The police-as-pimp metaphor

As this article reveals, however, police abuse of sex workers did not go unchallenged. Indeed, sex workers and their allies adopted the police-as-pimp metaphor to counter popular ignorance of, or support for, police exploitation. In the language of scholars Laura Winters and Gayle MacDonald (Reference Winters and MacDonald2025, 2024), by “talking back” to power, sex workers were “using their interpersonal interactions” as a “form of resistance.” By the late 1970s, activists argued that the police were no better—and, in some ways, far worse—than the stereotypical pimps often depicted in police propaganda and popular media. For example, a “Whore’s Handbook” circulated by the sex workers’-rights organization COYOTE in 1978 argued that male agents of “government” and “bureaucracy” fostered a “pimp mystique” in their relationships with women sex workers that “insures his needs taking precedent over hers” (Coyote Howls 1978, 14). Mixing metaphors, activists also likened cops to clients of sex workers, as when the first World Meeting of Prostitutes awarded one of its 1976 “Trick of the Year” awards to “all the boys in blue” engaged in “enforcement dragnets” (International Coyote Howls 1976, 6). Even the Atlantic Monthly employed the metaphor in the title of a January 1977 article, “The Biggest Pimp of All,” exploring the decriminalization of prostitution across the United States (Vorenberg and Vorenberg Reference Vorenberg and Vorenberg1977). Ironically, the authors derived their title from a quote given by, of all people, the chief of the New York Police Department (NYPD) Vice Squad, who likened municipal courts to pimps for forcing convicted sex workers back into the streets to pay exorbitant fines. Ignoring the role his own officers played in bringing sex workers before the courts, the chief insisted the city was the real pimp, not the police (Vorenberg and Vorenberg Reference Vorenberg and Vorenberg1977). Anticipating cops’ dismissal of the metaphor, the “Whore’s Handbook” included an “editor’s note” reading: “The worst possible pimp is one who doesn’t admit to being one” (Coyote Howls 1978, 14).

Certainly, the police-as-pimp metaphor rests on an elastic reading of the interpersonal relationships that police officers forged with sex workers. Yet activists who employed the analogy drew from academic, experiential, and commonsense conclusions about the basic nature of pimping. In 1986, economist Helen Reynolds (Reference Reynolds1986) published The Economics of Prostitution based in part on research she conducted in the Combat Zone in the early 1980s. In her chapter on pimping, Reynolds noted that one legal definition of a pimp was someone who was “supported from the proceeds of prostitution” (30). While most police officers did not directly derive income from the profits of sex work, many gleaned material benefits from its operation, including salaried positions in vice units, overtime pay, bribes, sex, and information. According to Reynolds, pimps received abstract “benefits” from their role in the sex trade as well, including “a feeling of power over their women” and “a degree of prestige within their own peer group” (26–27). Likewise, vice officers derived power and prestige from managing prostitution. While Reynolds found that some “pimps provide the women with affection, concern, or love,” other scholars note how police officers developed feelings of paternal care—if not love and affection—for sex workers, particularly juveniles, whom they wanted to “protect, parent, and rescue” (Smith and Mitchell Reference Smith and Mitchell1984, 56–57). Indeed, Reynolds (Reference Reynolds1986, 25) concluded: “For some pimp and prostitute relationships there is a great deal of mutual respect, affection, and trust.”

Eager to turn sex workers into informants, police officers also employed a mix of fear, respect, and trust when dealing with women on the streets. While most observers—especially police officers—would reject likening police to pimps, activists’ expression of the epithet drew from a logical interpretation of the facts as they perceived them. Moreover, activists condemned not only individual officers but also entire police departments and municipal governments for exploiting sex workers. Indeed, many activists believed that state action created modern pimping in the first place. For example, according to historian Cynthia Blair (Reference Blair2010, 2), Progressive Era policy decisions forced many sex workers, especially Black women, to rely on pimps for protection as sex work evolved “from a late-nineteenth-century economy in which the majority of black prostitutes worked in brothels … to a trade in which most struggled to earn ‘just one lousy dime’ on the streets.” Indeed, Blair argues, “men’s control of women’s work pace, earnings, and bodies did not emerge as an endemic feature of urban prostitution until after 1920,” largely as a result of state policy and enforcement decisions (10).

Outside activist circles, however, the police-as-pimp metaphor failed to take hold. After all, the language was inflammatory and offensive to the majority of the population who carried favorable, or neutral, opinions of the police. Even some police critics balked at the analogy or preferred using other language to critique departments. Yet racial dynamics also diminished the reach of the metaphor as well. After all, both words—pimp and police—came loaded with racial meaning. Simply put, many observers associated “pimping” with the Black “trickster” and “policing” with white authority (Quinn Reference Quinn2000, 118; Singh Reference Singh2014). To those who carried these associations, pimping and policing were direct opposites. The police as pimp metaphor thus fit awkwardly—or not at all—with a sizeable portion of the populace conditioned to imagine one opposed to the other. Indeed, it was the very incongruence of the police-as-pimp metaphor that explains its power.

Although this article focuses on Boston, variations of the metaphor appeared during this time in other locales. For example, when police in Madison, Wisconsin, declared a “war on prostitution” in July 1983, activists accused public officials of amassing funds—some forty thousand dollars by September alone—on the backs of sex workers, most of whom had to return to sex work to pay the $250 fines imposed by police officers. Organizing a mass protest, feminists rallied around the theme “city as pimp” (A. L. G. 1983, 36). Also in 1983, a male sex worker wrote to a gay liberation magazine to criticize a police officer who opposed the sex trade. “How much money has he made off the laws against prostitutes?” the writer asked, “How much overtime pay? How many times has he pulled a suspect off the street, abused her, forced her to hand over her money to pay a fine and stigmatized her with a criminal record that will keep her on the game?” Voicing a familiar refrain, the author concluded, “Now who is a pimp?” (D’Avanzo Reference D’Avanzo1983, 5). The metaphor also appeared outside the United States. During a sex workers’ strike in France in 1975, for example, a sex worker accused police and other public officials of exploiting women for personal gain. “All these fines they make us pay and all these taxes—who gets the profits from all that money?” she asked, adding, “Already it is the state itself that is the biggest pimp of all” (Coryell Reference Coryell1975, 7). While few people other than sex workers and radical feminists employed the metaphor, historical evidence supports the claim that police officers regularly wielded their lawful, and lawless, discretion to get what they wanted from sex workers.

Police discretion to abuse power in prostitution enforcement

In the most extreme cases, members of the Boston Police Department (BPD) actually violated departmental regulations and even broke the law in order to benefit from the illegal sex trade. Indeed, officers not only accepted gifts, bribes, and payoffs in exchange for not enforcing prostitution laws, but some also directly threatened, robbed, and sexually assaulted sex workers in order to satisfy their own desires. In November 1976, the BPD’s Special Investigations Unit (SIU)—a seven-member body established in 1973 by reform commissioner Robert diGrazia to uncover police corruption—released a bombshell report that exposed how officers benefited from sex work. The report found that District One officers—who patrolled downtown Boston and the Combat Zone—often chose not to enforce prostitution laws in exchange for benefits from businesses, organized crime outfits, and sex workers themselves. According to the report, “the inaction by the District One command” in regard to “illegal sexual activities” went beyond the exercise of normal police discretion and rose to the level of “corrupt neglect.” Police commanders facilitated “gross purposeful neglect” of the sex trade, the report added, “because such activities enhanced the business prospects of the bars, hotels and other adult entertainment facilities within the district” (Connolly Reference Connolly1976, 1). Of course, officers would not allow sex work to flourish in local businesses without getting something in return.

