Up to 25 percent of the city's call girls are managed by municipal police officers, a Taipei City councilor claimed yesterday.
Armed with audio tape and accompanied by a witness who claims he's been wrongly accused of being a pimp, New Party City Councilor Lee Hsin (李新) aired the allegations yesterday.
"The police benefit greatly from capturing and releasing call girls," the city councilor said. "They not only get rewarded for making arrests, but also get rewarded for running a lucrative business.
"Those involved in the business say that police are running at least 25 percent of the city's call girl services," Lee said.
To back up his claims, the city councilor yesterday played for reporters a taped conversation that he had recently with a married couple that runs a Taipei hotel.
According to the wife, a police officer from the local precinct in November began to pay the couple frequent visits.
"He kept persuading us to substitute our cleaning ladies with his friends so it'd make it easier for them to run the sex trade," the woman said on the tape.
The policeman wanted an inside contact to act as agent when hotel patrons sought the company of women.
After arresting two of the hotel's customers in July, the officer told the couple he would give them some leeway if they cooperated when he needed to make arrests in the future, the woman said.
"He asked us to turned off the surveillance camera," the husband said on the tape. "He told us that the only thing we needed to do was to call a certain call girl center and ask them to send a girl over and he'll take care of the rest."
The couple refused, "so he returned every so often to harass us by making raids," the husband said.
"It was very difficult to run a business with the police coming to your hotel every four days."
A man accompanying Lee at the city councilor's press conference yesterday claimed that he had been wrongly accused of being a pimp.
"I did contact a call girl, but I didn't have sex with her," the man said, wearing dark sunglasses and a baseball cap to conceal his identity. "The police arrested me and said that I was a pimp."
The man, who said he had gone to the hotel to eat a hotpot meal, has been charged with "undermining public morality."
Tsai Teng-yuan, director of the Ta-an Police Precinct, said the man in question had been charged after a call girl identified him as a pimp. "It's up to the judge to decide whether Yu is guilty as charged," Tsai said.
Municipal police have been under intense media scrutiny recently after Lee on Aug. 8 alleged that three Ta-an police officers detained a prostitute from China and extorted money from her managers in exchange for her release.
The three are facing charges of malfeasance.
The city has suspended the officers and plans to transfer them to different positions.
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