Plainfield-Times

2006-08-22T20:16:00.000-07:00

Where's the headline?

2004-02-04T08:02:00.000-08:00

5. GOOD PLAINFIELD POLICE WORK: DAMNED WITH FAINT PRAISE

Landesman sets up his story with a 2-year old Plainfield case. Let's look into this a little more closely.

In a story in its 3/26/2002 issue, filed from Newark, the New York Times reported:

"Four people, including two sisters, were charged today [3/25/02] with a scheme in which, prosecutors said, teenage girls were smuggled into the United States from poor Mexican villages after whirlwind courtships and promises of marriage, only to be forced into prostitution in two New Jersey towns.
"The scheme prosecutors described was uncovered after the police in Plainfield, N.J., raided a house where they believed sex was being sold in late February and initially charged three girls under age 18 with prostitution, the authorities said. From there, the police said, they were led to another girl in a brothel in nearby Elizabeth.
"Based on information provided by the four girls, six adults were accused of virtually enslaving the girls and forcing them to sell sex at $35 per customer at the two locations..."

Here is how Landesman sets out the matter:

"On a tip, the Plainfield police raided the house in February 2002, expecting to find illegal aliens working an underground brothel. What the police found were four girls between the ages of 14 and 17. They were all Mexican nationals without documentation. But they weren't prostitutes; they were sex slaves. The distinction is important: these girls weren't working for profit or a paycheck. They were captives to the traffickers and keepers who controlled their every move."

As Police Chief Ed Santiago has told me, it was the Plainfield police that developed the probable cause that made the raid possible. It was the Plainfield police who determined that what was going on was sex slavery, and not voluntary prostitution. The Plainfield police made the case that the under-age prostitutes were victims and eligible for coverage under the 2000 anti-trafficking law. And the local police put the bordello out of business by boarding it up and preventing its reopening. It is the boarding-up policy, says Chief Santiago, that has enabled Plainfield to be able to say that we have shut down all bordello operations.

He points out that Plainfield used to (and other towns still do) arrest the protitutes and madam, who would then post bail and be back in business the next day. Since Plainfield has adopted a policy of boarding up the properties, a key link in the chain is broken--the madam must find a new location, and the johns are left not knowing where the bordello has gone. In fact, he adds, Plainfield has gotten a reputation of being so inhospitable that these types of operations have moved to Essex County and other locations.

(I have been told that there are still bordellos in North Plainfield and Westfield.)

What bothers Mayor McWilliams and other Plainfielders who have read Landesman's story is that there is no mention of our being "on the side of the angels," as it were.

Seems that it did not fit Landesman's neat outline, premised on local police being too dimwitted to get it and cases too difficult and time-consuming to pursue.

No one doubts there is sex slavery in the US, though (as the exchanges around this story show) the extent is not really known. Too bad Landesman didn't use a real, current anecdote of an active den of sex slavery to set up his story. Is that because he didn't look hard enough or because there just aren't any cases to report? I don't know the complete answer, but I can tell you this--a search of the New York Times archives since 1996 uncovers only one other domestic (U.S.) case of sex slavery involving foreign nationals on which they reported--in Brooklyn. Hardly intense coverage by the nation's leading newspaper of such a horrific business. In fact, "scant" is a better description.

Dan Damon

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2004-02-04T07:23:00.000-08:00

4. PETER LANDESMAN'S PLAINFIELD: NOT THE ONE YOU KNOW

Landesman sets up his piece (and the Times sets it in type that can be read from across the room) with a dramatic flourish:

"The house at 1212 1/2 West Front Street in Plainfield, N.J., is a conventional midcentury home with slate-gray siding, white trim and Victorian lines. When I stood in front of it on a breezy day in October, I could hear the cries of children from the playground of an elementary school around the corner. American flags fluttered from porches and windows. The neighborhood is a leafy, middle-class Anytown. The house is set back off the street, near two convenience stores and a gift shop."

While it is satisfying, at last, to be recognized by the Times as an "Anytown," there are problems and discrepancies here.

