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The Pornography Industry Today
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20070 |
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Section : |
MODERN THOUGHT
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| Issue
Date : |
12 / 1992 |
8,280 Words |
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An Interview With Two Detectives
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The following article is an interview with two members of the Los Angeles Police Department's Administrative Vice Division, Sgt. Bob Peters and Det. Bob Navarro, conducted by WORLD & I Currents in Modern Thought editor Robert Selle.
THE WORLD & I: What sort of day-to-day work do vice officers such as yourselves do?
Sgt. Bob Peters: Basically, our responsibility is gathering information on the pornography industry and putting together obscenity cases. We check the bookstores, arcades, and other pornography outlets on a regular basis, find out the type of material that's on the market, the type of product that's selling and not selling, magazines that are coming on the market.
We try to find material that we feel is prosecutable under our obscenity statutes. After that, we look for the people who are supplying it.
W&I: Does that involve undercover work as well? Electronic surveillance?
Peters: We don't do a lot of electronic. We do some. Also, we might respond undercover to ads, and we do undercover operations on the distributors.
Det. Bob Navarro: There are also many companies that distribute primarily by mail order, so we'll order material that we think may be prosecutable. And, because of the obscenity laws, we have to keep abreast of changes in community standards, especially any changes that tilt against the presence of pornography in the community.
W&I: How has the porn industry in American changed over the past twenty years, and what was it like, say, fifty years ago?
Peters: We've seen a lot of changes in twenty years--for example, in the type of material we're prosecuting. When I started working the industry, the material was tame compared to today's violent sex, S&M, child porn, group sex, bestiality, sex snuff films, and so on.
We've also seen a big change in the location of porn outlets. When I started, bookstores were small and located in a run-down area of the neighborhood. Pornography usually was not their primary focus; for example, sometimes they were horse-race bookie stores that sold porno on the side.
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