"Round Up the Usual Suspects"

So Rick's was raided on Wednesday night:

P-I night reporter Scott Gutierrez was out on the scene and reports that police arrested 14 dancers and one manager for what a police spokesman said were violations of the city's adult entertainment ordinance.

Hmm. 14 dancers and a manager. Who's missing?

Right. The johns. Well, maybe there weren't any customers there at the time, with a squad of Seattle's Finest patronizing the place?

No, that's not it: "it closed about 9:45 p.m., with customers told to leave and dancers being lined up for questioning."

Commenters at the Slog and the PI have all weighed in on what a waste of police resources this kind of bust is. And we agree -- we think consenting adults should be able to show and see boobs offstage, and get lap dances. And by "lap dances" we don't mean "hand jobs"; if we meant hand jobs we'd say hand jobs.

But we suspect the real violation is prostitution. Rick's has a reputation as a jack shack. Our own commenters have said it, lots of nudge-nudge-wink-wink references to "mileage" on strip club discussion lists have said it. Writer and former Rick's dancer Elisabeth Eaves said it in her book Bare:

To say that Rick's was not a church, as Mike had, was wild understatement. At Rick's, one quick glance around the back bench, which was in the area that was darkest and farthest from the door, revealed women giving hand jobs. Some girls did it on their knees, between the men's legs; others straddled the men, and I could see their forearms pumping up and down. Others "breast-fed," as I heard one dancer call it, and some had devised a sort of backward hand job, in which the dancer straddled the man with her back to him and reached around behind. Later I met a former bouncer who told me he had seen a woman have anal sex with a customer on the back bench. Another ex-employee said that condoms were often found between the cracks in the bench cushions. A dancer at Rick's named Lara told me that not all shifts were the same--at night there were more customers, and the girls could make money dancing clean. She called the day shift women "the cream team."

So here's the thing: if all that was going on was boob-flashing and "illegal touching," we think the whole bust is a waste of time. If what's going on is prostution, though, we repeat: where are the arrested johns? Equal time for equal crime, that's our motto. (Our guess: bad as PR is about busting strippers, it'd be a lot worse if guys who couldn't be written off as skanks in the popular imagination got arrested with them. Or maybe there was no prostitution and the SPD enjoys vice raids.)

We're not even enthusiastic about busting prostitution. We've got a crazy social libertarian streak and figure that if two people want to have sex, even if the reason is one of 'em's paying for it, so what?

We do have an idea for productive use of police time in strip clubs, though. A lot of people didn't care for the anti-lap-dance stripper we interviewed last month, but one point she made (and a number of commenters supported her on) is that lots of men getting lap dances assault dancers. They touch, bite, rip costumes, feel up, try to finger, etc.

If the cops are going to spend time in strip clubs -- and who could blame them? -- they should go after those guys, the ones who aren't satisfied with something that should be naughty and fun and turn it into sexual assault.