THE HOUSE

Something about Landesman's description nagged at me and I drove over to the house toward the end of that Sunday afternoon. The signs on the two doors indicate that they are 1212A and 1212B West Front Street. There is not a 1212 1/2 in sight. The house in question is not slate-gray but cream colored. Saying that it is set back from the street is a bit misleading. The house, the original building on its lot, appears to have been built in the last half of the 1800s, when the area was still primarily residential and somewhat sparsely developed.

After the half-million square foot Mack truck plant set up shop in 1911, the neighborhood rapidly filled in with relatively modest single-family homes, becoming a largely Polish working-class neighborhood whose residents worked at the Mack Plant, National Starch, or nearby Art Color Lithography. The corner near which 1212 sits was transformed into a neighborhood shopping area by the addition of storefronts reaching out to the sidewalk on the street side of several of the homes. The older facades appear to date from the late 1910s and the 1920s.

THE NEIGHBORHOOD

As any longtime Plainfielder can tell you, our neighborhoods are quite sharply defined to ourselves, as though there were invisible lines between them. I learned this over the course of many years in residential real estate sales. And these demarcations are not at all obvious to the casual observer.

Front Street is busy State Route 28, and in this particular stretch has a mix of neighborhood retail, a bar, an auto repair shop, a tree service, and two-family rental properties. If American flags flutter from porches and windows, it must be elsewhere as there are no porches here, nor flags. The former Mack plant looms up just a half block away, on the other side of Clinton Avenue.

As for hearing “the cries of children from the playground of an elementary school around the corner,” consider this: Jefferson Elementary School is two-tenths of a mile away and its playground is on the far side of a three-story high building. With the noise of the steady stream of trucks, buses and cars on Front Street, one would have to have very acute hearing ideed to hear anything at 1212 from the playground on the other side of the school.

While Plainfield has many leafy, middle-class neighborhoods, it is hard to think of applying the description to this particular part of West Front Street. Among other communities he mentions is Westwood, a tony section of Los Angeles. No one who has ever been to both would confuse Westwood and West Front Street.

There are so many discrepancies, one begins to wonder about other parts of the story.

But there is another issue with Landesman's Plainfield lead-in: the Plainfield Sex Slavery Case (see post number 5 above).

Dan Damon
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2004-02-04T06:31:00.000-08:00

3. THE TIMES' REPLY AND THE MAYOR'S RESPONSE

[email from the NYTimes to Mayor McWilliams]

Dear Mayor McWilliams,

I include below an answer from the magazine editor:
"The piece in no way goes after Plainfield. It reports a case of sex slavery in Plainfield."

If you see a trend of anti-New Jersey reporting, please send us a message citing bias in a
specific article.

Sincerely,
Arthur Bovino
Office of the Public Editor

Arthur Bovino
Office of the Public Editor
The New York Times
(212)556-7652
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[Mayor McWilliams' reply]

Dear Mr. Bovino:

I'm sorry, but I am puzzled by your magazine editor's response.

My point is that because the sex slavery article featured Plainfield, NJ in its
headline, did not mention any other American cities, and used a 2 year old
one-off Plainfield case as an example of a current problem, the article gave the
impression that Plainfield is some sort of hub of sex slavery.

Soledad O'Brien portrayed Plainfield in that way during her CNN report about the
article on Saturday. And, just last night, during a dinner in Washington D.C.
with about 2000 people from New Jersey in attendance, Congressman Chris Smith of
New Jersey listed "slavery in Plainfield" among the ills we have to address in
NJ. This negative publicity is based entirely on the false impression your
magazine has given the general public about Plainfield.

I commend the Times for shining a bright light on the horrors of sex slavery.
However, your magazine editor's failure to grasp or care about the fact that the
story was misleading and harmful with respect to Plainfield is troubling.

Albert McWilliams
Mayor
City of Plainfield
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2004-02-04T06:27:00.000-08:00

2. MAYOR McWILLIAMS RESPONDS TO THE NEW YORK TIMES

On January 29, Mayor McWilliams sent the following email to Daniel Okrent, public editor of the New York Times.

