This is the first of a two-part series on prostitution in Champaign-Urbana. Part one focuses on Champaign, and part two, which focuses on Urbana, will appear tomorrow.
Where Bradley and Market Streets meet, there’s a funeral home, a muffler repair shop, a brand-new Family Dollar store and a closed-down restaurant. But according to Sergeant Dave Griffet of the Champaign Police Department, this is also a corner where prostitutes do business.
“It’s still a prominent area that we’ve found that there’s been acts of prostitution that continue to occur,” Griffet said.
Just how big of a problem prostitution is in Champaign-Urbana seems to be a matter of dispute. But the prostitutes themselves seem to be as easy to find as a phone call, an email or a drive down to one of the more notable neighborhoods.
Lerna Hyatt lives on Walnut Street in Champaign, not far from Bradley and Market. She says she sees five or six prostitutes in her neighborhood on a regular basis, and can hear them outside her house, sometimes starting as early as five or six in the morning.
“It’s usually every day,” Hyatt said. “They would go out in the street and try to flag down cars.”
Bernie Carver, outreach coordinator for Positive Options, Referrals and Alternatives, a Springfield organization offering a treatment program for former prostitutes, said most women who sell sex are coerced into the profession by other people.
“It really is the modern version of slavery, in my opinion, and not something that people voluntarily do,” Carver said. “I don’t know of any healthy person who wants to expose themselves to violence or potentially fatal sexually transmitted diseases just to make some money.”
Hyatt said she once witnessed a pimp hiding in the bushes, yelling at a prostitute standing in the street and telling her to “earn her keep.”
“These guys that are running them, they treat them like dirt,” Hyatt said.
Hyatt said newspaper coverage of police activity shows more arrests of prostitutes than of people controlling them, and said the police should watch prostitutes to see who they give their earnings to before arresting them.
“You’ll never see where they arrest the pimps, and I don’t understand that,” Hyatt said. “That ain’t right.”
Champaign police officer Kristy Miller said she is aware of five to 10 women who work regularly in Hyatt’s neighborhood, and that she believes the prostitutes when they say they are not working for anyone else.
“These girls are on their own,” Miller said. “They don’t need anybody to make a deal for them. I don’t think they’re big enough or organized enough to have pimps.”
Miller said the kinds of men Hyatt are referring to could be boyfriends or drug dealers. As for the yelling and screaming, Miller said, “that’s part of their culture.”
Hyatt also said she witnessed a “knock-down, drag-out” fight between two women competing over a customer. “Prostitutes get down on the ground, fussing, fighting, pulling hair,” Hyatt said. “It’s unbelievable.”
Griffet said he didn’t think anyone who sells sex for money does it for pleasure. “Most of [the prostitutes] are drug and alcohol abusers,” Griffet said. “This is how they earn money to feed their habit. Sometimes, while they might not get caught for prostitution today, maybe they’ve been arrested for retail theft. A lot of them have some criminal histories.”
Hyatt said she has seen women change over time as they work in her neighborhood, becoming thinner and “twitching around, jerking their shoulders” from the effects of drug addiction. “It ain’t too long before you start seeing them getting real messed up,” she said.
Griffet said Champaign police carry out a couple details per year targeting prostitutes in an effort to get them off the street. “Often times we get a lot of complaints from the residents, because maybe themselves or their children or other people that they know … may be getting harassed,” Griffet said.
Hyatt said her son lives nearby, but she doesn’t let her grandchildren cross the street to his house because women will try to proposition them. “They’ll say, ‘Come on, baby, come on,’” Hyatt said.
Hyatt said her late husband used to spend a lot of time on the phone complaining to the police about prostitutes, but it didn’t keep the women from their trade. ”[The prostitutes] circulate in a four-block radius,” Hyatt said. “Once they start noticing [the police], they’ll just make a circle around the block.”
Hyatt’s neighborhood is not the only known area where prostitution occurs. Miller and Griffet both said the area around Fourth and Washington streets in Champaign also has some activity. “We still occasionally get the calls of truck drivers picking up ladies and being at motels on North Neil Street,” Griffet said.
Part two will publish tomorrow December 11, at 10 a.m.