Last Saturday afternoon, Main St. in Lake Elsinore was alive with pedestrians. People milled from store to store, families walked to restaurants and mothers pushed strollers.

What was not taking place, however, was what interested Michael Yates, a sergeant with the Riverside County Sheriff’s Department’s Lake Elsinore Station.

Prostitutes who had recently been roaming Main seemed to have abandoned the area.

The Lake Elsinore station has received several calls recently from residents complaining women the callers suspected of being prostitutes were loitering on the sidewalks.

So on March 4, investigators from the station organized and conducted a "solicitation for prostitution" operation.

They conducted it in broad daylight, from 12 to 5 p.m., near the corner of Main and Library Ave.

As part of the program, they placed several "law enforcement decoys," or women who appeared to be prostitutes but were really working for the police department. The purpose, said Yates, was to catch men trying to buy sexual favors from the decoys.

The operation Advertisement

[ Chatton and Associates ] worked. Police arrested eight men in those five hours. "We thought that was a high number – higher than we would want it to be," said Yates.

The suspects range in age from 23 to 91. Five are Lake Elsinore residents, one is a Murrieta resident, one is a Quail Valley resident and one is a Wildomar resident.

The residents mostly came from Lake Elsinore and the cities immediately surrounding it, which is good news in a sense, said Yates. It indicates the city is not reputed as a prostitution hotspot.

The operation was a success, not because it resulted in eight arrests, Yates said, but rather because it deterred men from soliciting women for prostitution.

That is why police conduct these programs, Yates said. "It’s a program that needs to be done to keep everybody honest," he stated.

Anyone with information regarding this operation is encouraged to call Investigator Tina Woodard at the Lake Elsinore Police Department at (951) 245-3358.