Indeed, the report alluded to a range of ways in which officers and supervisors benefited from selective enforcement of sex work in the Combat Zone. “It is inconceivable,” the report concluded, “that any command superior officer would chance a charge of incompetence and/or corruption without being duly rewarded by those benefitting from purposeful police inaction.” Implying that officers accepted direct financial payoffs to ignore prostitution laws, the SIU also found that District One officers and command staff regularly received free or discounted services, food, coffee, alcohol, apparel, other commodities, and tickets to concerts or sporting events from local hotels, bars, restaurants, and entertainment venues, including the Boston Garden (Connolly Reference Connolly1976, 1). Finally, the SIU accused officers of receiving what the press dubbed “sexual favors” from sex workers as well (Boston Herald American 1976b, 3). Considering the unequal power dynamic between sex workers and vice officers, the euphemism “sexual favors” masks what might be characterized as a bribe, at best, and as sexual assault, at worst. Then and now, Bostonians had a name for someone duly rewarded for facilitating the paid sexual labor of women—that person was known as a pimp.

The SIU report also highlighted more direct ways that officers received compensation for facilitating sex work. Sometime in 1974 or 1975, a military policeman (MP) on leave sat in a bar in the Bay Village when a sex worker allegedly solicited him for prostitution. When he refused, the woman complained to a bouncer and a BPD officer assigned to “paid detail” at the bar. Learning that the man was a MP, the bouncer told him to leave. When he again refused, the police officer allegedly “assaulted him and threw him out.” When the MP returned demanding the cop’s name and badge number, the officer, the bouncer, and two other District One patrolmen “kicked and beat him.” While the BPD’s Internal Affairs Division found the allegations “not substantiated,” the SIU concluded that “this incident discloses the typical relationship between prostitutes, bars and Boston police officers.” Patrolmen and detectives helped adult establishments maximize profits by selectively enforcing prostitution laws in exchange for payoffs. Indeed, the report found that “police staged raids on prostitutes only when the public and the media demanded it” and that “such raids were often used as a smokescreen to take attention away from other forms of criminality” (Boston Herald American 1976a, 3; emphasis added). Receiving direct payment from establishments trading in sex work, police officers working paid details or moonlighting as bouncers benefited directly from the sexual labor of women under their watch.

Yet the most alarming cases involved officers actually committing crimes against sex workers. According to the SIU, District One employed two unnamed officers—known as the “Golden Boys” because their supervisor felt they “could do no wrong”—who regularly “pick[ed] up prostitutes in the Combat Zone and threaten[ed] them with arrest and prosecution if the prostitutes failed to satisfy the officers’ sexual desires” (Hawes Reference Hawes1976, 13). After assaulting the women, the officers would release those sex workers who were white in “secluded spots” in District One while dropping so-called “black prostitutes” in occupied areas of District Six—the notoriously anti-Black community of South Boston—where officers would create “a disturbance, usually horn-honking, to draw the white residents’ attention” (Boston Herald American 1976b, 3). Also accused of beating up the patron of a gay bar, assaulting a “passive drunk” on Tremont Street, and cultivating a “district-wide reputation for brutality,” the Golden Boys prompted the SIU to recommend criminal charges, including those of kidnapping, extortion, and robbery (Hawes Reference Hawes1976, 13). “We have given much consideration,” the SIU concluded, “to the illicit activities of the aforementioned two officers because of strong suspicions that an undetermined number of other police officers assigned to District 1 were and still are similarly engaged in such practices.” Moreover, the report continued, additional police personnel “had knowledge of such practices and did not report such practices to anyone in the department internal control units.” Overseeing the rank and file, “command and supervisory staff” also knew of these crimes and “by their criminal neglect permitted and promoted such associations.” Despite the extreme nature of the crimes reported, most media coverage of the SIU report focused on the payoffs and other corruption, ignoring or burying accusations that an “undetermined number” of officers were forcing women to have sex with them under threat of punishment (Hawes Reference Hawes1976, 13). Of course, Bostonians also had a name for someone who forced women to have sex against their will—that person was known as a rapist (Cone Reference Cone1977, 8).

Throughout this period, sex workers—especially those soliciting clients on the streets—remained the most vulnerable people involved in the sex trade. For example, the SIU report found that District One command staff selected patrol officers and detectives to act as “go-fors”—or menial errand boys—who would direct communication between the police and known criminals or other “notorious persons.” It was not always safe, however, for these go-fors to speak directly to underworld figures. Accordingly, the SIU reported that “[o]ne of the methods for alerting such persons of a planned police operation by special (police) units was to make multiple arrests of prostitutes. Such activity had the effect of warning the entire district that ‘the heat was on’” (Boston Globe 1976, 12). While police officers capitalized on sex work, they also betrayed sex workers when necessary to protect themselves or others. Police got what they wanted—high-profile raids to placate critics and provide a “smokescreen” for widespread corruption (Boston Herald American 1976a, 3). Indeed, Janet Parlin of the Prostitutes Union of Massachusetts (PUMA) told reporters in January 1977 that a recent “crackdown” on sex workers in the Combat Zone was nothing more than a “grandstand play by police officials to counteract former Police Cmr. Robert diGrazia’s adverse Special Investigative Unit [sic] report on police corruption in District 1” (Boston Globe 1977, 20). Organized crime figures, petty crooks, and pimps also got what they wanted—protection from politicized police raids. Only the sex workers suffered.

Police discretion to coerce sex workers into becoming informants

Sex workers and their supporters likened police to pimps not only because officers took payoffs from sex-trade operators and extorted money and services from accused women but also because officers coerced sex workers into serving as informants in other investigations. “In these cases,” argued Williamson and coauthors (Reference Williamson, Baker, Jenkins and Cluse-Tolar2007, 29), “[police officers] may get to know women on the streets to find out pertinent information on those involved in larger crimes.” As a sex worker in New York explained in 1974, the women who were being exploited and beaten by pimps were “the same women” who were also “threatened and terrorized by the police who want them to act as informants in drug cases” (Pandora 1974, 1). When the NYPD launched a “Pimp Squad” in 1976 to arrest men for sex trafficking, for example, officers patted themselves on the back for treating sex workers “like human beings” and helping the occasional “young girl in trouble” (Klemesrud Reference Klemesrud1977, 20). Yet, according to feminist activists, even as Pimp Squad officers handed their business cards to sex workers on one street, “their counterparts on the vice squad” arrested them around the corner, all to turn them into “unpaid informers” (Galloping Horse Reference Horse1978, 10). When looking to recruit sex workers, officers chose the carrot—promising them freedom or protection from violent customers—or the stick—threatening arrest or ignoring men who attacked them. Either way, sex workers entered a lopsided and transactional relationship with capricious cops who only helped them in return for some clear benefit.

