Since California's Assembly Bill 379 took effect in January 2026, San Diego police have issued 95 citations and arrests under the law's new loitering-with-intent-to-buy-sex provision through July 2026 — and only 12 of those went to white men. Most of the citations landed in Barrio Logan and National City, two mostly Latino, low-income neighborhoods that surround Naval Base San Diego, according to police enforcement data.
The pattern is exactly what critics warned about when lawmakers debated the bill last year. As reported by KPBS, San Diego police issued just one citation under the general law against buying sex during the first half of 2026, but ramped up use of the loitering provision specifically, treating it as a more efficient use of resources. The law, which created California Penal Code Section 653.25, makes loitering in a public place with intent to purchase commercial sex a misdemeanor carrying a $1,000 fine earmarked for the state's Survivor Support Fund, according to LegiScan.
AB 379 was introduced in February 2025 by Assemblymembers Maggy Krell and Nick Schultz, co-sponsored by San Diego Mayor Todd Gloria and District Attorney Summer Stephan, and signed by Governor Gavin Newsom before taking effect at the start of this year, per the City of San Diego. Gloria did not respond to KPBS questions sent to the city's communications office, per the outlet's report. Beyond the loitering charge, the law also expanded prosecutors' ability to charge solicitation of a 16- or 17-year-old as a wobbler felony when the adult buyer is at least three years older, according to Eisner Gorin LLP.
A Law Enforcer Defends the Numbers
Daniel Hall, who oversees the San Diego Police Department's enforcement of the law, said targeting street prostitution makes the city less appealing to traffickers and that street-level prostitution and human trafficking are closely connected, per KPBS. He said the racial disparities showing up in citation data were not intentional. Barrio Logan and National City are known areas of prostitution and are zoned for mixed use, according to the outlet's reporting.
To enforce the loitering law, police look for vehicles circling or stopping to talk with someone who appears to be a sex worker, then identify a driver's race and gender only after approaching the vehicle, per KPBS. Advocates had warned during the bill's drafting that this kind of vague intent standard could enable racial bias in policing. During legislative debates in July 2025, Democratic State Senator Scott Wiener opposed the bill, calling it “two bills in one” and warning that terms like “beckons” gave police overly broad discretion that could lead to discriminatory profiling, according to the Courthouse News Service.
Echoes of a Law Repealed in 2022
The tension is not new to California. Wiener had previously authored Senate Bill 357, the Safer Streets for All Act, which repealed the state's prior prostitution loitering law in 2022 after civil rights groups argued it disproportionately targeted Black, Brown and transgender women — a law that came to be known as the “walking while trans” law, according to KPBS. Between 2019 and 2021, Black individuals made up 79% of San Diego Police Department arrests and citations for loitering with intent to sell sex, despite representing roughly 6% of the city's population at the time, per the ACLU of Southern California, which found the earlier law was overwhelmingly enforced against Black women.
Minouche Kandel, senior staff attorney in the LGBTQ, Gender & Reproductive Justice Project at the ACLU of Southern California, told KPBS that solicitation laws were used for decades to police LGBTQ+ sexual activity, and that not all sex work is trafficked sex work. She said two consenting adults engaging in sex work are exercising control over their own bodies, and recommended housing, mental healthcare and paid job training as a public health approach instead. Kandel's organization traced the lineage of loitering statutes back to California's first such law, enacted in 1850, which enabled law enforcement to arrest Indigenous people and place them into forced labor, and to post-Civil War Black codes that criminalized being found “strolling about in idleness” to push newly freed Black Americans into low-wage labor.
What Sex Workers Say Is Happening on the Ground
Jamie Arangure, a local sex worker who advocates through Proyecto Trans Latinas, told KPBS the new law targets San Diego's most vulnerable workers and said business has slowed since it took effect. Street-based sex work is more dangerous but cheaper than online or motel-based work, Arangure said, and the fear of arrest is now preventing clients from allowing sex workers to take needed safety precautions before getting into a vehicle. Arangure said sex work will continue no matter how many laws target it, adding simply that “sex work is work,” per the outlet.
Trans immigrant sex workers face discrimination in traditional employment, according to KPBS, a barrier advocates say pushes some toward street-based work regardless of legal risk. Studies have found no connection between race and the likelihood of being a sex buyer, the outlet reported, undercutting any race-based rationale for where enforcement concentrates. AB 379 proponents argued the law was needed to combat sex trafficking, but critics counter that it primarily targets potential buyers rather than traffickers themselves, and may end up harming non-trafficked sex workers trying to survive a dangerous industry and costly economy.
The Backdrop: A Federally Flagged Trafficking Hotspot
San Diego's push for tougher tools against buyers is rooted in the region's federal designation. The FBI has previously named the San Diego metropolitan area one of 13 high-intensity child prostitution areas in the country, according to the San Diego County Office of Education. Separately, researchers from the University of San Diego and Point Loma Nazarene University estimated the underground commercial sex trade in San Diego County generates roughly $810 million a year, per a study cited by UBS Global.
Multi-agency enforcement in the region predates AB 379. In December 2025, the San Diego Human Trafficking Task Force — made up of SDPD, the San Diego Sheriff's Department and federal Homeland Security Investigations — ran “Operation Home for the Holidays” across San Diego and National City, rescuing 19 victims and making multiple arrests, according to U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement. Other California cities have moved fast on the new buyer-focused tool too: after officer training on AB 379, the Oakland Police Department ran targeted operations along International Boulevard in January 2026 that produced 20 arrests for solicitation and loitering to purchase sex within two weeks, per the City of Oakland.
San Diego's numbers arrive amid a broader statewide reckoning over how loitering laws intersect with race, sex work and street safety, a theme Hoodline has also traced in San Francisco's shifting sex trade and in coverage of Los Angeles's “Blade” corridor. For now, the debate in San Diego remains unresolved: police maintain the loitering law disrupts trafficking networks by targeting demand, while advocates like Kandel and Arangure warn it is reproducing the same racial patterns the state tried to undo when it repealed the earlier statute in 2022.
