Perrine said his department launched a more aggressive undercover operation in October and has already arrested four people for prostitution.īut he’s not sure the small department can afford to continue such an aggressive strategy. San Gabriel Detective Darren Perrine said the numbers don’t accurately show the prostitution problem he says is rampant. The proliferation of massage in many local cities, officials said, can explain both the increasing problem with illicit activity in the businesses as well as the lack in numerical proof of that problem. “Prostitution in massage parlors has been going on for decades, but what happened was that … law really exacerbated the problem when it removed basic land use authority from cities and counties,” said Assemblyman Jimmy Gomez, D-Los Angeles, who is a co-author of the new massage legislation introduced this week.
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The law also prohibits cities from passing laws that restrict massage businesses differently than other licensed professional services like lawyers or doctors, which cities say restricts their ability to successfully regulate them.Īnd with the law about to a sunset in 2015, many local jurisdictions and political leaders are eager to change it. The law created the California Massage Therapy Council (CAMTC), which is charged with licensing and regulating individual massage therapists in the state. Part of the problem with massage, officials say, lies in the sheer number of businesses that have opened since the California Massage Therapy Law went into effect in 2009. In the other cities in the region, arrests specifically in massage businesses have been rare or nonexistent.
There has not been a dramatic increase in prostitution arrests, though all of the arrests – a total of seven – have been at massage businesses. South Pasadena has gone from one to 17 massage businesses in the last 10 years.
The number of arrests solely in massage parlors has increased slightly from zero in 2003 to two in 2013, peaking at four arrests in 2006. There were seven arrests in 2003 and six in 2013, with a peak at 17 arrests in 2006. In contrast, prostitution arrests have fluctuated over the years, but there has not been a significant increase. In San Gabriel, for example, the number of massage parlors has increased from one in 2003 to 53 in 2013. There are nine times as many massage parlors in the region than there were 10 years ago.