Memphis Hires Consultant to Report the Obvious About City’s Strip Clubs
MEMPHIS, TN – Round and round we go – what purpose it serves, nobody knows.It’s another round of “City (in this case, Memphis, TN) vs. Strip Club,” and the bad data, wasteful “research” and horrid logic are flying about like a hoard of Biblical locusts, threatening to devouring all sense of perspective and proportionality in their path.
Inevitably, the local politicos will thrust out their chests, proclaim the latest statistics “unacceptable,” and pass a law (or series of laws) designed to “correct” the “problem.”
First, though, the city needs to waste some money “documenting” the problem, naturally.
In Memphis, the cycle described above apparently is in process and playing out according to script, thus far.
CommercialAppeal.com, a website dedicated to all things Memphis, reports that the Memphis City Council recently hired consultant Eric Damian Kelly to conduct a study of local strip clubs, and report to the Council his findings and recommendations.
Kelly’s study, which comes with a reported price tag of $38,000, will describe to the council violations of local adult business ordinances, alleged acts of prostitution, and other criminal activities Kelly observed at local clubs.
In Kelly’s $38k report, the council will learn what any club visitor could likely have told them for free; in spite of city ordinances prohibiting contact between dancers and patrons, and the exposure of dancers’ genitalia, “exotic dancers openly violate the law, elected officials will learn,” as the CommercialAppeal.com article puts it.
No kidding? There are violations taking place of arbitrary, senseless, unnecessary “decency laws” within strip clubs? Say it ain’t so!
For his part, Kelly maintains that he was “shocked by how blatant sexual contact was at these clubs.”
“We’ve reviewed clubs in Detroit and Kansas City, and neither of those cities had anything like what we saw in Memphis,” Kelly told CommercialAppeal.com.
Kelly says frequent violations at the clubs are not the fault of the city’s police department, a force that he argues lacks sufficient manpower to enforce local strip club ordinances.
Memphis Police spokesman Sgt. Vince Higgins agrees, additionally noting that police have higher priorities to deal with.
“Would you prefer that we go after jaywalkers and ignore all the speeders on the road?” Higgins asked, posing jaywalking and speeding as analogous to lap dancing and prostitution, respectively.
“It’s easy to go in there to give a ticket to a girl for throwing her G-string aside,” Higgins added. “What’s more important are the more egregious offenses.”
According to CommercialAppeal.com, Kelly will recommend that the city “place the onus of regulations on club owners” by making its licensing laws more stringent, and introduce the threat to club owners of losing their permit “if they allow even one dancer to violate the law consistently.”
There’s at least one local club owner among those that would like to see the local clubs clean up their act – or at least improve on their reputation.
“I’m not in this business to run brothels,” Charles Westlund owner of local clubs Black Tail Shake Joint, Downtown Dolls, Ebony & Lace and The Pony told CommercialAppeal.com. “I say, ‘Bring the sexy in; take the sex out.’”
Westlund, a one-time politician who made an unsuccessful run for city council in Long Beach, CA, is also a board member of the Association of Club Executives, perhaps the country’s largest strip club trade association. Unlike some of his peers, Westlund says he welcomes Kelly’s recommendations and the regulations that may come as a result.
“Memphis strip clubs are legendary for being bad,” says Westlund. “I would like to have clean, well-operated clubs in a city with clearly defined laws that are enforced evenly at all of the clubs.”
Just last month, however, the Memphis Alcohol Commission fined Westlund $26,500 for 37 violations at the Black Tail Shake Joint alone, including 35 alleged incidents of prostitution and “pornographic acts,” according to CommercialAppeal.com.
Westlund says his fines and citations are simply a case of being persecuted as an “outsider” and contends that other local clubs don’t receive the same manner of scrutiny due to their connections to local authorities and other Memphis power brokers.
“What we need in Memphis,” Westlund argues, “are checks and balances to make sure that enforcement is even and fair.”
Others aren’t so sure that Kelly’s study, or his eventual recommendation, presents much information of value.
