The new WPS chief was on CBC The Current this morning. He does not use the terms sex trade workers and johns...they are exploited women/girls and and predators.
To be fair, the context of that programme was about missing and murdered indigenous women and girls, so in that sense, yes, he is looking for predators. I think we can take all these statements a couple of different ways, and assess how that statement helps him do his job, or not.
First, regardless of what they actually do, what they say they are doing has an impact on people's behaviour for good or ill. Under the current legal framework, in theory, yes, virtually every type of buyer is now a criminal, someone exploiting a person who, in theory, cannot be considered to have made a free choice. It's illogical, but leaving that aside, it's also impractical for them to prosecute every john they come across even when they do catch them "just after" or "just before" (it always was), but they're definitely out there stopping anyone that looks suspicious and making it known what can happen to them in the long run--and letting them go, generally. We only ever hear about anything when it involves minors or other "real" crimes. The more they remind people that they're out there, though, the more they patrol the streets, the more some people got the intended message and left the streets alone. A result, from the point of view that the streets may be a bit safer. So far so good, to the extent that I think the street can be a dangerous place for both sides. So then what?
Because the law is what it is, if they find they have succeeded in having a lot fewer workers on the streets, then unsurprisingly these workers must find another way to get that income. A lot of people expected they'd put themselves into even greater danger by going to more dangerous, isolated locations, but they still have to be able to find the buyer to get there and that's the point of interference, so, no, the most obvious way is to join the ranks of those who are already on the internet, thus muddying the waters: ten or fifteen years ago, if you were sophisticated enough to advertise on the internet, there was no way you could be confused with someone driven there by necessity (drugs, etc.) or exploited. Now anyone can do it, and does (hence all the complaining about Backpage). You have to have a website with all the bells and whistles to be considered a free agent or at least not a scam or con artist, though under the law, you never will be anything but exploited or a pimp--unless of course you're filming everything you do, in which case you're an artist and that is covered under freedom of expression, even in the USA (I'm surprised this has never come up as a glaring oversight in the law: if paying someone else to have sex with someone is illegal, why isn't porn illegal? Isn't profiting from the avails more or less the same as sale of the video?). If you're openly advertising 300 to 500 an hour on your site, they probably figure you are not someone who needs to be saved by them.
So much for theory. Do the police have the resources they need to set up their own ads? Yes. That's easy. They probably have been doing that for ages. But how many johns do they actually want to arrest and charge? I'm inclined to think what they really want is a big fish in the criminal sense, someone who is likely to intend harm on the worker, or at least someone who's been convicted of something before, even has a warrant for their arrest, possibly from another jurisdiction. So they're probably the ones asking for a picture, comparing it to mug shots and other known photos. More than likely they will string you along for a bit, find you are not interesting (especially if you refuse to send a photo, which, yeah, you should not), leave you alone and move on, unless they really have nothing else better to do. It's not practical to go after everyone online just as it's not on the street--but if you say you are doing that, it still has a chilling effect and fewer people will engage in the activity, which itself is a result from their point of view. Such are the times we live in. Speaking of sting operations, that's supposedly how they got the guy who is accused of Tina Fontaine's murder (in that case it's a Mr Big sting operation, which have been under fire for a while now as a form of entrapment, so it may be that case will fall apart in court).
There was something else talked about in that Current programme. The families don't like to hear about how their daughter or sister was in the sex trade, which is fair enough. But to the extent that this was an element of the missing lady's way of getting by, she came into contact with a lot of these so-called predators, and may have told them things that could be very useful in the pursuit of an investigation into the lady's whereabouts or indeed to finding her killer if such is the case. Some people, knowing how the law is, and hearing themselves described as predators, may not come forward even when they know something useful, because of statements like this. So while it saddens me on a personal level to hear us all described as predators, too, what concerns me even more is the knock on effect this has: cases going cold because someone is afraid to go to the police. I'm for sensitivity, but I'm also for solving cases and bringing real predators to justice. In the current climate, that's less likely to happen both because johns are afraid of being labelled predators and surviving family do not like labelling one of their own a sex worker. Why must it always come down to prejudicial labels getting in the way of justice, or progress?
