1989 DC Prostitute Expulsion

The 1989 DC Prostitute Expulsion was the attempted forced removal of a group of suspected sex workers by members of the Metropolitan Police Department of the District of Columbia on July 25, 1989. Police officers, frustrated by inability to clean up the prostitution problem in D.C.'s 14th Street red-light district, where several police districts came together and prostitutes could easily avoid enforcement efforts by crossing the street, ordered a group of scantily clad women to march from the Thomas Circle area, down 14th Street toward Virginia via the 14th Street Bridge.

As the hapless parade passed the Washington Monument about 1:30 in the morning, Washington Post reporter Bill Dedman happened by in a taxi on his way home from the Post newsroom, and began interviewing police officers and the women. He ran to the Agriculture Department building across the Mall to use a pay phone to ask the Post metro desk to send a photographer. Before a photographer could be sent, Post photographer Stephen Jaffe also happened by on his way home from another assignment. He began taking photos, causing the police officers to flee.

The women never crossed the bridge, but photos of the parade on the bridge's approach ramp demonstrated the police officers' intent to make them march into Virginia. After the police left, the women were driven back to Thomas Circle by men in vans, which had been following the parade at a distance, and were back on street corners within half an hour.

In The Washington Post the next day, Dedman and Post police reporter Jeffrey Goldberg recounted the events:

District police have started a new push on prostitution -- all the way to Virginia.

Beginning about 1:30 a.m. yesterday at 14th and M streets NW, officers rounded up 24 women from downtown street corners and ordered them on a forced march to the state line.

The angry line of women, many of whom were dressed in leather miniskirts and brightly colored tube tops, ambled 1.4 miles down the left lane of 14th Street, through the business district and across the Mall, grumbling and carrying their spiked-heel shoes all the way.

A police scout car with flashing blue and red lights led the procession and another brought up the rear.

"They said they were taking us to Virginia, that we could work over there," said a woman who identified herself as Toni. "They said we'd go to jail if we stopped."

-- Bill Dedman and Jeffrey Goldberg, The Washington Post, July 26, 1989, March Clears Out Prostitution Zone; D.C. Police Criticized After Ordering Women to Walk to Va. Line^[1]

The next day, after politicians from Virginia complained, others noted that Virginia police had sent homeless people across bridges into D.C.^[2]

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