"as part of an effort by the San Diego Police Department to reduce the impact of street prostitution in the city, police Chief William Lansdowne said in a statement. "

Must Read! This is exactly how the sting worked.

As luck would have it, this sting was going on across the street from my office. As far as I could tell there were three women acting as decoys, a cop staked out in my office parking lot, a cop parked behind the hotel, two 2 man marked units, and an ugly homeless guy hanging around the girls who may or may not have been a cop. I can’t tell you how many cops were involved in the booking process but there had to be some. This sting started around 12:30pm and was still going on when I went home at 5:00pm. When you consider the number of personnel involved and the number of hours it went on for, it adds up to a huge waste of resources. The women would hang around on the street and when cars would pull over to talk to them, the women would (I guess) try to get the guy to talk about sex for money or make some other incriminating statement. When the decoy had enough evidence they would get him to pull into the parking lot. They would then signal that they had enough for an arrest and then the marked units would sweep down on him, cuff him, throw him in the back of the unit and the passenger cop would drive his car away. The whole thing took about 60 seconds. I don’t know how the signal worked or if the decoy was wired or had a hidden radio. There are some very apparent differences between decoys and regular S/W’s. If you are crazy enough to pickup girls on the street, keep this in mind:

1. The decoys NEVER got in the cars.
2. The decoys never left the one block area so they could stay in observation range.
3. The sting was a one block stretch on El Cajon Blvd. between the Brookshire hotel and Taco Bell just East of Texas St.

Maybe next time I will take pictures of the decoys and see if NoStinkingBadges will put them on his website. Stay safe…

LTT