Between 1990 and 95 as part of a mobile support unit, I worked regularly in Glasgow city centre. Patrols would often focus around the area where street prostitution took place. Heroin was starting to flood into Glasgow, and almost without exception the women who worked the streets were addicts, as were their stick-men. They sported the heroin-chick look before that became a thing. Business was done down dark lanes, and robberies of punters were a regular occurrence, many carried out by the stick-men. I never charged anyone with importuning, but when women were checked out on the police national computer, they often had convictions for this. My involvement in the main, was taking reports from punters, who’d been robbed. The whole thing was dismal; for the women, the stick-men and the punters. Around the same era, my late elder brother introduced me to music of the Dead Kennedys. The lyrics of the track ‘Police Truck’ are etched into my brain. It was about a police unit, possibly similar to mine, in the LAPD. The fictional unit’s conduct described in the song, was nowhere near my reality, but the closing line finishes the song perfectly, and is very darkly funny: ‘Dispatch calls, are you doing something wicked? No siree Jack, we’re just giving tickets!’ Anyway, prostitution seemed from my perspective, a truly dismal business to be involved in.
Sorry to hear about your treatment by the surgeon. I watched Hardcore years ago and thought that all his films have the same faults and qualities. I recently watched a disturbing film on the porn industry on Mubi, Pleasure.
Between the Jade video and Katy Perry’s latest, I think TikTok attention spans have a lot to answer for.
Between 1990 and 95 as part of a mobile support unit, I worked regularly in Glasgow city centre. Patrols would often focus around the area where street prostitution took place. Heroin was starting to flood into Glasgow, and almost without exception the women who worked the streets were addicts, as were their stick-men. They sported the heroin-chick look before that became a thing. Business was done down dark lanes, and robberies of punters were a regular occurrence, many carried out by the stick-men. I never charged anyone with importuning, but when women were checked out on the police national computer, they often had convictions for this. My involvement in the main, was taking reports from punters, who’d been robbed. The whole thing was dismal; for the women, the stick-men and the punters. Around the same era, my late elder brother introduced me to music of the Dead Kennedys. The lyrics of the track ‘Police Truck’ are etched into my brain. It was about a police unit, possibly similar to mine, in the LAPD. The fictional unit’s conduct described in the song, was nowhere near my reality, but the closing line finishes the song perfectly, and is very darkly funny: ‘Dispatch calls, are you doing something wicked? No siree Jack, we’re just giving tickets!’ Anyway, prostitution seemed from my perspective, a truly dismal business to be involved in.
Sorry to hear about your treatment by the surgeon. I watched Hardcore years ago and thought that all his films have the same faults and qualities. I recently watched a disturbing film on the porn industry on Mubi, Pleasure.