With the caveat that I am not licensed to practice law in Ohio:
The law in question appears to be Ohio Rev. Code Ann. § 2907.40, which provides in pertinent part at (C):
I have bolded the portion that would seemingly be violated when a performer touches a patron.
I presume the law is intended to forbid lap dances and similar services, because that goes beyond stripping and more towards prostitution.
Ah ok. Thanks! That (2) wasn’t mentioned before.
Right – although there might have been probable cause for the arrest. But when it became clear that Ms. Daniels was not an “employee who regularly appears nude or seminude on the premises” of Siren’s, it would have been clear that the prosecution could not prove that element of the crime.
Just wondering how lap dances worked in Ohio, I found this story: Ohio’s strip club law rarely cited over the last decade
Apparently Ms. Daniels was one of three dancers arrested, with the other two being Ohio natives and presumably “regular” performers within the meaning of the law.
The law was passed some 10 years ago. According to the September 2017 article: [INDENT]The Franklin County Sherriff’s office found no instances in which the 2007 law had been cited, according to spokesman Marc Gofstein.
“We have not had any complaints or reasons to apply this law. We have gone back as far as we have records for, and nothing has been found,” he said. [/INDENT] Columbus is located in Franklin County.
Now perhaps they started enforcing the law after the 9/2017 article. Or perhaps this is the first time they are enforcing the law ever. If it’s the latter, I opine that the Vice Squad should familiarize themselves with laws that they are not accustomed to enforcing. If they do not, that is bad police practice and deserves administrative penalty, e.g. a writeup.
Furthermore, there is the appearance of impropriety: extralegal considerations may have played a role in law enforcement. There is basis for further investigation by journalists and the citizenry.
Well, that would certainly be odd.
If, as you suggest, extralegal – political – considerations caused law enforcement to begin an investigation, but the investigation revealed legitimate probable cause of a crime, what do you think should happen?
I’m honestly unsure. I can only provide 1/2 of an answer.
Preamble:
Law abiding African Americans must be wary of cross country trips due to unjust legal harassment. This offends my sense of justice.
Policework ain’t easy.
Police reform is a heavy lift. But an important matter given 1) and ongoing LE threads in the Pit.
Crime has declined a lot since the early 1990s, probably due to lower levels of lead in the blood of male 16-30 year olds.
Ok, now say that investigation revealed the sting operation was conducted because officers were determined to wreck vengeance on Ms. Daniels. (Other scenarios are plausible - maybe they wanted to see a pr0n show at taxpayer’s expense for example.) While they were there they found blue laws being broken. They also trumped up some charges for Stormy that they knew or had reason to know were bogus.
Upon review, their supervisors might
a) respond as they would to any other police officer who enforces nonsense laws. That might vary according to the officer’s experience.
b) Penalize them for drawing up false charges for Stormy, as they would if any other sort of false charges were brought up,
Ok, now say the laws they were enforcing were commonly enforced and correctly applied to Stormy, but that the officers were conducting the investigation because they had it in for Stormy. In that case,
a) Well that didn’t happen
and
b) I’m honestly unsure at present. I will say that such practices are decidedly non-optimal and should be subject to monitoring and review. I suppose I’d need to work with a better hypothetical to get a grasp on it. Even then…
I’ll take a run at crafting one; the issue of pretextual stops is not a new one in the legal world, after all.
So let’s imagine that the officers hotly deny any improper motives for their investigation, but some kind of extrinisic evidence shows up – maybe a voice mail recording or a text message exchange between the officers saying that they should go undercover at the club because “Once a whore, always a whore,” and they are confident they’ll find something to hang an arrest on that will “teach her to mess with Trump.”
Nonetheless, when at the club, they have hidden body cameras that when reviewed clearly reveal Daniels (and other dancers) touching patrons and inviting patrons to touch them, which is (as to the other dancers, if not Daniels) inarguably a violation of Ohio law.
What should happen?
It’s not hard to imagine a hypothetical where the law applies to all dancers, not only to “regular” dancers. If, in that hypothetical, the police decided to enforce that law specifically against Daniels, even though it’s never or almost never enforced against anyone else in its decade-long history, then that still looks like a problem to me. I don’t know what the solution is or should be (though a lawyer might know), but a law that’s selectively enforced depending on the politics of the offender is worse than no law at all.
EDIT: Oh, and I’m taking it as a given that the police specifically chose to enforce the law in this specific instance because it was Daniels performing. The police could argue that it was just a new commissioner who was determined to crack down on strip joints, or the like, but the fact that the first time this law has ever been enforced just happened to be against the single most politically-significant adult performer in the country (and heck, how often is any adult performer politically significant?) makes that argument very hard to buy.
According to CBS, the police claim to have been at the club as a part of a long-term investigation of illegal activity at city adult clubs.
I have no idea how true that is.
I doubt that an investigation of lap dances at strip clubs would have to be that “long-term”
Seems like quite a coincidence to me, but if the police showed records of busting similar stripper touching since the law was passed, that would definitely sway my opinion. I’m not holding my breath though.
Ah. Progress from the SD hivemind.
Wiki on selective enforcement: [INDENT] In law, selective enforcement occurs when government officials such as police officers, prosecutors, or regulators exercise enforcement discretion, which is the power to choose whether or how to punish a person who has violated the law. The biased use of enforcement discretion, such as that based on racial prejudice or corruption, is usually considered a legal abuse and a threat to the rule of law. [/INDENT] ISTM that selective enforcement by police officers for the purposes of political manipulation compromises the rule of law.
Could be true, in some world. That’s why investigation is appropriate. Long term criminal inquiries into city adult clubs (snort) generally produce credible paper trails of one kind or another.
Big picture: I think cops should be paid a professional salary, even if they only have a high school diploma. But this job isn’t for everyone, and they should be expected to uphold the law without fear or favor.
I think that’s only records of citations by the sheriff’s office. The sheriff’s office would normally only deal with things happening in an area without its own police department.
Today’s article lists some numbers for the entire county and city:
I enjoy the Columbus PD saying this arrest was part of a long-term undercover investigation into prostitution and human trafficking. 
And they blew their cover by arresting a stripper who put her boobies on someone? That’s some fine police work.
“A long term investigation of illegal activity at city adult clubs” sounds to me a lot like police officers wanting to go to strip clubs on the public dime.
If cop movies have taught me anything, it’s that every investigation requires a cop to go into a strip club. Those places are the hubs of the underworld.