The Paw Print

A news publication created by Baruch's College Now high school journalism class

DENISE PU-FOLKES

Prostitutes Being Recruited at Children’s Shelter

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The ACS (Administration for Children’s Services) Children’s Center is supposed to help the most needy and vulnerable children in New York City. Unknown to the public, the Children’s Center is also a place where many teenage girls enter a life of prostitution, often being recruited by pimps or other girls in the system so they can afford tattoos, drugs and alcohol.

The kids in the Children’s Center range from a day old to 18 years of age. ACS takes children from parents the agency deems negligent and receives uncared-for-children who require shelter.

Through interviews with a former ACS guard who worked at the Children’s Center, a NYPD official with knowledge of the criminal investigations connected to the Children’s Center, and a private investigator who has expertise locating missing and exploited children (including those who absconded–fled to avoid detection of or arrest for an unlawful action–from the Children’s Center), much has been revealed on what goes on at the Children’s Center.

The former ACS guard explained that ACS, “Will only physically stop children from leaving the Children’s Center when they are 13 or under.” Any child over 13  can come and go as they please, making it easier for them to go out and sell their bodies. The NYPD official reported the drain and cost on police resources from the shelter was staggering, so much so the 13th precinct where the Center is located prepared a report suggesting that ACS bear the cost for police services related to runaways from the Center.

To make things worse, the private investigator stated that, in his experience, “Over 60% of teenage girls who run away are involved in the selling of their bodies. These girls eat, sleep and shower at the Center, leave from the Center in the evening to meet their pimps and sell their bodies, then return to the Center after a hard night’s work. Pimps find this such a profitable arrangement that they’ve directed their young sex workers, sometimes under threat of harm, to recruit other teenage girls from the Center to enlarge their stable, and there’s been very little ACS has done.”

Transit Cops Target Teens for Jumping Turnstiles

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“I swear, this was some 21 Jump Street s–t,” said high school sophomore Stephanie.

After watching a fight between some people from school, Stephanie and her friends went to a subway in Midtown to go home. The station was empty except what appeared to be a couple of teenagers. Without any money to pay their fares, Stephanie and her friends decided to jump the turnstile. Those other teenagers in the station turned out to be undercover transit cops. Unfortunately for Stephanie, the cops were about to let her and her friends go free but, according to Stephanie, one of her friends “decided to be a b—h and gave the cops a fake name and address” so the cops gave them tickets.

Stephanie and her friends aren’t the only teenagers to get stopped for jumping turnstiles. It turns out transit cops have been arresting and giving tickets to a lot of teenagers recently. In an interview, a transit cop stated they “target high school kids because they’re the ones who do this a lot and they’re easy arrests.” He then went on to say, “The majority of their arrests are theft of service and their primary goal isn’t to make the subway safer, it’s to show an increase in arrest activity.” Cops who make more arrests are given more days off, better assignments, and overtime.

Instead of looking for more serious crime, transit cops target teenagers for fare beating when the teens are either going to school or coming home from school. These transit cops will either dress up to blend in with teenagers or hide cameras and stay concealed in MTA rooms, waiting for their next target.

An MTA manager confirmed that “transit cops regularly use their (MTA) rooms… and the police are oftentimes observed playing games on their phones or just hanging out.” A police supervisor within the transit bureau stated, “It’s an occasional problem that creeps up every so often and when it gets too bad, management has to do something to get them to stop going in the MTA rooms.” Management is trying to get the transit cops out of the MTA rooms so that they will stop hanging out and start doing their job. The police supervisor further explained, “The problem, though, is when they try to keep the cops out of MTA rooms, the arrest activity goes down so they basically have a blind eye toward cops using the rooms because they want arrest activity to be up.”