Vice officers understood that their discretion whether to arrest someone for prostitution or related charges gave them incredible power to coerce something of value from women desperate for leniency. Precisely because they had so much to lose, police departments and their representatives consistently opposed legislation to decriminalize prostitution (Blake Reference Blake1977, A1). “White male judges, cops, that’s their turf,” argued renowned sex workers’ advocate Margo St. James in 1979, “[t]hey don’t want decriminalization. There goes the payoff” (Epstein Reference Epstein1979, 6). But it was about more than blackmail and bribes. Authorities also guarded their power to flip sex workers into informants. After all, by preventing detectives from leveraging prostitution arrests for information, decriminalization would rob police of a tool used to clear cases in more serious drug and homicide investigations. “Prostitutes are easy marks [for arrest] and are in no position to take the pressure,” St. James explained, adding: “Decriminalizing prostitution would shut down [the police department’s] informant network” (Zinberg Reference Zinberg1978, B5). Like St. James, who founded the sex workers’ rights organization COYOTE in 1973, sex workers everywhere understood that, in a pinch, they might trade information for favorable treatment by the police. Like a real-life get-out-of-jail-free card, the right information might help a sex worker avoid punishment, so long as they were willing to cooperate and the officer honored the arrangement. Indeed, prostitution laws provided police officers with great discretion to exploit sex workers for personal or professional gain.

For example, in November 1976—the same month that the SIU report hit the front pages—a twenty-six-year-old white sex worker named Donna understood that her fate hinged on what she could deliver for the police. When officers looked to boost their arrest statistics, Donna offered them an easy mark. Indeed, she experienced multiple arrests for prostitution during an eighteen-month stint working the Combat Zone in the mid-1970s (Cullen Reference Cullen1976, 29). A week after the SIU dropped its report, however, a Black man stabbed a white Harvard University football player named Andrew Puopolo in the chest during a brawl in the zone. While Puopolo lay dying in the hospital, detectives claimed that the brawl occurred after Puopolo and his friends pursued a Black woman sex worker who allegedly stole one of their wallets (Banks Reference Banks1976, 3). The Puopolo stabbing drew sensational news coverage and brought community pressure on the police to clean up the city (Brogan Reference Brogan2021). Donna had nothing to do with these events. Nor did her former pimp, an older Black man already facing criminal charges. With all eyes on the Combat Zone, however, Donna suddenly found the police eager to publicize her role in finding him guilty of “deriving support from a prostitute,” the first such conviction in Boston in over a decade. “We have a strange relationship with the prostitutes,” said a vice officer who guarded Donna in court before and after the unrelated Puopolo stabbing, “[w]e bust them and they hate it—well some of them do anyway. But they also know when the chips are down that we are the only people they can turn to” (Cullen Reference Cullen1976, 29).

Yet, for most sex workers, the chips were down most every night, and few turned to the police for help unless already in custody. “The police are the enemy,” explained a former sex worker in 1980, “[t]hey’re not a friend. And so when you get in trouble, or when you want to get away from a pimp, or you’re mad at him, the impulse is there, the knowledge is there, that you can sign on him [with the police]. But there’s so much social pressure against doing that!” (Kinesis 1980, 18). According to the Boston Herald American, Donna only came to vice detectives with accusations against her pimp because she knew the officers from “previous encounters with the law”—in other words, her own arrests (Corsetti Reference Corsetti1976, 3). While officers agreed to protect her from retaliation during the trial, it is not clear if they also offered her immunity from criminal charges. Yet she remained free following the trial, so it is possible that the police coerced Donna to testify with a quid pro quo (Cullen Reference Cullen1976, 29).

Although Donna’s former pimp—allegedly, the “biggest pimp in town”—received a maximum sentence of two-and-a-half to three years in state prison, the vast majority of convictions related to prostitution fell not on the men who profited from women’s sexual labor but, rather, on the women themselves (Corsetti Reference Corsetti1976, 3). For example, compared to zero convictions for pimping in the ten years prior to 1976 and only twelve pimping arrests between 1969 and 1973, the BPD made eight hundred arrests for prostitution in the Combat Zone in 1971 alone (Blake Reference Blake1971, 1; Boston Globe 1973, 3). Just weeks prior to the conviction of Donna’s pimp, for example, the Boston Globe reported that “97 young women under [age] 17”—not to mention adult women—were arrested in the Zone the previous year for “prostitution, common street walking and running away.” While detectives bragged that the conviction of a single pimp would show “that we will protect a girl,” the extreme disparity of arrests of sex workers versus arrests of pimps or johns suggested otherwise (Fripp Reference Fripp1976, 55). Indeed, considering Donna’s multiple arrests in a short span, it is clear that officers only protected her because she could deliver a rare conviction in a politically charged case.

As was common in 1970s Boston, race and class played a role as well. As law scholar Suzanne Bouclin (Reference Bouclin2006, 99) argues, issues of race and class and “the manner in which these systems intersect with gender is highly relevant” to research in sex work. Indeed, Donna was a young, white, college-educated suburbanite from a “professional background.” Her pimp was an older Black man (Cullen Reference Cullen1976, 29). Officers may have been less willing to protect Donna had she been a Black woman from a less-privileged family. As Fischer (Reference Fischer2022, 119) writes of 1970s Boston, because “the presence of Black women downtown was tightly associated with violence and crime,” police officers wielded discretion to treat Black sex workers differently—and with less care—than white sex workers. Residents’ intersecting identities helped determine their experience with the criminal punishment system and its agents.

A further opportunity to explore the relationship between police and sex workers arose in winter 1979 when someone discarded the bodies of two Black teenage girls—fifteen-year-old Christine Ricketts and seventeen-year-old Andrea Foye—outside a shoe factory in the Roxbury neighborhood of Boston. Both girls were strangled. One was left in a trash bag, the other in a duffel bag (BPD 1979l). Within hours of the discovery, investigators labeled the girls sex workers (BPD 1979f). Newspapers repeated the allegation throughout the coming days and weeks (Barnicle Reference Barnicle1979b, 15; Loth Reference Loth1979, 6). Yet Ricketts and Foye were only teenagers—legally, still minors. While evidence surfaced that both girls performed sex work in the weeks leading up to their deaths, they can best be understood as victims of sex trafficking, not perpetrators of sex crimes (BPD 1979h). As an older woman told public officials at a community meeting days after the murders, “[t]hey weren’t whores what was killed, they was just little girls who got kidnaped” (Barnicle Reference Barnicle1979a, 13). While the speaker could only speculate on the circumstances of the crime, detectives soon formulated a similar narrative through their contacts with the girls’ friends, families, and acquaintances, including sex workers who encountered Ricketts and Foye in the Combat Zone (BPD 1979q).

Indeed, patrol officers and detectives immediately took to the streets to ask informants—including persons they identified as “prostitute[s]” and “pimp[s]”—what they knew about the murdered girls. In one memo, Patrolman Gary Bratsos explained how relationships he had built with informants during an earlier assignment helped him locate information on the murders. Bratsos described how a “white female prostitute known to me” approached him with information about the identity of the killer, an alleged “black male ‘pimp’” often seen in the Combat Zone. Later, Bratsos and his partner, Henry Nelson, “met with a black informant” who knew both victims “and their ‘pimp,’” whom the informant helped identify. Sitting in a police car, Bratsos and Nelson also “observed two female white prostitutes who are known to us and who have given us reliable information in the past.” Drawing them over, Bratsos asked “if they knew the victims, to which they responded that they knew both of them.” When Bratsos showed them photographs of Ricketts and Foye, “one of the girls broke down and cried.” Composing herself, she revealed that she “knew the pimp of both girls” before describing him in detail. The women—described by Bratsos as “our two informants”—also led officers to a hotel where the alleged pimp stayed with both victims. A clerk provided the man’s name and registration cards that the suspected killer had filled out on behalf of himself and the girls in recent weeks (BPD 1979h).

