Erie County, NY — When it comes to the government, in general, the notion of ‘do as I say, not as I do’ rings true through every level, from the parking transit officer to the president.

Hypocrisy is a function of the state.

The citizens of the US are often reminded of this hypocrisy when members of the government commit such heinously criminal and hypocritical acts that they are cast out from their curtain of government protection.

The most recent case of this hypocrisy comes from a cop in Erie County whose job consisted of locking people up for engaging in prostitution as well as numerous other crimes. Wallace Waliczek, 52, and a deputy with the Erie County sheriff’s department, was arrested this month on prostitution-related charges. He was arrested by the Human Trafficking Task Force with the Lancaster Police Department on charges of promoting prostitution. The prostitute he was “promoting” was his own wife.

As the Buffalo News reports:

That arrest came after his wife, Melissa Waliczek, was charged by Lancaster police with prostitution over the summer.

One of the department’s detectives was tipped off that an escort service may be operating in the town and set up a meeting, said Lancaster Police Chief William Karn Jr.

Melissa Waliczek was arrested in a parking lot on Transit Road, near William Street, on Aug. 16, Karn said.

After news of his arrest was made public, the sheriff’s department responded by suspending the deputy.

“On or about Oct. 8, the sheriff and undersheriff issued a letter of suspension to Deputy Waliczek,” sheriff’s spokesman Scott Zylka said Saturday in an email, according to Buffalo News. “The suspension took effect immediately, and it was a suspension without pay.”

Zylka provided few other details according to the paper.

“I know our Human Trafficking Task Force was involved with this and I don’t know if they had a lead, if they received a tip or worked in conjunction with, because this is still developing,” Zylka said. “The Human Trafficking Task Force is still looking into the incident.”

While we don’t know the details of how hard this deputy was promoting his wife’s prostitution, if it was all completely voluntary, there should be no crime—except for the fact that this hypocrite put people in cages for doing the same thing.

Sadly, however, in the Land of the Free, it is against the law to get paid to have sex — outside of Nevada — unless that sex is filmed, distributed on DVD or online, and taxed. One of the least talked about systems of oppression in the US is that of persecuting prostitutes.

When referencing prostitution, we are talking about the mutually beneficial exchange of sexual favors for money by two or more consenting partners; not forced human trafficking.

It’s called the “oldest profession in the world” for a reason. Sex is a basic human need. One need only observe the explosive population growth of humans in the last 10,000 years to see that desire to mate is inherent in each and everyone one of us.

When one takes this into consideration, the notion of outlawing consensual sex is seen for what it is, sheer insanity.

Just like the war on drugs creates crime by pushing the unending demand for illicit substances into the black market, the war on the sex trade creates crime in the same manner.

Because the demand for sex is pushed into dark alleys and late night street corners, a woman working in the sex trade becomes far more vulnerable than if they were legally allowed to operate out of brick and mortar setups. This danger of working on the street drives the need for protection from pimps who are often more abusive than any customer would be.

Despite the tens of thousands of arrests each year, the market has found a way to provide the service of sex using safer solutions. In spite of the laws, sellers of sex have found ways to safely conduct business by setting up “massage” parlors, using phone books, and, of course, the internet.

A recent study of how Rhode Island accidentally legalized prostitution actually proved this situation.

The study, titled: Decriminalizing Indoor Prostitution: Implications for Sexual Violence and Public Health examined a period of time in Rhode Island in which the state accidentally decriminalized prostitution. 

In an incredibly ironic move, Rhode Island lawmakers sought in 2003 to strengthen its laws on prostitution. When the law was rewritten, however, its careful wording accidentally left out the language to explicitly forbid indoor prostitution. This created a loophole that essentially legalized indoor prostitution.

Because changes in government come at such a gruelingly slow pace, that newly created loophole—effectively the function of a bureaucratic typo—stayed on the books for a whopping six years after they noticed it.

Since it was now technically legal to operate indoor brothels, the trade exploded in Rhode Island, creating a larger market and driving down prices. While this expansion of the market would be easy to predict given the legislation, the other factors were not.

What the authors of the study found was the decriminalization of prostitution sent sexual violence rates plummeting.

According to the study, the decriminalization of prostitution reduces sexual violence rates by 30%.

What’s more, not only does it decrease the rates of rape but it also saves the taxpayers dearly.

Rape has high direct costs to society. McCollister et al. (2010) using contingent valuation techniques estimate that the cost per rape offense is $240,776 in 2008 dollars. This estimate includes both tangible cost such as criminal justice costs and intangible costs such as pain and suffering. Therefore, decriminalization has the potential to result in large savings in terms of rape offenses.

Decriminalization also has a dramatic effect on the rate of sexually transmitted diseases. Because prostitutes aren’t forced to conduct their trade in back alleys and on the street, facilities provide a far safer environment by providing condoms and testing their workers.

The result of decriminalization cut the spread of Gonorrhea nearly in half.

Gonorrhea rates among women in Rhode Island fell 40 percent between 2003-2009 and 25 percent among men.

Despite prostitution arrests across the country dropping from 2001 to 2010, the cost of arresting people for sex remains staggeringly high. Individual cities continue to spend up to $23 million a year stopping people from having voluntary sex.

Meanwhile, involuntary sex goes uninvestigated at an alarming rate. Hundreds of thousands of rape kits are sitting in police departments across the country — collecting dust, as cops petition the government to allow them to have sex with prostitutes so they can then bust them.

In police state USA, truth is stranger than fiction.

Article posted with permission from Matt Agorist