Crackdown on prostitution is a first step for Warren

Warren’s days as Ohio’s massage parlor capital may be numbered after a sweep by city police and agents from Ohio Attorney General Mike DeWine’s office aimed at prostitution — and possibly human trafficking and money laundering.

Over a period of years, Warren became host to nearly a dozen massage parlors that were operating 24 hours a day and attracting customers from a radius that reached to Cleveland and beyond.

“Why Warren?” is a question that may never be answered, but a website that keeps track of massage parlors that traffic in sex identified 10 of the state’s 23 such establishments as being in Warren. The job of city officials from Wednesday forward will be to assure that as long as prostitution is illegal in Ohio, Warren does not once again become the state’s red-light district.

DeWine was emphatic Wednesday in asserting that an undercover investigation that his office launched turned up evidence of “a ton of prostitution.” That’s based on information received from an informant and on interviews with customers who were tracked down based on surveillance, including video cameras placed outside two places. There was also evidence to indicate that women working in at least some of the parlors were brought to Warren to work and were housed at the parlors under tight supervision.

Trafficking issue

As we said in January, when city council was mulling legislation to restrict the operation of massage parlors, some people believe that rampant prostitution has a deleterious effect on an area’s stability and economy, and others find it morally reprehensible, but anyone should see that indentured servitude is un-American.

A lawyer representing most of the massage parlors denies that any are involved in human trafficking. Evidence gathered in the investigation and raids should go a long way toward proving him right or wrong.

Human trafficking would be an aggravating factor in what the Mahoning Valley Organizing Collaborative referred to as Warren’s brothel industry. But even if every woman working in the parlors were as happy as the endings she provided her customers, Warren receives no benefit from its reputation as a haven for hookers.

To be sure, prostitution is not the only crime evident in Warren, but the fact that there are robberies, burglaries, drug-dealing homicides or street prostitution is not an argument for authorities to avert their eyes from the crime going on at massage parlors.

The answer to the question of which crimes the city should battle is all of them. That the city got some much needed assistance from De-Wine in stemming massage-parlor prostitution is a bonus. It allows local police to concentrate on other trouble spots.