A group of strip clubs have released a study showing that such clubs don’t attract crime.
The study, which is said to have examined police responses over an eight-year period at three Seattle strip clubs, says that there was no evidence to show that they needed more police attention than other businesses, the Seattle Times reported.
The study was part of an effort in support of a referendum placed on the Nov. 7 ballot by several area clubs that aim to overturn the city’s tough ordinance regulating clubs that was approved last year. Under the measure, dancers are required to remain at least four feet away from customers at all times. It also bans the direct tipping of dancers and also requires brighter lighting at clubs.
City officials said they had not seen the study, but nonetheless dismissed it, saying it was biased on behalf of the clubs.
Daniel Linz, a professor of communication and law and society at the University of California, Santa Barbara, conducted the study for the clubs. Linz is said to work for the adult entertainment industry regularly in order to dispute claims that it attracts crime or other negative after effects.
The study examined the clubs Rick’s, in Lake City; the Déjà Vu, near the Pike Place Market, and the Sands club in Ballard. Only Centerfolds, the other licensed club in the city, did no participate in the study.
According to the study, police responded to about 1,200 service calls at a Fred Meyer store on Lake City Way between March 1998 and June 2006, compared to just 375 at Rick’s during the same period.
Most police activities at Rick’s and other clubs involved undercover vice inspections to determine whether dancers were violating rules barring sexually touching patrons. The study said that most of those inspections have been reduced over the last few years due to budget cuts and by shifting members of the vice unit to other areas such as liquor inspections and street prostitution.
The study contends that such decline in inspections shows that law enforcement does not view strip club activities as a threat to public safety.
But Assistant Police Chief Linda Pierce said that the number of police calls does not mean strip clubs are any safer than other businesses, adding that she felt that strip club patrons are unlikely to call police if they see a crime take place in a club.
Police said they frequently cite dancers for violating the city’s sexual contact rules with customers when undercover officers are sent to clubs. The city has suspended the licenses of 114 dancers for various rules violations since 2002, of which 26 were reversed on appeals, the city’s licensing office said.
