It\u2019s midafternoon outside KIPP Academy of Opportunity, a charter school serving children in fifth through eighth grade on South Figueroa Street in residential Los Angeles. As children inside prepare for their futures, a young female struts by in high heels, wearing nothing but a bikini and a jacket.\u00a0<\/p>\n
\u201cWe\u2019ll see some police officers roll by and some young women out here just prostituting. They\u2019re walking right by, and the police drive right by them,\u201d the school\u2019s gun-toting security guard said. \u201cIt\u2019s normal.\u201d<\/p>\n
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This is Figueroa Corridor, one of California\u2019s most notorious sex markets. Here, prostitutes gather, night after night, selling sex acts that, according to one former cop, cost as little as $25. Last year, members and associates of a gang were indicted<\/a> after allegedly trafficking adults and minors\u2014including foster children\u2014along the corridor and branding them with tattoos.<\/p>\n This was all the predictable result of public policy. In 2022, Governor Gavin Newsom signed<\/a> a law decriminalizing loitering with intent to commit prostitution. When he signed the bill, Newsom suggested it would help would reduce the harassment of women.<\/p>\n We went to Figueroa to see the results for ourselves. As we walked the corridor, saw the sex market, and rode along with a former LAPD vice cop, one thing became clear: on Figueroa, human flesh is big business\u2014something state leaders appear to have no desire to change.<\/p>\n The scene stretches across almost four miles of hot, dusty cement. Nearly nude women cluster at the start of side streets just off the main road. Lines of cars slowly cruise along, apparently hoping to buy. Pimps either oversee the prostitutes themselves, on a nearby phone, or through hired low-level watchers. Sirens blare constantly, but officers often just roll on by. When asked about activity on the corridor, one prostitute said, \u201cmoney and p*ssy,\u201d before twerking and walking away.<\/p>\n Stephany Powell, a former sergeant<\/a> in an LAPD Vice unit and former executive director at Journey Out, a Los Angeles\u2013based nonprofit serving human trafficking victims, rode with us along the corridor.<\/p>\n \u201cStatistically, the average age of entry for human sex trafficking is between the ages of 12 and 14 years old,\u201d she said. \u201cWe\u2019d see 14-, 15-year-olds that were out on the prostitution tracks. We also would see 25-to-30-year-olds . . . some of them had been out on the streets on the prostitution tracks since age 13. And in those cases, nine times out of ten, they had a trafficker.\u201d<\/p>\n Figueroa has been a sex-trafficking den for decades. But recent policy changes have made the corridor harder to police. In California, it had been a crime<\/a> to loiter with the intent of committing prostitution since at least 1995. Patrol officers could use this law to curtail the street market\u2014and stop, identify, and rescue trafficked minors.<\/p>\n That began to change in 2016. That year, then-Governor Jerry Brown signed<\/a> S.B. 1322, prohibiting minors from being charged with solicitation of and loitering with intent to commit prostitution. The law was arguably well-intentioned, reflecting a belief that trafficked children shouldn\u2019t be treated as criminals.<\/p>\n But that wasn\u2019t enough for the state\u2019s progressives. In 2021, State Senator Scott Wiener authored<\/a> S.B. 357, a bill that would fully decriminalize loitering with intent to commit prostitution. A trio of the state\u2019s most powerful progressive institutions\u2014the Anti-Defamation League, the ACLU\u2019s California chapter, and Equality California\u2014rallied behind the bill, which passed in 2022.<\/p>\n Governor Gavin Newsom signed the bill in July of that year, suggesting that it would reduce the \u201charassment of women.\u201d He also referenced \u201ctransgender adults,\u201d seemingly endorsing LGBT activists\u2019 view<\/a> that the loitering statute had criminalized \u201cwalking while trans.\u201d<\/p>\n \u201cBlack adults accounted for 56.1% of the loitering charges in Los Angeles between 2017-2019, despite making up less than 10% of the city\u2019s population,\u201d Newsom wrote. \u201cTo be clear, this bill does not legalize prostitution. It simply revokes provisions of the law that have led to disproportionate harassment of women and transgender adults.\u201d<\/p>\n Since the law\u2019s passage, however, Figueroa has more prostitutes than it did before. Before S.B. 357, Powell says she delivered around 30 makeup kits along the entire corridor each night that she engaged in outreach efforts. When we drove past a particularly active handful of blocks, Powell said that after \u201cS.B. 357 passed, we counted about 60 girls just from this track [alone].