Tools of the Trade

How far can a cop go when he's trying to catch a prostitute? Last week, an officer pulled out a weapon not registered with the Minneapolis Police Department and allowed a hooker to fondle it before he made the arrest.

"It's sad conduct on both sides," says Steve Simon, a clinical law professor at the University of Minnesota. "I never see police reports where an officer smoked crack or injected heroin before making a drug bust."

The bust raises all kinds of questions. The police are reluctant to reveal just how far they'll go "undercover" because they don't want sex workers getting wise. The courts, Simon says, are reluctant to interfere with police tactics that have thus far evaded entrapment rulings or court classification as extreme.

As a special Hennepin County public defender, Simon has tried to curtail these kinds of intimate police tactics using a decades-old California ruling, which bars evidence obtained through "conduct that shocks the conscience." He's not been successful—not terribly surprising given the full spectrum of cop-as-john behavior nationwide. This offering of a Minneapolis Police Department penis, it turns out, is notable but not remarkable.

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