Thank you so much for the question.
There is always going to be a turbulent relationship between police and sex workers as long as police are instructed to criminalize sex workers. I want to emphasize that's really how it goes.
The sex workers on the ground experience violence. They experience harassment, especially racialized workers, especially trans and queer workers.
Something we saw during COVID-19 was that police were using the emergency orders to further target sex workers. That's something we always see. We always see how law enforcement uses other laws to surveil sex workers.
For example, during the height of the pandemic, a service user reached out to us because someone who they thought was a client booked a session with them. That client showed up and it was actually a policeman who ticketed that sex worker for transgressing social distancing. We actually had to amp up our legal support services to address this increase in policing. We also saw how the emergency orders just facilitated more contact.
I'm not here today to be a proponent of police relationships, because under criminalization, it doesn't work. Under incarceration, under colonialism, that just doesn't work.