Insane.

The only way police should be involved with prostitution at all is licensing, including the prosecution of unlicensed ones.

You legalize, regulate and tax, you create jobs and revenue. You protect public health by requiring STD testing and requiring condom use. You give sex workers a reasonable amount of dignity, and you make them less prone to victimization because a legal worker isn't afraid to speak up like an illegal one is.

If you made prostitutes legal, hundreds of millions of dollars could be flowing into local economies from their services.

Billions if they'll do anal.

"Great, we could be on our way to economic prosperity just by subjugating women and forcing all into legalized prostitution."

Danni:

How is it subjugation if a woman makes a free, informed choice to pursue a job that requires licensing and health testing?

What we've got now, now that's subjugation - women being forced into prostitution because they owe their drug dealers or because they can't leave a pimp without risking their lives. Very few such women feel they can report their situations, much less escape them, because of the illegality of what they're doing.

You obviously have no experience of a regulated, legal brothel, where customers are screened before they ever get near a worker, and where workers are allowed to refuse service to anyone who creeps them out or is otherwise offensive. Where johns are required to wear condoms, and a lot of sex acts are not permitted because of risks to the worker.

Prostitution is not, in and of itself, subjugation. Only when women must ply the trade in secret are they at the kind of risk you're thinking about.

"why should anyone report their earnings?"

That's one of the prime reasons for brothels. In that setting, it's a business, and it's much easier to detect who's reporting earnings and who's not. The individual worker gets an earnings statement like any other employee, of course. A brothel runs on a particular business model, and earnings reports that are very far outside that model will get scrutiny.

Street trade is another matter, of course, which is another one of the reasons why it should be outlawed. Prostitution isn't the problem. Putting defenseless women into the high-risk environment of the street, with no protection against pimps, drug dealers, violence and disease, is the problem.