By his own admission, Bratsos knew that his informants broke prostitution laws on a regular basis. But he chose not to arrest them in order to develop a mutually beneficial, if unequal, relationship. These informants understood, however, that Bratsos could threaten their freedom at any moment. While detectives had already identified the suspect through interviews with the victims’ friends and family, the material gleaned from informants—including sex workers—helped corroborate details and build a case for criminal charges (BPD 1979l). The emerging narrative portrayed Ricketts and Foye in a tragic light. Chris Ricketts grew up in a middle-class household, attended prestigious Brookline High School through a voluntary busing program, encountered some unknown difficulties at home, met a man ten years her senior, dropped out of school, and wound up on the streets. Andrea Foye grew up in one of the city’s most isolated public housing projects, attended predominantly white South Boston High School through the city’s forced busing plan, dropped out of school, left home, and met Ricketts and the same older man who had preyed upon her. The alleged pimp, Dennis “Jamal” Porter, reputedly forced both girls to solicit men in the Combat Zone (BPD 1979m; McMillan Reference McMillan1979, 8; Pollard, Fields, and Osgood Reference Pollard, Fields and Osgood1979, 1).

Both girls also attracted unwanted police attention. In the fall of 1978, according to police files, Foye, still under eighteen years old, was arrested and booked under an alias for an undisclosed crime, perhaps prostitution (BPD 1979b). On January 2, 1979, Ricketts—still only fifteen years old—was arrested on LaGrange Street for soliciting an undercover vice officer (BPD 1979q). Ricketts and Foye each provided fake names and ages. It is possible that the arresting officers had no idea how young they really were. Yet, by all accounts, Ricketts and Foye did not look like adults. Others who saw them that winter easily marked them as teenagers. Indeed, prior to identifying their bodies weeks later, the medical examiner estimated both girls were between fourteen and seventeen years old based on appearance alone (BPD 1979i). Confronting underage girls on the streets, officers selected from a range of choices. They could have ignored the girls altogether, told them to go home, given them a warning, taken them into the station before releasing them, investigated how they wound up on the street, located who put them there, contacted their families, placed them with social service agencies, or otherwise approached them with care and concern. Simply put, the police could have protected Ricketts and Foye. Instead, they chose to arrest them, charge them, and release them back onto the street where they were soon murdered.

A year after the murders, Margo St. James (Reference St. James1980) argued that police discretion not only helped draw women into sex work but also prevented them from leaving. According to St. James, officers made choices about which sex workers to target for arrest. Rather than target women employed by “parlors and escort services”—often run by organized crime figures who paid off the police—officers directed the bulk of their enforcement toward the “most visible” sex workers, usually the “young and poor” forced to ply their trade on the streets. By arresting the most vulnerable women—including those wrongly accused—the police engaged in the “official labeling” of already marginalized people, often preventing them “from gaining other kinds of employment” (8). Even Donna, who testified against her pimp in court, argued in 1976 that pimps “especially” came “in handy” after an arrest when they paid bondsman and “court fines.” Of course, Donna admitted, she was back on the street “within an hour” to repay the debt (Cullen Reference Cullen1976, 29). Thus, St. James argued, police departments helped “maintain an endless supply of branded women for public consumption,” just like pimps. “The public worries about the recruitment of their precious children,” St. James (Reference St. James1980, 8) quipped, “yet fail to see how the police are the actual recruiters.”

While they were alive, Ricketts and Foye only served the interests of police as targets of vice enforcement, grist for arrest statistics, providers of criminal information, or prey for sexual or financial corruption. Only after they were murdered did Ricketts’s and Foye’s interests align with those of the police, who then benefited from locating their killer, clearing a homicide case, and reaping favorable press coverage. Ricketts and Foye were only the first two in a series of high-profile murders of Black women and girls that placed great pressure on the police throughout the winter and spring of 1979.Footnote ¹ The day after their bodies were discovered, another Black teenager was found murdered (BPD 1979j). Detectives pursued leads that she too was a sex worker, a claim that her family strenuously denied (BPD 1979e). Within a week, a twenty-five-year-old Black woman was found dead in a city park (BPD 1979k). With four murders of Black women and girls in a week’s time, the city was put on alert. Black communities wondered if they were confronting a serial killer.Footnote ² Within three months, a total of thirteen women and girls—twelve Black and one white—were murdered in adjacent communities, nearly all by separate perpetrators.Footnote ³ Detectives and reporters smeared the reputations of many victims, linking some or most to prostitution.

The killings triggered widespread fear and outrage in Boston’s Black and feminist communities. Activists rallied support for social movement organizations, public protests, and collective self-defense (Kelly Reference Kelly1979, 9; Okazawa-Rey Reference Okazawa-Rey2023).Footnote ⁴ Owing to the work of Black feminists and their allies across the region, the 1979 Boston murders of Black women and girls proved a watershed moment for the development of Black feminist theory and practice. Indeed, Black feminists argued that the victims’ overlapping identities—what later scholars would call intersectionality—helped explain the outcome. Owing to the overlapping oppressions of race, gender, class, and more, girls like Chris Ricketts and Andrea Foye, as well as older women from other backgrounds, were vulnerable to premature death not only in Boston but also virtually everywhere. The victims’ identities shaped not only how they wound up murdered but also how the police and the media treated them afterwards. When detectives encountered Ricketts and Foye, they did not see young girls in danger; they saw Black sex workers ripe for punishment or exploitation.

Yet, as the murder crisis intensified, Black communities directed their rage at the police. In response, detectives turned to sex workers to help them locate suspects, clear cases, and ease the pressure. As always, officers faced choices when determining how to convince sex workers to help them with an investigation. In addition to leveraging arrests, officers could also promise protection in return for information. For example, after the fourth victim was discovered on February 5, 1979, investigators belatedly turned their attention to a series of recent attacks against sex workers by men trolling the Combat Zone in cars with sawed-off door handles. Prior to the murder of Ricketts and Foye, sex workers had been wary of reporting these attacks to the police. After all, it had only been two-and-a-half years since the SIU outlined how District One officers kidnapped, extorted, and raped sex workers with impunity. Police officers also seemed disinterested in protecting sex workers from predatory men. In the midst of the murder crisis, however, the prospect of netting clearances in high-profile homicide investigations convinced officers to pursue the perpetrators in hopes that they were the killers.

