Who Is Pimping Whom on Figueroa St.?

The New York Times is finally upset about child sex exploitation in L.A., but won't tell us who is at fault.

From the New York Times:

Can Anyone Rescue the Trafficked Girls of L.A.’s Figueroa Street?

Inside the effort to pull minors from ‘the Blade,’ one of the most notorious sex-trafficking corridors in the United States.

By Emily Baumgaertner Nunn

The reporter embedded with vice investigators as they carried out undercover operations to arrest sex traffickers. She interviewed dozens of victims, experts, aid workers and officials to understand the crisis.

Oct. 26, 2025

There’s a lot of good on-the-spot reporting in this article about the streetwalker stretch (“the Blade”) on Figueroa St. in South-Central Los Angeles south of USC:

… Over the years, the Blade had become much busier than when Ana started: more girls, more customers, more traffickers idling in their Hellcats and Porsches on the side streets, watching to make sure their girls didn’t hide any money and didn’t snitch. Ana had seen the Blade expand from three main intersections of Figueroa to more than three miles. She had met girls brought in from the East Coast and the Deep South, and there sometimes seemed to be four times as many minors as before — easy to spot by their over-the-top makeup and unsteady gait. The police helicopters Ana used to notice hovering overhead with search lights seemed to become infrequent. Eventually, she said, they disappeared completely.

In the shadows, Figueroa had become more violent. The younger the girl, the more customers would pay, which meant preteens were often being robbed and assaulted by groups of older girls trying to make quota. The traffickers who governed the street were worse. Tonight Ana was waving at cars in front of a tire shop when a trafficker pulled up on the wrong side of the street, climbed out and beat one of the girls near Ana over the head with a pistol. The girl had probably looked at him wrong, Ana decided. She knew better than to intervene.

But, plenty of obvious questions are left blurry or unanswered:

For example, why did streetwalking disappear from the expensive parts of town, like the Sunset Strip where it was big in the 1970s, (I presume, due to the rise of the Internet), but is now exploding in the 2020s in South Central?

The article at least offers a sketchy answer to the latter:

For the 77th Street Division, which covers the northern half of the Figueroa Corridor, prostitution had always been a problem. But in recent years, the officers had seen the magnitude of child sex trafficking explode. Part of that boom happened during the pandemic, when many girls were out of school and immersed in social media, where traffickers lurked. Teachers who would ordinarily follow up on absences or report signs of neglect could not.

Gangs that had long sold drugs began to take advantage of Figueroa’s lucrative opportunity. With a dozen girls, one trafficker could easily make $12,000 a night. “Drugs are sold once and gone forever, but girls can be resold indefinitely,” said Navarro, who had been in the division for two decades. Motel owners who noticed the parades of customers but feared the gangs’ retribution kept quiet.

As trafficking grew, the means to deal with it shrank. In 2021, the Police Department’s central human-trafficking unit was disbanded following budget cuts, leaving each division fewer resources to tackle the problem. According to Navarro, the 77th Street Division was supposed to have six investigators at Armendariz’s rank in its vice unit. Instead, she was the only one.

Their jobs grew even more challenging when California repealed the law allowing the police to arrest women who loitered with the intent to engage in prostitution. The repeal, known as SB 357, was intended to prevent profiling of Black, brown and trans women based on how they dressed. But when it was implemented in January 2023, the effect was that uniformed officers could no longer apprehend groups of girls in lingerie on Figueroa, hoping to recover minors among them.

Uh-oh.

Now officers needed to be willing to swear they had reason to suspect each girl was underage — but with fake eyelashes and wigs, it was nearly impossible to tell. One girl told vice officers that her trafficker had explained things succinctly: “We run Figueroa now,” he said.

Great work, state legislature! Heckuva job fighting racism.

Soon every intersection from Gage to Imperial had girls waving and waiting to be rented out, some of them imported by traffickers from Oregon or Texas or Alabama. By the end of 2023, the city attorney had taken to calling Figueroa the Kiddie Stroll because so many of the girls weren’t even 13.

By the way, who sponsored SB 357 the so-called Safer Streets for All act?

Paywall here.