From [HERE] Typically the term "profiling" is used in discussions of the way police target young men of color, especially for drug crimes or weapon possession. And much police profiling is, in fact, of this type. New York City's stop-and-frisk policy, for example, disproportionately affects black and Latino men—so much so that in 2011 the New York Police Department (NYPD) actually conducted more stops of young black men than there are young black men in the entire city.

As a new report makes clear, however, police profiling isn't only focused on men. The Red Umbrella Project (RedUP), a peer-led Brooklyn organization that advocates for sex workers, has just released the results of a year-long study of New York's Human Trafficking Intervention Courts (HTICs). These courts are intended to provide alternatives to incarceration for people charged with prostitution-related offenses. But while HTICs goal may be humanitarian, their proceedings seem tainted by racial bias. In Brooklyn—where blacks make up about one-third of the total population—black defendants faced 69 percent of all charges brought before the trafficking court. And they faced a whopping 94 percent of charges on the offense of "loitering for the purposes of prostitution."

Loitering for the purposes of prostitution is a particularly subjective charge, heavily based on individual officers' perception of criminal behavior. As Audacia Ray, the director of RedUP and a former sex worker, explained, "the bar for proof of loitering for engaging in prostitution is much lower than for proving a person has been doing prostitution." Loitering charges don't require an exchange of sex for money and are "really based on … what the cops observe and what they say they observe."