Stats back a more 'adult' approach to commerce

OFF/BEAT GLIDEWELL E-mail: Click here Archive

© St. Petersburg Times
published July 5, 2002

If you play around with statistics long enough, strange ideas begin to emerge.

Usually it depends on who is quoting the statistics and for what reason.

Strip bars, for instance, a business that keeps a lot of people exercised, and a lot of lawyers rich down Pasco way, are often portrayed by their most avid opponents as hotbeds of crime and sin, but those descriptions are subject to definition.

My colleague Saundra Amrhein, for instance, found recently that many of the regular bars, the ones where the employees keep their clothes on most of the time, needed law enforcement assistance far more often than exotic dance bars and other adult entertainment clubs.

Two popular drinking (only) establishments, during a four-month period, had 26 and 22 calls each.

One of three adult clubs had 13 calls during the same period, one nine and one eight.

What does this tell us?

That people involved in lap dances are too busy paying attention to get into trouble?

But a Tampa lawyer, hired by the county as a consultant as it tries for the umpteenth time to fix its nudity ordinance, points out that those statistics deal only with crimes that are reported.

Because, the reasoning goes, some of the acts the county desperately wants to call crimes take place between consenting adults who don't call the police to report them, whereas most crimes that take place in regular bars involve cases where one party or the other feels aggrieved.

That would make the civil libertarians among us wonder why we would bother people in situations where nobody is complaining -- but that would not be in keeping with the American tradition described by H.L. Mencken as "losing sleep because they know that someone somewhere is having a good time."

My own theory is that a lot of money in strip bars goes into G-strings instead of alcohol consumption, and alcohol is a more frequent cause of violence than nudity is. The slogan "Make love, not margaritas" comes to mind.

An aside here: In all the hours over the years that I have selflessly patronized adult establishments while conducting research for this column, nobody in any of them has suggested I perform or offered to perform any illegal act. This includes counties and states where my face is not known as well as those where it is, and although I might be too ugly to inspire such invitations, I am hardly ever too broke to do so.

And if we are going to let police calls be the guiding data, then somebody should note that a certain, ahem, large, free-standing and often controversial discount department store, during 91/2 months last year, logged more than 400 police calls.

That's roughly 42 calls per month to the department store and roughly 6.5 per month to the "regular" bars and a little more than three calls per month to the most police-involved of the "adult bars."

So who makes the best neighbor?

Of course, given the nature of the calls, someone is going to have to make a determination whether shoplifting is worse than being drunk and obnoxious or vice versa.

Something in all of this makes me want to recommend that we could consolidate police efforts by creating an adult discount department store.

Greeters in G-strings could liven the joint up -- and collect a cover charge.

Out-of-work lingerie models could work in the women's wear department.

You could buy tube socks and adult movies in the same establishment.

"Customer Service" would have an entirely new meaning.

Relaxing nudity restrictions would make shoplifters easier to spot.

And an adults-only policy would keep you from being trapped in a checkout line between two carts with screaming infants in the seats.

The other place could keep the blue-light special; we'd have the black-light special; and when you saw blue lights, you would know the show was over.

Yeah, I know. The idea needs a little work, but then so does the county's nudity ordinance, which brought us here in the first place, and that is an arena in which -- obviously -- dumb ideas have never been prohibited.

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