For example, on Tuesday morning, February 6, 1979—the day news of the fourth murder victim hit the front pages—a twenty-year-old white woman named Joyce Kelley stood in a parking lot at the corner of Warrenton Street and Stuart Street in downtown Boston. Several hours after midnight, a dark blue, two-door sedan turned into the lot, its passenger side gliding by Kelley as it came to a stop. The driver, a white man in his mid-twenties, reached across the empty seat beside him and lowered the window. Peering inside, Kelley noticed a second white man—six feet tall and two hundred pounds, with “sandy, blonde colored” hair—sitting in the backseat behind the driver. Something else caught her attention—the handle to the passenger-side door had been removed. The men greeted her, offering forty dollars “for the both of us for a blow,” she recounted. “I [don’t] get in the car with two men,” she said, walking away. When she got near the driver’s side door, however, “the man jumped out, grabbed me and threw me into the car and threw a badge at me, saying that he was police.” He lied. They were not cops. But it is telling that he believed identifying himself as a police officer might help him assault her. Trapped in the backseat with the taller of the two men, Kelley grew frightened as the car lurched away. Streetlights illuminated the vehicle’s interior as they moved through the city.

Recounting her ordeal to detectives two days later, Kelley told how her captors commanded her to perform oral sex on the passenger, “which I did,” she admitted. At this point, one of the officers interrupted her. “You don’t have to say that,” the detective warned, “[w]e are on tape; it is being recorded.” Conscious of the tape recorder, he added, “you are talking to me voluntarily,” and “[I] am not forcing you.” He promised that “nothing you say would ever be used against you insofar as being a prostitute goes.” “I realize that,” Kelley answered, pledging that “I will testify” against the two men if they ever faced charges. The brief exchange highlighted the transactional nature of the interview. Detectives offered Kelley immunity from arrest in exchange for cooperation in a murder investigation. Detectives also wanted to make sure a defense attorney would not later try to undermine her credibility by suggesting she spoke under duress. Continuing, Kelley described how her attackers maintained their ruse of being cops, threatening arrest if she did not comply. After assaulting her, the passenger asked: “How would [you] like to be brought down to Station #15?” “That was a stupid question,” she replied, “[t]hat was like me asking … if you wanted me to bite [your penis] off.” Angry, the man slammed his fist against the side of Kelley’s head. The car stopped. The men demanded she hand over all her money—a paltry thirty-five cents. They forced Kelley to remove her boots and told her to undress. “I unbuttoned my coat,” she recalled, “pulled it off, and I went to lift up my shirt. [The passenger] saw that I was pregnant. He held me and apologized for hitting me.” He opened the door, got out, and gestured for her to leave.

The driver interjected, “Well, what about me?” and climbed into the backseat to force upon her another “unnatural act,” as the police called it, using the language of anti-prostitution statutes. With Kelley on the record admitting to criminal acts, the officers had leverage that they could use to force her to help them hook a bigger fish. “I did what I was told,” Kelley explained, alluding to the coerced sex act. The driver then returned to the front seat while the passenger “came back … for a second round” of sexual assault despite his earlier reaction to her pregnancy. Finished, the passenger threw Kelley’s boots and coat out the window along with a flashlight pen they found on her; “he thought [it] was a weapon,” she said. Before releasing her, however, the passenger warned that “if I didn’t come up with at least $10.00 that he was going to strangle me.” The driver then handed his accomplice a pair of gloves and repeated the phrase “you better give up the money” several times. They let her out of the car. She grabbed her boots and coat from the street and ran into a nearby hotel.

After sunrise, Kelley returned to the same corner where she had been abducted and told other women about her assault. She and a girlfriend left briefly, but, when they came back, two other women told Kelley they had just seen her attackers “driving around in a different car … trying to pick them up.” Moments later, a 1978 red Mercury veered around the corner and stopped at a red light on Charles Street South. The same tall, blonde passenger from the night before stepped out of the car, spotted Kelley, and got back in before the car peeled away. The Mercury cruised around Park Plaza, made a U-turn, and came back toward the four women. Kelley and the others sprinted across the street to a parking lot while the men heckled, “why [are] you running” and “started chasing us with the car.” Noticing a pair of police officers—“two vice,” as she called them—making an arrest on the corner, Kelley ran over and explained that the men in the car had attacked her just hours earlier. The power of police discretion was on full display as Kelley interrupted officers arresting sex workers in order to ask them to help protect sex workers from predatory men pretending to be cops. Meanwhile, another woman distracted the attackers while an officer ran toward them. Kelley never learned what came of the chase, but she recorded the license plate number of the Mercury—579 430—and kept it on a piece of paper in a bureau drawer in her hotel room (BPD 1979n).

Investigators were already aware of similar culprits. On February 4, two days before Kelley’s assault, another woman named Candice Carter reported being picked up by a tall, white man in his mid-twenties with blonde hair and eyeglasses driving a “whitish-brown” 1977 Lincoln with the passenger-side door handle “sawed off.” According to Carter, “several of the girls on the street have been talking about this person in the whitish car who has been robbing and raping the girls and stealing some of their clothes.” Carter told officers that the man “grabbed her by the arm and was attempting to rape her but she had held on to the door lock and she maced the male and ran away.” She also claimed that the attacker pretended to be “a cop” (BPD 1979c). While these attacks had been happening “for several months,” officers only showed interest “relative to the recent murders.” On the day that the fourth victim was found, detectives devoted key hours to questioning “several Prostitutes”—all would-be informants—with whom they faced off under changed circumstances. Before the killing of three Black teenagers in two days’ time brought political heat on the department, attacks on sex workers did not warrant much attention. Now that detectives needed something from sex workers, however, they proved eager to locate their predators. As usual, detectives knew they could get sex workers to give them what they wanted.

Running the license plates provided by Kelley and Carter, officers quickly traced the Mercury to a car dealership in Framingham and the Lincoln to a fleet of rental cars in Brockton (BPD 1979c). The Brockton Police Department learned that the company leased the car to the manager of a South Boston distributing company. The manager and his three sons, all college students, enjoyed access to the car but denied any involvement in the attacks and claimed someone stole the car sometime earlier. When officers inspected the recovered vehicle, they found that it matched the “general description” given by the victims—“tan or yellow” with a “sawed off” door handle. The father insisted that the damage “was done after the car had been stolen” (BPD 1979a). While it would turn out that the recent attacks on sex workers had nothing to do with the murders, detectives spent more time investigating attacks on marginalized women than they otherwise would have. Indeed, without the heightened scrutiny of the murder investigation, detectives would have probably ignored all these cars with missing door handles altogether. After all, officers were only interested in protecting sex workers if it helped them solve more high-profile cases.

Meanwhile, detectives also began looking for a Charlestown man in a leg cast who recently helped kidnap a seventeen-year-old Mattapan girl named Ducy Julian. Described by the police as “Indian,” Julian had been living away from her family since Thanksgiving 1978 (Black Reference Black1979, 21; BPD 1979p). According to police records, Julian told detectives she left a Combat Zone nightclub around 4:45 a.m. on Tuesday, February 13, and made her way to the corner of Beach Street and Taylor Street where she expected to find a cab driver “who earlier had offered to give her a ride home.” Before she got there, however, a white man approached her, brandished a switchblade, and forced her into the backseat of a yellow compact car with black interior, possibly an AMC Rambler. Inside, another man threatened her with a sawed-off shotgun. One of the men wore a cast up to his right knee and told her he had “just got out of the hospital.” The other “stated he recently got out of the service.” The driver cruised the city for roughly an hour. The kidnappers drank beer and took valium. While they “did not make any sexual advances to her,” they promised if she did not give them all her money they would kill her. Trying to intimidate her, the men told Julian that they had already “killed two black females that had tried to rip them off.” Investigators later determined that this was a lie they employed to scare her.

