They are almost all addicted to crack; they are for the most part freelance entrepreneurs who work without pimps, and they are part of what is believed to be the greatest number of women ever to ply the sex trade on the Island.
While yesterday's call girls worked with a fair degree of discretion and usually behind closed doors, today's genre are freewheeling streetwalkers who flag down cars by lifting their miniskirts still higher and smiling or sticking their tongues out at commuters leaving railroad stations. Then they have sex with customers in their cars, parked in secluded corners of parking lots. You never saw a streetwalker like on 10th Avenue in Manhattan. These girls are on the street night and day, developing their own clientele.
As much as they earn, they spend it almost immediately on drugs. They are serious crack addicts. Darius Perry, made 44 arrests for prostitution in the first five months of In the same period in there were arrests. Sergeant Perry noted that those numbers do not include any of the arrests made in what he refers to as ''Nassau's hotbeds of prostitution, the villages of Hempstead and Freeport. In Suffolk County's five westernmost towns, there were 17 arrests for prostitution in In , there were Crack began encroaching into the suburbs in and that year there were arrests.
By , the figure rose to In , in the town of Babylon alone there had been over prostitution arrests by late November. Sometimes when we pull up, we see a male and a female together. She's a prostitute and he's selling drugs. Spending their earnings immediately is one way for these women to protect against losing it to the johns. They're easy prey, so most of them carry some sort of weapon, a knife, a razorblade, a hairpin or an Afro comb. The johns can get very violent.
Most of the women, Sergeant Perry, said never file a police report: ''They write it off as an occupational hazard. Otherwise they'd have to go to court and they doubt they would be believed. It's a tough life out there. The enormous increase in crack-connected prostitution has been coupled with a concurrent rise in the numbers of these women who test positive for syphilis. According to Kenneth T. Bomeisel, Long Island director of sexually transmitted diseases for the New York State Health Department, 60 to 65 percent of women arrested for prostitution in Nassau and Suffolk test positive at one time or another for syphilis.
