Police drive violence in the unregulated drug and sex work markets

Police forces have a vested interest in continuing to manage the sale, procurement and consumption of sex work labour and certain drugs – through the criminalization of both.

And this vested interest is reflected in police messaging uncritically reproduced by too many media outlets.

Law enforcement organizations across Canada – most of which are funded publicly – are in a conflict of interest against what is best for the general public by any reliable measure when it comes to the sex work and drug markets. The fact that drug prohibition and the criminalization of sex work give rise to violence is not a contentious idea, it is settled knowledge.

The forever toxic drug emergency impacts people who do sex work labour in uneven and violent ways, especially with the rise in intentional and unintentional use of sedatives mixed into the deregulated synthetic opioid supply. Despite this, Canada’s faltering media continue to invest their credibility in police public-relations statements.

And while law enforcement across Canada work to obscure causes of violence and fuel moral panics, they also actively drive harm. This occurs when they conduct raids on massage parlours or initiate cycles of criminalization against sex workers, unregulated drug market workers, and consumers of both.

Driving panic
In a significant example of police-triggered harm in a major Western Canadian news market, a carefully crafted police news release led major Calgary newsrooms to report that a woman was arrested and several massage parlours were shut down after an investigation found "links" to human trafficking.

The Alberta Law Enforcement Response Team (ALERT) claimed immigrants were being exploited, and a charge of advertising sexual services was laid. Supporting Women's Alternatives Network (SWAN) Vancouver, which met with workers at two massage parlours two months before ALERT shut them down, later confirmed with Alberta Courts that the accused was also charged with three counts of drug possession and careless use or storage of a firearm.

Not a single charge of trafficking in persons was laid, and the largely minor offences were omitted from police messaging. ALERT presented the operation as the heinous crime of human trafficking to justify police enforcement – and the loud announcement that accompanied it.

The Calgary Police Service and RCMP members who make up ALERT acted against all evidence that proves shutting down safer workplaces pushes sex work underground, where workers are at greater risk of being attacked, robbed and exploited. ALERT also worked with Canada Border Services, putting sex workers with precarious citizenry at dual risk of domestic criminalization and deportation.

Among im/migrant sex workers, there is systemic and reasonable distrust of the police forces who raid their workplaces. This, along with labour and safety implications and the evidence against criminalization, was a key piece of the story that could have been conveyed by media. Police successfully diverted journalists away from these perspectives, including SWAN, which was ignored when it contacted reporters to offer interviews on the case.

Destabilizing consumer markets
The relationship between raids, seizures and busts of illicit opioids with overdose and other violence is not new information. Despite this, even somewhat critical reporting cannot shake the tendency to both-sides the argument.

What has brought more attention to the endless spectacle of these destabilizing practices is the tragic increase in acuity of harm. More than 47,000 people have died in Canada from apparent opioid and stimulant overdoses since 2016. This loss does not account for indirect, premature deaths caused by the ongoing toxicity of the supply or the violence that shapes the unregulated market.

Law enforcement practices are making the toxic drug crisis and sex workers' health worse, and their public messaging both celebrates and obscures this.

Power of carceral public relations
When Canada’s National Action Plan to Combat Human Trafficking launched in 2012, $5.3 million out of a total $8-million initial budget went to law enforcement. Since then, the Edmonton Police Service rebranded its VICE Unit to a Human Trafficking & Exploitation Unit. By 2020, ALERT launched its own human trafficking unit.

Police are incentivized to lead journalists and the public to support crisis-level enforcement interventions to combat human trafficking, and misleading news releases are one tool to spread moral panic. Ironically, law enforcement in Squamish, BC had no problem debunking viral posts about traffickers when this moral panic strategy backfired and officers were blamed for not acting to stop trafficking in 2019.

Federal spending on a response to the drug poisoning crisis shares a parallel logic.

When the Public Health Agency of Canada released its 2023 audit of the national “Drugs and Substances Strategy,” it showed that 58 per cent of funding went directly to law enforcement organizations – initiatives that overwhelmingly aggravate drug supply toxicity. A majority of the remaining funds were allocated to other law enforcement or criminal justice programs or collaborations, with only eight per cent going to harm-reduction initiatives. Even then, just a fraction of that went into actual (rather narrow) interventions into the toxic drug supply.

While reliable and robust media publications struggle to find their footing, law enforcement public relations machinery is allocated more funding to fill the information vacuum with its own self-serving narratives.

In a recent example of this, police forces across Canada spent public money to campaign against social service budgets. Local ‘copaganda’ initiatives across the country include a Toronto Police $337,000-per-year podcast, the Vancouver Police spokesperson’s blog, the National Police Federation’s 3rd party campaign in the 2024 BC election, and Alberta police chiefs coordinating anti-decriminalization messaging in sync with the 2023 UCP election campaign.

This is only compounded by decades of social inertia – partly reflective of who has traditionally been employed in Canadian newsrooms and who has been excluded – where police have been treated as a trustworthy source of information.

Undoing carceral media
Both Canadian drug control laws and sex worker consumer-side criminalization are not only about drugs or sex work. Many of these policy frameworks are about displacement, disposability, control over people (particularly those who are Indigenous and/or racialized), migrants and exclusion from public space.

Through these policy decisions and funding choices, we exclude from everyday life those who use, sell, procure, solicit and/or possess drugs and sex. As austerity, inequality, and the accompanying carceral crackdowns increase, the levels of harm against the public do too.

And when journalists mimic police talking points, they are only extending that same carceral grasp.

The work of media should be rooted in unpacking and challenging power. Instead, many working in media either can’t find the resources to resist or seem content to comply, placing trust in policing institutions that continue bringing violence and disorder into communities, even beyond prohibition. This includes through expensive (and endless) decampments, interference in overdose response and prevention, workplace raids, actions that render healthcare less accessible, weaponization of mental health apprehensions, and through direct killing.

Media outlets can do better, even in the current resource-starved climate.

Independent media are scrutinizing news releases to the ire of police forces, while emerging journalists are taking a critical look at reporter-police dynamics, Indigenous-led platforms are taking control of their own stories, and we know there are reporters within mainstream media fighting pressure from the police and even their own editors to maintain the status quo.  

The publications with the most success in disrupting the news cycle and its reliance on police sourcing have done the difficult work of reckoning with how that trust has distorted their reporting and caused adverse effects on communities. These newsrooms are also reducing risks to journalists by supporting critical investigative stories and standing behind reporters who face backlash, online harassment and attempts to discredit their work.

The longstanding treatment of police as a trusted primary source has damaged reporting accuracy and ethics. It’s time to let go of this unfortunate legacy. Journalists may point to exclusion zones and the arrests of colleagues as evidence of law enforcement trying to hide their actions, but it doesn’t have to be as extreme or obvious as physical barriers and handcuffs.

Manipulating the media is often a subtler practice that begins with news releases delivered directly to reporters’ inboxes. If journalists viewed those news releases as one of the first places to start holding powerful and well-funded forces to account,  public discourse would edge closer to the truth.

Tyson Singh Kelsall is a PhD candidate in Simon Fraser University’s Faculty of Health Sciences, a researcher with P.O.W.E.R., and an outreach social worker in Vancouver.

Crystal Laderas works for SWAN Vancouver, which promotes the rights, health and safety of im/migrant women engaged in indoor sex work. She is a former journalist who now manages ResponsibleReporting.ca.