Seven cities, seven different yardsticks: police records on prostitution do not measure sex workers

Asked:

“show me a map of US cities with the largest number of prostitutes”

No credible, comparable census of sex workers by US city exists. What a live-web scan did find are recent numeric prostitution-related police records for seven cities, spanning 2022–2025 — arrests, offenses, cases and crimes counted by different agencies under different rules. This page maps those records as a proxy, and only as a proxy.

Recent prostitution-related police records — not sex-worker population estimates

Bubble area scales with the reported count; each city uses its own metric and year, so bubbles are not directly comparable

Read the caveats before the numbers

Counts mix arrests, offenses, cases, and crimes from different years; do not interpret any sum or ranking as people. These figures mostly reflect enforcement and reporting practices, not the underlying number of sex workers.

The web research scanned broad academic, official, police, news, and dataset sources; rigorous city-level population estimates were sparse and inconsistent. FBI UCR methodology warns that arrest data can include the same person more than once.

Las Vegas has the largest single figure in this set — 1,007 offenses in 2024 — amid local reporting that enforcement activity is rising. ktnv.com

Houston's 958 crimes are from 2022 and come from an academic study of legalization effects, two years older than most of the set. shsu-ir.tdl.org

Phoenix's 437 cases in 2024 trace to targeted sweeps of one corridor, showing how one operation can move a city's count. azfamily.com

St Petersburg's 15 arrests in 2024 — 67 times smaller than Las Vegas — is the only figure from an official UCR annual report, underlining how uneven the sources are. police.stpete.org

The seven records

City	State	Count	Metric	Year	Agency	Source

Police-record proxy data for 7 US cities, 2022–2025, gathered by a live-web scan of academic, official, police, news, and dataset sources. Each row is one recent numeric prostitution-related police record; a count measures arrests, offenses, cases, or crimes as defined by the cited agency or source, not people. Figures are not comparable across cities and no prevalence ranking is implied. Cities without a recent numeric record were cut.

This report was generated automatically by Keenable SELECT at a user's request, from publicly available web sources linked herein. Keenable does not review, verify, or endorse its contents and makes no representation as to accuracy, completeness, or timeliness; AI-based extraction may contain errors. Nothing in this report is investment, legal, financial, or other professional advice. All trademarks and referenced content remain the property of their respective owners; no affiliation or endorsement is implied. To report an error, rights concern, or request removal: legal@keenable.ai.