Craigslist is on Missouri Attorney General Chris Koster's shit list. Koster wants the online marketplace to clean up its "erotic services" ads, close them or face legal action.
"If 85 percent of the transactions in a given market were for crack cocaine or for child exploitation services, no one would tolerate them for an instant."This week's Pitch feature story looks at Craigslist and the growing scrutiny the online marketplace is facing in the wake of the alleged Craigslist killings.
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I think they are missing the point -- the only way to keep the hookers out of the personals is to give them their own space.
Besides which -- it seems to me that as jjskck mentioned, if the police can't / won't combat prostitution when the prostitutes put their pictures and phone numbers on line, you really can't blame the messenger.
If crack cocaine dealers put their pictures and numbers on line, the cops would be ecstatic, because they could sweep in and arrest them en masse.
Drugs and Prostitution are end products of poverty and a lack of education. If you are not willing to commit resources at a governmental level to deal with these environmental factors, don't bleme the media -- and Craig is essentially a media at this point.
He is not a pimp: Craig does not get commission in any way from ES (and I doubt he wants it); ES is to Craig essentially a way to bleed off off topic sex worker posts from the rest of the site.
Criminilization has proven to be a failing strategy when dealing with widespread and culturally accepted (if not embraced) activity. There is ample evidence that regulation and social services have a better track record with destructive activity than the penal system. At some point scientific governance needs to apply itself at this situation as well.
One nutjob offs hookers and happens to have found them on Craigslist. I knew it would be mere weeks before someone proposed legislation.
Seriously--this isn't Craigslist's responsibility. It's a lo-fi classified ad emporium. If people are stupid enough to openly use it as a prostitution front, let the cops handle it. Or don't. I don't care. Stop wasting your time making stupid laws and get something measureable accomplished for once.
And comparing handjobs to crack and child trafficking?
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