Eventually, the driver eased into an Atlantic Avenue parking lot and ordered Julian to remove her coat, shoes, and socks. When another car pulled into the lot, “she managed to escape,” and “they did not chase her” (BPD 1979p). The victim reported minor injuries to her right hand and leg. A rumor circulated that her attackers told her that “[t]hree other black girls tried to rip us off and they are all dead,” but a police spokesperson “expressed skepticism” this was true (Black Reference Black1979, 21). While Julian could only vaguely describe her attackers—two white men in their mid-twenties, one wearing a leather jacket, the other with a mustache—the leg cast soon drew detectives to a suspect. Again, it turned out that Julian’s attackers had nothing to do with the murders. But with detectives eager to show results in homicide investigations, the department temporarily devoted extra resources to locating men who attacked women in the Combat Zone. It was the murders, not the assaults, that inspired police action on the kidnappings. For example, in a memo to homicide detectives, investigators in the Julian kidnapping wrote: “I don’t know if there could be any possible connect between your two black females, the only thing that strikes a bell, is both of yours were missing their shoes, as this girl here is, she left them in car, after being made to take them off” (BPD 1979p). As critics argued, detectives only agreed to protect sex workers if they got something in return.

In the context of police administration, choosing to devote resources to one task over another involves an opportunity cost (DeAngelo, Vitaliano, and Lang Reference DeAngelo, Vitaliano and Lang2014). Considering the political optics of protecting sex workers versus arresting them, the incentive structure usually favored the latter. Simply put, it was better politics for the police to crack down on sex workers than to crack down on the men who preyed upon them. After all, observers might equate protecting sex workers with sanctioning prostitution. From the administrators’ perspective, the best way to protect sex workers from assault was to take them off the streets altogether, arresting them, closing their business, and locking them up for their own good. Officers might also argue that they could accomplish both tasks at the same time, enforcing prostitution laws by arresting sex workers while also arresting the men who targeted them for robbery and assault.

Yet the two goals—arresting sex workers and their predators—often worked at cross-purposes. For example, by making sex workers afraid to approach the police, prostitution enforcement made it harder for victimized women to report crimes or otherwise seek help from authorities. “As it stands now,” revealed feminist magazine Sojourner following the SIU report and the Puopolo murder, “prostitutes are afraid to report crimes to the police for fear of resulting harassment. They often turn to the real or imagined protection offered by pimps” (Cone Reference Cone1976, 3). In response, members of the PUMA and Boston’s chapter of the National Organization for Women held a press conference to condemn police abuse and demand decriminalization of sex work. “Most of the Combat Zone’s problems with violence,” reported a retired prostitute, could be linked “to the fact that so much of the police force’s time and energy is spent dealing with prostitutes, treating them as if they were more dangerous than muggers, thieves, and murderers.” Rather than protecting sex workers from violent crime, they argued, police officers were “dutifully rounding up and otherwise harassing” them (3). Indeed, Patrolman Gary Bratsos later wrote in his memoir about getting so bored busting sex workers that he began playing tricks on them just “for laughs.” Unrepentant, Bratsos described telling sex workers that he was taking them to a hotel and then driving into the police garage, pinning his badge to his underwear so he could surprise them after asking for oral sex and dressing like a priest and having the women say five Hail Mary’s—anything, he said, to “break up the monotony” (Shaw Reference Shaw2014, 197–98). Under these conditions, it is no wonder that detectives resorted to threats and promises to extract what they wanted from sex workers. Few women would speak to them otherwise.

Indeed, it took a series of high-profile murders to redirect officers’ attention—however temporarily—toward protecting sex workers in the winter and spring of 1979. Suddenly, detectives proved willing to offer sex workers immunity from arrest and protection from attackers. But only if they helped them in return. As in other scenarios, the murder crisis highlighted the transactional and exploitative relationship that police officers constructed with sex workers throughout this period. Considering the history of police extortion of sex workers in 1970s Boston, it is likely that Joyce Kelley only reported her experience in the car with the missing door handle because detectives offered her immunity and protection in exchange for cooperation in a homicide investigation. Under normal conditions, detectives faced incredible pressure to solve murders, boost their unit’s clearance rate, and demonstrate the crime-fighting prowess of the entire department. When a series of sensational murders attracted citywide scrutiny, however, pressure on detectives became overwhelming. Finally, Kelley’s interests aligned with those of the police. Knowing they held wide discretion when deciding her fate, she thought it safe to speak up. She was right. Detectives proved far more eager to solve a homicide than nab her on some petty prostitution charge. Indeed, the officers went out of their way to assure her that she would not face repercussions for her involvement in prostitution. But she had to give them something—anything—they could actually use.

Accordingly, detectives pushed Kelley throughout her interview on what she knew about the murders. “Did you hear anything?” an officer asked. “How could I miss it,” she answered. “Well, I am asking you,” the detective repeated. “Yea, I heard about it.” Pressing for details, detectives finally got Kelley to open up, revealing that she often stayed at the same place—the Hotel Milner—where Andrea Foye stayed during the last weeks of her life. Given a description of the dead girls, Kelley even remembered “seeing them a couple of times in the hallways, maybe going to their room, going up the stairs.” She believed they were “hustling” but never saw them on the streets, nor did she know if they worked for a pimp. Eager for any information, detectives asked Kelley if she knew anything else about the girls. “I’ve heard enough about them,” she answered, “[t]hat’s all everybody on the street is talking about.” She heard “they were young” and “working as hookers.” She also repeated a “rumor” that the girls “ripped off a bookie,” but she was not sure if it was true. She identified a photograph of Andrea Foye as the girl she saw in the Milner along with “two other girls,” including “one that was definitely under age,” likely Chris Ricketts.

None of this helped solve the case. But Kelley’s willingness to enter police headquarters and cooperate with detectives symbolized the changed atmosphere on the street. Kelley’s assault by two men so soon after the murders prompted detectives to treat her with care—for once—so long as she helped them find the killer (BPD 1979n). She was not alone. Several other alleged sex workers turned to detectives for help escaping prostitution charges throughout the winter and spring of 1979, offering tips on the murders in exchange for immunity (BPD 1979d). For example, within days of the first two murders, twenty-four-year-old Sandy Spencer found herself in a pinch following an encounter with a police officer in the Combat Zone. “I went up to [undercover vice detective] Bill Dwyer and propositioned him and I got arrested,” she told homicide detectives (BPD 1979o). Facing criminal charges, Spencer proved vulnerable to police manipulation. Indeed, Bratsos wrote a supervisor asking permission to “apply some pressure” to Spencer and another witness named Bobby Harvell in order to learn more about their prime suspect in the first two murders. “It is my opinion,” Bratsos wrote, “that Harvell and Spencer, if approached in the right way, will be able to give us the information” (BPD 1979g). Prosecutors later included statements provided by Spencer to win a conviction against Ricketts and Foye’s murderer.Footnote ⁵ Once they were done with Kelley, Spencer, and the other alleged sex workers who cooperated with detectives in homicide cases, however, investigators lost interest in protecting them from harm.

