Over half of the 110 men busted in a prostitution sting in Bellevue last summer are off the hook, the Seattle Times reports.
During the sting, which took place this past August, the Bellevue Police Department and King County Sheriff’s Office placed fake online listings advertising sex work. The buyers, who included a whole bunch of tech workers and a local sports radio personality, were later arrested after showing up at a condo where they thought they could buy sex. Unfortunately for law enforcement, the police mistakenly recorded audio between the wannabe sex-buyers and undercover cops posing as sex workers, and because Washington state requires two-party consent to record audio conversations, those charges have now been dismissed by the city prosecutor.
From the Times:
Bellevue Police Chief Steve Mylett said Friday that his officers are working to figure out exactly what happened, but there’s a good chance there was a mechanical glitch with the camera equipment used in the August operation. He noted that audio was captured during a particular time frame of the weeklong operation, but not during arrests outside that period.
“Nobody was wired for sound and there were no microphones” set up in the room where undercover officers greeted men who had answered online ads and communicated with the officers by text or phone, Mylett said.
“We can’t use audio and everybody knew it. There was no way in the world that any of the officers were going to jeopardize this operation,” he said.
Whatever the reason for the error, 61 of the 110 johns are now off the hook. Perhaps the police will shift their focus to a much more serious threat to public health than non-trafficked adults consensually buying and selling sex: dogs in restaurants.
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