Drive Would Link AIDS, Hookers

A publicity campaign aimed at instilling the fear of AIDS into prostitutes and their customers is expected to be proposed today by Los Angeles City Councilman Joel Wachs.

Posters, billboards and bus benches would be placed along Sepulveda Boulevard in the San Fernando Valley and in other undetermined areas of the city, if the City Council allocates $12,000 for the program Tuesday, a Wachs spokesman said.

The signs also would warn of the likelihood of arrest, noting that police in recent months have focused their undercover efforts on customers as well as prostitutes.

“What we have is a buyer-seller relationship,” said Los Angeles Police Capt. Mark Stevens, whose division includes part of Sepulveda Boulevard. “We try to remove the buyers and sellers, but we also try to destroy that link in their relationship.”

Researchers have said that acquired immune deficiency syndrome, a fatal disease, is spread primarily through intravenous drug use and male homosexual contact. In a recent study sponsored by the federal Centers for Disease Control, only eight of 184 female Los Angeles prostitutes--4.3%--tested positive for exposure to the AIDS virus. Nationally, 11.7% of the 835 female prostitutes in the study, released last year, tested positive for exposure to the AIDS virus.

Nonetheless, Wachs said concern about AIDS is a driving force behind the proposed publicity campaign, which he and police officials are expected to unveil today. The stretch of Sepulveda Boulevard in Van Nuys and Sepulveda, which Wachs represents, has long been considered a problem area for prostitution.

“AIDS adds the dimension to the message that wasn’t there before,” Wachs said. “This is basically saying, ‘If you don’t stop, you’re going to die.’ ”

One billboard would show a gravestone inscribed “AIDS” next to the slogan: “The Price of Prostitution Just Went Up.” Another would show the back of a handcuffed man with the message: “If You’re Into Prostitution, We’re Into Handcuffs. . . . LAPD Undercover Vice.”

Prostitution in the Sepulveda Boulevard area has been reduced in the past year, Devonshire Division Sgt. Thomas Wade of the vice squad said. But the onset of warm weather seems to be sparking a resurgence of prostitution, he said. Devonshire vice officers arrested 30 prostitutes during March, as of Wednesday--up from about 15 in February, he said.

Last year, Devonshire vice officers arrested 210 prostitutes and 103 of their customers. Of 275 prostitution-related arrests last year in the neighboring Van Nuys Division, about half were of men, Sgt. Steven Allen said.

But would-be customers of hookers have not gone away, said Caroline Kovarik, an anti-prostitution activist in Sepulveda and co-owner of a flower store on Sepulveda Boulevard.

A year ago, Kovarik’s customers were staying away because there were so many prostitutes near the store, she said. They had become so familiar that she and her employees gave them nicknames.

Now, prostitutes are much harder to find, but “the johns are still hanging around . . . and they’re bothering the high school kids,” Kovarik said.

Allen, of the Van Nuys vice squad, said, “Our biggest problem is there’s more demand than there is supply. . . . That tends to be almost a bigger problem for the people who live out here than the prostitutes are.”

Allen and Wade said they will continue to use undercover officers to arrest men trying to buy sex. Last weekend, a team of Wade’s officers arrested 19 men on Sepulveda Boulevard on suspicion of soliciting a sex act.