Editor:

What is it about Plainfield, New Jersey that brings out such anger in the New York Times? As Mayor and on behalf of our citizens, I can tell you that the problem described in your Sunday story "The Girls Next Door" does not exist in our city. Unfortunately, your use of our city in that big bold headline has left many with the opposite, false impression.

The story's author, Peter Landesman, leads off with a two-year old example in Plainfield to prove the theme of the story that sex slavery occurs in plain sight today. Moreover, Landesman does not point out that it was Plainfield's police who determined the case was one of sex slavery, or that it is the only example of this horror that ever occurred in our city.

A 1999 CIA report, which seems to have informed much of Landesman's article, estimated that in the previous two years 100,000 victims of sex slavery and forced labor had poured into the United States, with only 250 prosecutions countrywide. One would think that Mr. Landesman's story would credit Plainfield for being proactive, and not just having another police force that "[doesn’t] know trafficking when they see it," as he says of police elsewhere in his article.

The story cites large metropolitan areas in which hundreds of "stash houses" operate—Los Angeles, Atlanta and Chicago, in addition to New York. One might expect that the resources these cities could bring to bear on the problem--hundreds of times what Plainfield, a city of about 50,000 can muster--would mean that there are plenty of other cases to cite. But evidently that is not the case as there were no further illustrations from American cities.

Landesman cites a State Department official, Laura Lederer, as saying "We’re not finding victims in the United States because we’re not looking for them." This neglect verges on the criminal. In the Plainfield case, we took advantage of the "Trafficking Victims Protection Act" to place the victims in the custody of New Jersey child welfare agencies, get them medical treatment, and make sure they were offered visas to remain here or help to return to Mexico. Again, shouldn’t our efforts have been painted more positively?

Like hundreds of other communities across the country, Plainfield strains its resources to tackle problems on its own when we know all too well that these problems are the result of abject failures by federal and state governments to control their borders.

In addition, in 2001 Andrew Jacobs wrote in your pages that opponents of a major redevelopment project stated that our downtown was "littered with empty buildings begging for revitalization." That article even misquoted me. We had only one empty building in our downtown in 2001. That one building was under redevelopment then and it is occupied now. If Mr. Jacobs had done any research to back up the statement he would have seen immediately that it was not true.

Mayors of communities like my own cringe whenever they see their city mentioned in the New York Times. Your coverage can cause people and businesses to move away from or decide not to move to our communities. You can lead bond-rating agencies to question our creditworthiness, and cause insurers to mark up premiums for our residents. My request is that you understand your power, and that you take extra measures to avoid giving false impressions that negatively impact the thousands of people who invest their time and money in cities such as ours.

Sincerely,
Albert T. McWilliams
Mayor, City of Plainfield
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2004-02-04T06:24:00.000-08:00

1. USING PLAINFIELD (AGAIN): "The Girls Next Door" by Peter Landesman

The lead article in the New York Times Magazine for Sunday 1/25/04 was a report on sex slavery in the U.S. by Peter Landesman. The story has aroused considerable comment. In addition to an exchange between Plainfield Mayor Al McWilliams and the New York Times public editor, Daniel Okrent, the story sparked a series of postings on MSN's Slate.com and the blog of Daniel Radosh. Links are provided below:

The full story is available on the NYTimes website (free, but registration is required).
Point your browser to--

http://www.nytimes.com/2004/01/25/magazine/25SEXTRAFFIC.html

Slate press critic Jack Shafer has links to his and other postings on Landesman’s sex slavery story at—

http://slate.msn.com/id/2094646/fr/nyt/

Shafer’s first article, "Doubting Landesman" can be found at—

http://slate.msn.com/id/2094502/

He followed this up with "The Times Magazine Strikes Back" at—

http://slate.msn.com/id/2094580/

And then "How Not To Handle Press Critics" at—

http://slate.msn.com/id/2094648/

Concluding on February 3rd with "Enslaved by His Sources" at—

http://slate.msn.com/id/2094896/

Blogger Daniel Radosh has several posts on his Radosh.net weblog, including—

http://radosh.blogspot.com/2004_01_01_radosh_archive.html#107506549865169128

All of this is quite illuminating and well worth reading.

DAN DAMON
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