“It’s a bad joke, isn’t it?” said Dale Tuttle, according CommercialAppeal.com. “They’ve flown in some consultant from Indiana and paid him to go to strip clubs.”
Tuttle represents local club owner Ralph Lunati, a man jailed in 1982 on prostitution and obscenity charges, but who these days is a major player in the strip club business and owner of the Platinum Plus and Tunica Cabaret in Memphis.
Another attorney who represents local clubs, Edward Bearman, observed one other small problem with Kelly’s recommendation; any new law passed by the city will almost certainly be followed by a lawsuit challenging that new law.
“The day the City of Memphis enacts a new law is the same day my phone rings with new clients,” said Bearman.
As noted by CommercialAppeal.com, the city likely didn’t need to hire a consultant in order to find out that prostitution and “illicit” nudity was taking place in Memphis’ strip clubs; a casual perusal of the comments posted on tuscl.com (The Ultimate Strip Club List) would lead one to the same conclusion.
The website’s article goes beyond allegations of nudity and prostitution, however, asserting that Memphis’ strip clubs have “kept police busy” with more serious criminal activity, as well.
“Violence is a part of doing business at Memphis strip joints,” the article asserts, flatly.
To support the claim of pervasive violence at the club, the author recounts a couple of anecdotes from alleged victims of assault at local clubs and notes that “from Jan. 1 to Oct. 31 (of this year), Memphis police wrote 34 reports for assault at the city’s clubs.”
(Elsewhere in the article, the author reports that police made 34 “arrests” for assault during the same time period; so presumably the “reports” in question were arrest reports).
How large is this number – 34 assaults – in light of the overall crime rate for Memphis? Put another way, is violence any more a “part of doing business” at Memphis strip clubs than it is a part of simply living in Memphis?
Unfortunately, the relevant crime data is somewhat difficult to interpret and compare, in part because the author of the article does not specify whether the assault arrests made at the club were for “simple” or “aggravated” assault.
Even assuming that all 34 assaults for which the police wrote reports were aggravated assaults (incredibly unlikely), the number seems none-too-alarming, especially in light of the fact that the alleged assaults were spread across 11 clubs and 10 months.
In considering how big a “problem” Memphis’ strip clubs are with respect to the city’s violent crime rate, it might be helpful to view the club statistics in the context of how Memphis rates, overall, where violent crime is concerned.
In 2005, the FBI listed Memphis as number 16 on its count of America’s 25 “most dangerous” cities, a calculation based on multiple types of violent crimes, including homicide, rape, and aggravated assault.
Reporting and data collection methodology vary from source to source, but according to the Federal Bureau of Investigation, there were 7,628 aggravated assaults in Memphis in 2004, a rate of 1123.4 aggravated assaults per 100,000 people in the city – well above the national average of 340.1 per aggravated assaults 100,000.
Assuming the rate of aggravated assault in Memphis, a rate which held reasonably stable between 2000 and 2004, has been similar this year, then the number of aggravated assaults in Memphis in the time period examined by CommercialAppeal.com would be in the neighborhood of 6,300, total.
Again, even assuming that all 34 assaults reported at the local strip clubs were aggravated assault, said assaults would comprise slightly more than one half of one percent of the City’s aggravated assaults.
It’s not possible to calculate what the rate of assault at the clubs is, lacking data on how many individual patrons, employees, etc. passed through the clubs in the time period in question, but it seems safe to assume that number is greater than 10,000 – the number of people at which the total number of assaults would reach the national average of 340.1 per 100,000 people.
Given the above, it should come as no surprise that Memphis Police aren’t over-concerned about the clubs as a major contributor to local law enforcement headaches.
Memphis’ journalists and politicians, on the other hand…. I suppose we’ll find out sometime after December 12th how the strip club assault numbers grab them.
If past performance is any indication of future results, however, Kelly’s recommendation of harsher penalties for ordinance violations will likely be taken to heart – and subsequently taken to court.
Round and round we go….