Last spring, a police sergeant in Arkansas's second-biggest city, Fort Smith, noticed an affidavit that a colleague had submitted after making a prostitution arrest.
The document states that the suspect met the cop at a motel, where she advised him to "get comfortable" i. Don Paul Bales had received the affidavit via a cell phone photo sent by another officer. It bothered Bales such that he showed it to his supervisor, complaining that it described a violation of department policy against sex while on duty. This triggered a series of events that, in part because Bales was already engaged in a whistleblower suit against the department, may have compromised the undercover officer's identity and led to the department's firing Bales.
Are cops legally allowed to buy sex? I got a crash course in the subject last spring when covering the fight in Hawaii to scrap their exemption allowing on-duty police to have sex with prostitutes. To my knowledge, Michigan is the only state in the country where that's still legally permissable. During my reporting last year, I reached out to other Associated Press statehouse bureaus to crowd-source that determination; separately, a prostitution researcher I'd called for information came to the same finding.
Bridgette Carr, the director of the Human Trafficking Clinic at the University of Michigan Law School, tells me the clinic is drafting language suitable for a bill on the matter, with hopes that a lawmaker will take it up this year. As Michigan's legislative session revs up, lawmakers ought to shed their ignominious distinction as the only state that allows cops to have sex with prostitutes, even if or perhaps because departments tend to set their own boundaries with this sort of thing.
Honolulu police testified to a House committee last year that the old Hawaii exemption was necessary for their jobsβnot because police were, in fact, having sex with prostitutes, they said, but because writing such restrictions into law provided instructions for pimps and prostitutes to smoke out undercover cops.
