIP statute cannot be used for non-commercial sexual solicitation, and I certainly want to make sure they’re not doing that.”

Although an area near where Walls was arrested has been known as a place where male prostitutes congregate, some activists say the area has also long been known as a gay male cruising spot, where men seek out non-prostitution related sex partners to take home for a private encounter.

Insp. Brian Bray, commanding officer of the Narcotics and Special Operations Division, which oversees the police Prostitution Enforcement Unit, said Kameny and other activists need not worry about police turning the clock back to the 1970s.

“We don’t do that,” he said. “I can tell you they can rest assured that that’s not the case now. We’re just going after the people that are out there charging for sex,” he said.

Channing Phillips, spokesperson for the U.S. Attorney’s office, which prosecutes prostitution cases, said he is unaware of the SLIP statute being used to make arrests in any non-prostitution cases.

As the statute stands now, it involves the exchange of or the offering of money,” Phillips said.

Bray said the undercover operation targeting male prostitution has been confined largely to an area north of the D.C. Superior Court and police headquarters buildings on Indiana Ave., N.W. He said the area is bordered on the east by Third Street and on the west by 6th Street, N.W. He said the area extends north to H Street, at the edge of Chinatown.

“A lot of this is being generated by community complaints,” Bray said, in discussing the overall prostitution problem citywide.

He said the complaints about male prostitution have been forwarded to his division from the First Police District, which has jurisdiction over the city’s downtown business district.

“That’s an area that’s strange because there’s not a lot of housing there,” he said of the male prostitution section.

Although police make about 14 or 15 prostitution arrests each night throughout the city, nearly all of those involve female prostitutes, with some involving transgender prostitutes, who congregate near K Street, N.W., between Third and Fifth Streets, Bray said.

“By far, it’s female street walker prostitution and then there would be a much smaller category of transgender,” he said. “Male prostitutes would be the very lowest number of arrests.”

The most recent figures he has seen show that undercover officers arrest only about “two or three” male prostitutes or johns on any given night, Bray said.

“It depends on the weather. Sometimes there’s not a lot of people out,” he said.

Neither Walls nor his attorney could be reached by press time.

Phillips of the U.S. Attorney’s office said Walls is scheduled for an arraignment in D.C. Superior Court on May 15, when a police charging document will be filed for the first time in court.

According to Channel 4 News, District Heights Vice Mayor Eddie Martin said Walls told him “he is innocent and that the truth will come out in court.”

The District Heights city web site says Walls won election as mayor on May 6, 2006, making him the youngest person to ever serve as mayor and vice mayor as well as on the City Commission. The city has a population of 6,000. The site says Walls works full-time as town administrator for the nearby suburban Maryland Town of Fairmont Heights.
He is also a licensed and ordained Baptist minister, the web site says, and serves as associate pastor of Forestville New Redeemer Baptist church in Forestville, Md.

Under the District of Columbia’s SLIP and prostitution statutes, an arrest for soliciting prostitution is a misdemeanor with a maximum penalty of 180 days in jail and a $1,000 fine. A first time conviction almost always results in a suspended sentence with a period of probation, Bray said.

Rick Rosendall, vice president of the Gay & Lesbian Activists Alliance, said his group had not been aware that D.C. police were targeting male prostitutes and their customers in a sting operation. Rosendall said the group would have been outraged and would have planned a possible protest if it learned that police were using the SLIP statute to make non-prostitution arrests for men seeking out other men for pickups.

But he said the group also feels that making prostitution arrests against any group is a waste of police resources and prevents police from devoting more resources to addressing violent crimes, including murders. He said prostitution should be decriminalized, zoned and regulated.

“These people know that these kinds of laws don’t work,” Rosendall said. “They know that they can’t eliminate prostitution. They know this is a waste of time and it doesn’t solve any problem. It doesn’t help anybody. It only hurts people, “he said. “It makes absolutely no sense from a policy point of view and from an allocation of resources point of view.”

Bray said police initiate enforcement activity against prostitution in response to community complaints. Rosendall and Kameny, who has been a longtime advocate for legalizing prostitution, have said the neighborhood problems caused by street prostitution are a byproduct of a prohibition that forces prostitutes to ply their trade on the street rather than allow them to confine their activity to non-residential, designated areas that would become possible under legalization.

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