Secondary harm: Destin's case against strip clubs

A strip club in Destin would inevitably become a magnet for crime, according to reports the city has collected to justify refusing a proposed Mountain Drive strip club a business license.
“The (sexually oriented business)-crime link is a scientific fact predicted by strong theory, confirmed empirically,” research Richard McCleary of the University of California said in one of the reports.
Terry Stephenson, who owns the Pin-Ups club in Georgia, wants nude dancing in the Oasis pool-hall on Mountain Drive. After the city turned down his business application because the Mountain zoning doesn’t allow for “adult entertainment,” Stephenson filed suit in Pensacola federal court.
One of the suit’s arguments is that Destin has no “compelling government interest” in restricting nude dancing — which like other forms of dance enjoys First Amendment protection — because there’s no evidence the club would harm the community. The reports are the city’s response, which will be used to justify a new ordinance on adult entertainment that the city’s Local Planning Agency was scheduled to review Tuesday night.
Destin’s 1986 ordinance on adult entertainment banned nude dancing outright. City Manager Greg Kisela has said that the requirements in the new ordinance — background checks for owners and staffs, six feet of separation between dancers and patrons, no alcohol on the premises — will discourage new businesses, but will be defensible in court.
McCleary’s report found that all sexually oriented businesses, including adult bookstores and video stores, pose a threat to the public because the patrons are “soft targets”: They’re often drunk; frequently there after dark, when crime is at its peak; carry lots of cash; are strangers in the neighborhood; already predisposed to offers of drugs or prostitution, which can also be bait for robbery; and won’t report the crimes so that they don’t have to admit patronizing the business. The end result is a low risk and high payoff for crooks.
“Virtually every empirical study conducted in the last 30 years has found that (sexually oriented businesses) pose large, significant ambient crime risks,” McCleary said.
Studies by the adult-entertainment industry have challenged most of the “secondary effect” arguments and said the studies supporting the arguments are flawed. McCleary said that “no single flaw could explain the broad consensus finding of this literature ... Industry-sponsored studies are designed to support industry arguments but even then, these studies almost always find effects.”
McCleary said a common counter-argument is that any new business, such as gas stations or grocery stores, will cause similar “secondary harm,” but that’s not so, because the conditions that make strip-club patrons vulnerable don’t apply to people buying bread or filling up their tank.
In a 1991 study in Garden Grove, Cal, McCleary said, when a new sexually oriented business opened, crime went up 67 percent over the following year, but only 6 percent at established businesses — meaning the 67 percent wasn’t part of a general rise in crime, but the effect of the new business in an area.
Free-speech advocates have cited counter-studies. The First Amendment Center says on its Web site that two studies in Fulton County, Ga., found that regular bars generated more calls to police than strip clubs, and property values around the clubs actually increased.
The U.S. Supreme Court has ruled that communities cannot ban nude dancing completely, but they can restrict it based on “adverse secondary effects” such as an increase in crime. A 1986 federal case established that cities can infer such effects from studies in other areas, rather than locally, and that the evidence of adverse effects need only be “reasonably believed to be relevant”: It’s up to plaintiffs to shatter that reasonable belief by either proving the facts of the study are off or that the facts do not support the conclusions.