\u201d<\/p>\n More minors are apparently being trafficked, too. The Times reported<\/a> that LAPD Sergeant Al Navarro\u2019s officers, who work at the nearby 77th Street station, rescued<\/a> 123 children in 2024\u2014a nearly eightfold increase from 2022, the year before S.B. 357 took effect.<\/p>\n The law itself is driving these trends. Before S.B. 357, police officers could use a woman\u2019s attire and behavior to determine that she was loitering to commit prostitution. Once that behavior was decriminalized, prostitutes began wearing hardly any clothes\u2014and law enforcement found itself helpless to control the sex trade.<\/p>\n \u201cA lot of the girls hardly have anything on, they\u2019re practically naked. In many cases you can see right through whatever they\u2019re wearing,\u201d Powell said. \u201cBefore S.B. 357 . . . what would happen if we were working vice and we\u2019d see somebody out there like that, we could arrest them for solicitation of prostitution. Now, in order for you to arrest them for solicitation of prostitution, there has to be an act involved.\u201d<\/p>\n S.B. 357 has also enabled traffickers. In the past, a patrol officer could arrest a loitering prostitute to get her off the streets and encourage her to testify against a trafficker. Today, law enforcement has to use resource-strapped undercover units to target traffickers one-by-one.<\/p>\n \u201cSB 357 removed a key enforcement tool that kept communities free from red light blight,\u201d former Los Angeles County sheriff Alex Villanueva told us. \u201cThis ill-advised bill condemned the marginalized to be sex trafficked, and human trafficking has exploded.\u201d<\/p>\n The situation is so dire that the federal government intervened. In August 2025, First Assistant U.S. Attorney Bill Essayli spearheaded the region\u2019s first-ever RICO human trafficking case against the vicious Hoover Criminal Gang. Essayli\u2019s office charged six<\/a> members and associates of the Hoovers with various crimes, including sex trafficking of minors, money laundering, and sexual exploitation of a child.<\/p>\n The indictment<\/a> spells out the depraved allegations. The Hoovers and their associates allegedly targeted adults and children as young as 14; branded their victims with tattoos; and, in some cases, required their victims to secure $1,000 per night. In one instance, a Hoover associate and two unindicted co-conspirators allegedly tried to kidnap prostitutes from San Bernardino, a plot that failed only when the two targets broke free and escaped.<\/p>\n On July 1, 2026, a federal follow-up operation<\/a> took down another ten suspects, including the operator of a seedy motel, who was charged<\/a> with \u201cfinancially benefiting from the Hoover gang\u2019s sex trafficking operation.\u201d<\/p>\n City Journal\u2019s four-day visit to the corridor took place just before the second operation against the Hoovers and revealed the challenges faced by the ongoing federal efforts. Figueroa still pulsed with activity, with the entire apparatus of apparent prostitutes, pimps, watchers, and Johns out in the open for all to see. Police drove on by. Women walk the corridor, risking disease, beatings, and death with each step.<\/p>\n When he signed S.B. 357, Gavin Newsom suggested that the new law would help reduce harassment against women. What it enabled instead is a wave of crime, suffering, and abuse.<\/p>\n Christopher F. Rufo<\/a> is a senior fellow at the Manhattan Institute, a contributing editor of City Journal, and the author of America\u2019s Cultural Revolution. Kenneth Schrupp<\/a> is an investigative reporter at City Journal.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"It\u2019s midafternoon outside KIPP Academy of Opportunity, a charter school serving children in fifth through eighth grade on…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":390747,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[6],"tags":[7,9,8],"class_list":["post-390746","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-california","tag-california","tag-california-headlines","tag-california-news"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/390746","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=390746"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/390746\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/390747"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=390746"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=390746"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=390746"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}