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Posted: Wednesday, 10 June 2009 6:14AM
Sheriff hires two ex-prostitutes to get information on pimps
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CHICAGO (STNG) - To help counter prostitution throughout Cook County, two former ladies of the night are on the county payroll.
Their task? To help get information from prostitutes Cook County Sheriff Tom Dart arrests during stings to nab the bigger fish -- pimps and human traffickers. Former prostitutes also share their stories to teach women they don't have to earn a living by selling their bodies.
"We were trying to use our brains" to fight prostitution, said Dart, who has been sheriff for about two years.
So far, Dart's office has partnered with the county Department of Women’s Justice Services for a prostitution sting in February and one in April. Sheriff's deputies arrested 11 women. Two women accepted the county's offer to help get them off the streets, Dart's spokesman Steve Patterson said. The other nine received a phone number for the women’s justice department, which connects the women to social service and substance abuse assistance agencies.
Reining in prostitutes and the people who pimp them out was just one of several initiatives Dart detailed during a luncheon Monday at the Tinley Park Convention Center. The Chicago Southland Chamber of Commerce hosted the event.
The sheriff said he still pursuing a lawsuit against Craigslist, the online advertisement site where he said prostitution ads are rampant. The online company has agreed to shut down its "erotic services" section.
Dart, who made the list of Time magazine's 100 Most Influential People of 2009 for refusing to evict people who live in foreclosed homes, also voiced concern for video poker. Legalizing the game, which some state lawmakers want to do, would be a "monumental disaster" because it often has ties to organized crime, Dart said.
His department doesn't have the manpower to monitor video poker, the sheriff said. Deputies are busy enough targeting gangs, dogfighting and financial and public corruption, as well as policing Ford Heights, Dart said. The sheriff's department took over the village's police department last year.
"I felt very strongly that we couldn't walk away from this," Dart said about Ford Heights, adding that his department has found cases that were never investigated and rape kits never processed.
And like most companies these days, the sheriff's department is tightening its belt. Dart is requiring any employee who drives a county squad car to live in Cook County. The sheriff's department, which has a $440 million budget, also has cut about 200 jobs in the last two years and is mandating furlough days. Dart's office this year saved about $1 million by privatizing electronic home monitoring.
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Copyright 2009 STNG Wire, The Chicago Sun-Times. All rights reserved.This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten, or redistributed.
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