I think the best situation is with friendly police and social worker semi-invisible presence. It was the situation back in the day in Edinburgh's Leith. The girls were relaxed enough to chat to so it was relatively straightforward to find one that was just a relatively normal prostitute, ie a woman who needed to make enough extra cash for her rent or spawn or family groceries. The police, if encountered were there equally sympathetic to working girls and punters. They kept a look out for 'real' crime (like prossies that tried to steal or punters who were violent or abusive) and didn't take much of a moral stance one way or the other on the prostitution aspect. The one time I had got a warning the officer seemed almost apologetic, saying the car was in a relatively public place and someone could have walked past and objected (people objecting give the police extra work). It was quite a pleasant patch where they did business, approximately in a prossie triangle of The Shore, Coburg St, North Junction St and Commercial Street.
The first hint of the downward slide came when property investor bastards decided to gentrify the area. The posh cunts who bought the new flats, quite understandably, objected fannies getting shagged almost outside and in sight from their nicely manicured apartments. So they moved the 'tolerance zone' to a shitville area of factories and low-income migrant dwellings bordering Salamander Street. In the process, the religious right started polarising the issue (and in contrast to Margo MacDonald MSP, a Scottish icon and one of the few politicians ever to be in touch with the voice of ordinary people). The area was less safe for punters and for prossies (dark streets off a fast main road). But the real clanger came when the great unwashed 'Muslim' community started taking to the streets. Their houses, at that time at least, were among the shittiest in Leith but they protested their 'rights' not to have prossies within hundreds of yards of them. (Some of the prossies actually lived there, minding their own business or waiting until their shit-for-brains husband had fucked off down the pub. One of my regulars was like that. Fit young mixed race woman, about 22. Another I used to pick up nearer the Meadows, not bothering anyone or looking at all indiscreet, and we'd drive to Restalrig for lots of sucking and fucking. She only got out two or three times a week and seemed to look forward to it. She was early 30's, between a 12 and a 14 which is slightly lardy for me but her enthusiasm more than made up for it. I only once picked a coke-head by mistake and aborted when she tried to pinch my wallet. Told the coppers and the other girls, who (both) would 'spread the word.' )
Muslims, not proper decent Muslims but the ragheads of the mental achievement not far removed from the north England groomers or the ban-the-bottle nutters in that nice street parallel to Smithfields in London, would start 'patrolling' and issuing threats to punters and abuse to the prossies. The abolitionists must have been delighted that such scum were doing their work for them. Next thing you know there's an enormous poster over the Western Approach 'warning' men that there is a massive new fine for picking up an SW. So now only crackheads and other illicits risk going out at night to shagland. But at least we have brothels and AW, and we are broad minded enough to say that homo ex-Bizzie can keep his shirtlifter massage clubs after all the trouble he caused here if come thru from Glasgow (a place of intolerance where Jeremy might have heard the basis of his lorry driver kills a prossie joke). Aye, thank guid for Edinburgh, a civilised place where sanity reigns (at least until we get too fuckin pissed to care...)