Police discretion to honor or reject sex workers’ claims of self-defense

Another high-profile murder case occurring two years after the 1979 Boston murders of Black women and girls further demonstrated how police officers drew benefits at the expense of sex workers. For Zakia Lamrini, who also went by the name Rita Owens, getting into a car with a much older man in the spring of 1981 must have seemed like a calculated risk. Yet her decision to accept a ride to the Boston suburbs proved a costly mistake. While only around nineteen or twenty years old, Lamrini had been through a lot already. Born in North Africa, a land she barely remembered, Lamrini migrated to the United States as a child and entered sex work as a teenager. Indeed, a newspaper described her simply as a “petite illegal alien from Morocco” and a “one-time prostitute and exotic dancer” (Boston Herald American 1982, 6). Lamrini admitted to once working the streets of the Combat Zone but insisted that she had quit after landing a job dancing at a suburban bar sometime in 1980 (Boston Herald American 1981a, 5). But she still spent time in the zone.

On Sunday, March 8, 1981, Lamrini sat in the Saxon Coffee Shop near the corner of Tremont Street and LaGrange Street, an area known for heavy traffic in prostitution (Reynolds Reference Reynolds1986, 139–40). Sometime that evening, a thirty-four-year-old man named George Karkiozis entered with a male friend. The two had come from the Hotel Essex where they had spent part of the day.Footnote ⁶ Like Lamrini, Karkiozis was an immigrant, although he had been living in nearby Somerville with his wife and children for some time (Boston Globe 1981, 45; Langner Reference Langner1982, 22). A blue-collar worker, Karkiozis was described as either a Boston pier fisherman, fishing boat captain, truck driver, or dock worker (Boston Herald American 1981b, 13; 1982, 6; Harvey Reference Harvey1984, 22; Blake Reference Blake1987, 1). In March 1981, the Boston Herald American (1981b, 13) reported that he “recently returned to live with his wife” following a “temporary estrangement.” It is not clear why Karkiozis spent the day at a hotel with friends or what they were doing at a notorious Combat Zone intersection. After all, it was relatively early on a Sunday evening, he had a wife and kids, he lived close by, and he was working on saving his marriage.

Inside the small coffeeshop, Lamrini—petite, with olive skin and long black hair—caught Karkiozis’s attention. He introduced himself. They chatted. Around 7:10 p.m., she left. The entire exchange could not have lasted long. But they made some sort of arrangement. Within fifteen minutes, Karkiozis followed her out the door.Footnote ⁷ Allegedly, Lamrini had told Karkiozis that she was a dancer at the Surf Club in Revere, Massachusetts. She was scheduled to work later that night and needed a ride (Boston Herald American 1981a, 5; Langner Reference Langner1982, 22). Agreeing to take her, Karkiozis grabbed his late-model Buick and picked her up outside (Boston Herald American 1981b, 13). Considering the facts of the case, some observers—particularly detectives, prosecutors, and reporters—speculated that Lamrini was still working the streets and that Karkiozis had offered her money in exchange for sex. Others alleged that she planned to rob him. These allegations rested entirely on circumstantial evidence.

Regardless of their intentions, the two sat side by side as the car crossed the Charles River, cruised through Somerville, and left the city behind. Expecting to head northeast toward Revere, however, Lamrini noticed that they were heading northwest instead. Objecting that they were going in the wrong direction, Lamrini grew anxious as the car eased into a remote woodland area near the Mystic Lakes in the small town of Winchester. Turning into the Sandy Beach recreation area, Karkiozis found a parking spot in a local “lover’s lane,” put the car in park, and took his foot off the pedal. It was still early—just shy of 8:00 p.m.—but no one was around. The night was quiet and dark. Within minutes, one of them would be dead.

Lamrini was slight in stature. At 5’2” and ninety-five pounds, she was dwarfed by Karkiozis, who, at 5’10” and 190 pounds, was more than double her weight (Langner Reference Langner1982, 22). Yet despite her serious disadvantage in a fight, it was Lamrini, not Karkiozis, who escaped that Buick alive. According to Lamrini, Karkiozis turned toward her, asked her to remove her clothes, and demanded that she have sex with him. She refused. At this point, she said, he attacked, beating and choking her with his hands. “I was scared to death,” she explained, “I was afraid he was going to kill me” (Boston Herald American 1981a, 5). But Lamrini never left home without protection. Desperate, she fumbled for a switchblade she kept hidden.Footnote ⁸ “All of a sudden,” she said, “I got the knife and I was stabbing him.” But it only seemed to make him angrier. His hands tightened around her neck. He threatened to kill her. “He kept fighting for the knife,” she said, “I got the door open and he was grabbing for the knife.”

She stabbed him again. And again. And again. When it was all over, a total of 28 puncture wounds peppered his back. Four more marked his chest. One plunge, however, did the trick, piercing him twice in the aorta and killing him within seconds. She managed to push him out of the car. “He fell down, then he got up again,” Lamrini recalled. He collapsed, dead or dying. Rather than become the latest victim of what women’s rights activists called “femicide”—the intentional killing of a woman based on her gender—Lamrini defended herself (Radford and Russell Reference Radford and Russell1992, 143–44). And she survived. “I got in the car,” she concluded, “and drove away” (Boston Herald American 1981a, 5). As the Buick careened down the road, she tossed the knife out the window. It was never found.

About a mile-and-a-half away, she spotted a payphone in Medford and stopped to call for help. Rather than dialing the police, however, she called a friend, Stephen Gavrilles, who worked as a taxicab operator in the city. Considering the relationship that sex workers had with police, it is not surprising that she called a friend first. Gavrilles agreed to pick her up. He arrived around 8:45 p.m. and listened as she explained what happened. As she talked, he noticed that she was dirty and injured. Her face was “puffed up,” she had a “mud mark” on her knee, and her eye “looked black.” A man tried to rape her, she explained. He choked her, and she stabbed him. Looking to return to the scene, Gavrilles and Lamrini drove through several wooded areas, but found nothing. He agreed to take her back to the Combat Zone.

Returning to the Saxon Coffee Shop, Lamrini finally called the police. Like most sex workers in the area, she was familiar with several officers in the vice squad. Accordingly, she called Detective Bill Dwyer, the same man who arrested Sandy Spencer two years earlier and an officer with “whom she had assisted in a prior prosecution.” Lamrini knew Dwyer. While she could never fully trust the police, he seemed the right man to call. And she may have felt that he owed her something for her earlier work as an informant. Dwyer agreed to meet her right away. He noted bruises on her knees and thighs, blood on her pants, and a red mark on her neck. She told him that Karkiozis “forced her to have sex with him and had tried to strangle her.” She admitted to stabbing him “maybe once or twice,” but was not sure how badly she had hurt him. Unaware that the attack happened in Winchester, she told Dwyer it must have occurred in Medford. He checked with the Medford Police Department, but they knew nothing of a stabbing. Despite Lamrini’s battered appearance, Dwyer dismissed her story as “not serious.” If she wanted, he told her, she could report the incident to the Medford police, but he had other work to do. Telling her to keep in touch, he bid her farewell, for now.

