Strangely it wasn't just the police that were responsible for the crack down but council ineptitude. At that time, the abolitionists phrase instead of "prostitution and trafficking" was "prostitution and drugs." If someone wasn't heavily opposed to prostitution, you could try to pin them down by classing prossies with hard drug abuse, as if you couldn't have one without the other. There were plenty of prossies on drugs but far from all of them and the ones that were high or desperate were usually easy to spot after two minutes of chat before agreeing on an arrangement.
But Edinburgh and Glasgow had opposite policies on hard drugs. (The Edinburgh SW prossie scene at the time was smaller, but reasonably flourishing.) One of the main concerns of Edinburgh Council was stopping the spread of HIV, one of the main routes of course of which is needle sharing. Edinburgh initiated a needle-exchange program so that drug users were less afraid to come forward and could get free new needles instead of sharing someone else's, together with outreach programs run well by ex-addicts so they could get prescription substitutes.
Glasgow took an opposite approach, a sort of ill-judged zero tolerance, which kept the drug users well underground. Another big difference between Edinburgh and Glasgow was that Glasgow had fairly regular headlines about prostitutes being murdered. Edinburgh however did not. It seems fairly reasonable to surmise that the spate of murders was linked not to the fact that the women were prostitutes but that they were pimp-controlled drug-users.
In other words, Glasgow's murders were largely preventable. Punters don't generally go round murdering prostitutes; drug supplying pimps who are owed money probably do.
The story in Edinburgh is slightly different. The traditional street area mostly in the triangle formed by the Waters of Leith, North Junction Street and Commercial Street. When the developers started building new residential property people were slightly understandably concerned about the value of the property if the streetwalkers continued (not that they were particularly bothering anyone: people got the houses cheap precisely because it was a run-down area). In an attempt to provide a tolerance zone, the prossies were moved to the area further east, near Salamander Street and Salamander Place. However the areas there that are fully non-residential are badly lit and very dodgy looking at night. Residents starting making a lot of noise, particularly Muslims surprise surprise (again, the area has been cheap as chips for years, some of the prossies actually lived there, so you could say it was a bit ripe complaining). Then the politico abolitionists stepped in.
The abolitionists are still fighting for measures to make life even more intolerable for punters and prostitutes irrespective of every bit of reputable research that shows that their attitude is dangerous, not least to the women concerned, and whose voice they refuse to allow.