Despite her history of sex work and vulnerability to the criminal justice system, Lamrini turned to the state for protection following the worst night of her life. And Dwyer dismissed her. Things would only get worse for Lamrini. After Dwyer left her, she went with her friend to a hotel in Cambridge. She called the Medford police around 2:20 a.m., but they still had no reports of a stabbing. The next day, Lamrini learned that a body had been found in a parking lot in a secluded area of Winchester. She must have been frightened of the implications. Despite reaching out to the police at least twice in the hours after the attack, Lamrini hid behind a newspaper when she spotted an officer looking for her in the hotel lobby that afternoon. Avoiding the cops for now, she spent the day with friends, shopping for new clothes, asking one companion to dispose of her soiled outfit from the night before, and telling another that she stabbed Karkiozis after he threatened to strangle her while she was giving him oral sex. After calling Detective Dwyer from a movie theater payphone, she agreed to meet him at 10:00 p.m. at his office.

Arriving alone, she walked into an ambush. Rather than offer her assistance, Dwyer delivered her to an officer of the Metropolitan District Police (MDC). She really needed a lawyer. Perhaps she thought Dwyer would help her out as she had helped him in the past. He did not. The MDC officer recited her Miranda warnings and began an interrogation. Providing an oral statement, Lamrini insisted that she had “nothing to hide,” admitting that “I killed him in self-defense.” Removed to an MDC facility, she was placed under arrest before providing a lengthier, written statement. Prosecutors noted inconsistencies in Lamrini’s two statements and charged her with first-degree murder.

Zakia Lamrini went on trial in the spring of 1982. Compelled to present a motive to the jury, prosecutors argued that Lamrini killed Karkiozis so she could rob him. It was a flimsy argument. After all, she had ditched Karkiozis’s car within minutes of fleeing the scene. Nothing in her statements suggested she intended robbery or escaped with Karkiozis’s money. The crux of the commonwealth’s case rested on the fact that, while witnesses recalled Karkiozis having between seventy and eighty dollars on his person early in the day of March 8, 1981, he was found with only seventeen dollars in his pocket on March 9. Yet witnesses also reported that Karkiozis spent an unknown amount of money on food, coffee, drinks, cigarettes, gasoline, parking fees, and more throughout the day. His expenses could account for the missing money. And prosecutors could not explain why she might leave seventeen dollars behind. While police officers claimed that Karkiozis was found with his left pants pocket pulled out—suggesting someone had rifled through his clothes—photographs taken at the scene before and after officers searched the body all showed the pants pocket “in place and not pulled out.” Either the testifying officers were mistaken when they testified about the pants pocket, or they committed perjury to strengthen the prosecutors’ case that Lamrini killed Karkiozis to rob him.Footnote ⁹

Regardless of the flimsy motive, a jury found her guilty in March 1982, and a judge sentenced her to life without parole (Langner Reference Langner1982, 22). Lamrini’s became a classic survived and punished tale. Lamrini appealed her conviction and won a reversal from the Massachusetts Superior Judicial Court in 1984. In the decision, Justice Ruth I. Abrams wrote: “There is no evidence that the defendant [Lamrini] sought to rob the victim, or that she went with the victim to rob him.” Accordingly, “[w]e conclude there was a substantial risk of miscarriage of justice requiring a new trial” (Harvey Reference Harvey1984, 22).Footnote ¹⁰ Lamrini later pleaded guilty to manslaughter and received a sentence of twelve-to-twenty years at Massachusetts Correctional Institution – Framingham. During a routine furlough in July 1987, Lamrini married a man she had been dating during a work release. When she returned to her cell after a blissful weekend, prison authorities placed her in special confinement, taunting her with cries of “[h]ey, there’s the bride” as they ignored her pleas. “They told me I’m state property,” she told the press, “that I belong to them and I had no right getting married without their permission.” Lamrini resented the implication that the state owned her, body and soul. Threatening to sue, she insisted on a right to enter marriage without retaliation (Blake Reference Blake1987, 1). Anticipating her parole on November 21, 1988, Lamrini sought to avoid deportation back to Morocco.Footnote ¹¹ Unfortunately, it is here that my research ran cold. I was unable to discover what happened to Zakia Lamrini after her release.

Following Lamrini’s conviction in the spring of 1982, two feminists wrote a letter to the Boston Globe protesting the “male-dominated, male-defined system” that condemned Lamrini to prison for stabbing Karkiozis “to save her own life.” Rejecting prosecutors’ claim that twenty-eight stabs in the back warranted a first-degree murder charge, the activists argued that “10 stabs, or 11, or 27, or however many” less than twenty-eight “might have cost [Lamrini] her life.” And if she died, they pointed out, “she would have been filed away among the statistics of ‘raped and murdered’” women instead of facing trial. They also pointed out that, if Karkiozis had been arrested for rape instead of Lamrini arrested for murder, he would have received better treatment in the press and a lesser sentence if convicted than Lamrini (Fisher and Silverman Reference Fisher and Silverman1982, 3). In a tribute to Lamrini and other women who have suffered violence at the hands of men, the writers ended with a stirring account of Lamrini’s ordeal written in the subjunctive mood—a literary method that involved speculating on what may have occurred considering a commonsense reading of the evidence. Offering a plausible recreation of events that absolved Lamrini of guilt, they invited readers to do something the police, lawyers, and judge never did: put themselves in Lamrini’s shoes. Employing present-tense verbs and adopting the second-person voice, they described what might have happened that night:

While the Boston Globe did not print the letter, the authors published it in the feminist magazine IAHU.

Police discretion played a crucial role in determining the fate of Zakia Lamrini. The detectives who investigated the killing of George Karkiozis exercised their discretion when interpreting the evidence, when weighing competing narratives of events, when dismissing Lamrini’s cries for assistance, and when supporting the prosecution’s case. Vice squad Detective Bill Dwyer chose to ignore Lamrini’s story when she came to him less than two hours after the killing. Despite using her as an informant in an earlier case, he chose to dismiss her in her hour of need, then betray her by handing her over to the MDC the following day. Detectives also chose to gather evidence pursuant to a first-degree murder charge rather than a justifiable homicide based on self-defense. Finally, it is possible officers chose to lie about the pants pocket to support prosecutors’ weak narrative at trial.

Lamrini’s story reinforces the police-as-pimp metaphor by highlighting the capricious and exploitative nature of police-sex worker interactions. To most law enforcement agents, marginalized women were resources to be used, discarded, and replaced. When it suited them, officers protected such women. When it did not, they punished them. Prior to the killing of Karkiozis, officers coerced Lamrini into becoming an informant. After the killing, they found other uses for her. Her arrest helped preempt another Combat Zone scandal—an alleged sex worker killed a john, but she was already behind bars. Even as the Boston Globe’s premier Spotlight team exposed the BPD for its subpar clearance rate, Lamrini’s case padded their stats with an open-and-shut case (Boston Globe 1980, 1). The department lost an informant, but there was no shortage of disposable women on the street. Moreover, as an immigrant, Lamrini was especially vulnerable. According to social work scholar Elene Lam (Reference Lam2016, 102), non-native sex workers “are particularly prone” to police abuse “because of racism, their immigration status, and language barriers.” While there is no record of the personal interactions between Lamrini and Detective Dwyer, his changed demeanor from one occasion to the next—from seeking her assistance to locking her up—may have reminded her of other men who had used her and then abandoned her in similar contexts.