Laura Torlaschi was in an unusual line of work.

“I am a sex worker. I use it to fund my writing and my activist work,” she told NY1 on a recent afternoon in Brooklyn.

What You Need To Know

  • Democratic mayoral nominee Zohran Mamdani co-sponsored a piece of legislation in Albany to decriminalize sex work

  • There has been a dramatic shift in how the city treats sex workers in the last decade

  • Prostitution arrests have plumetted in the city in the last decade, according to officials 

Starting at 20 years old, for several years she was a sex worker — first in Miami, then in New York.

Torlaschi is disabled and says she needed work that didn’t take much time.

She met clients online.

“For financial reasons I ended up in sex work and there were a lot of times where kind of the psychological terror of realizing that I could have an arrest record and I could throw away all my parents’ hard work because of what I needed to do, the work I needed to do, to survive was not particularly comforting,” Torlaschi said.

It’s this work, which is illegal in New York, that’s now a big topic on the campaign trail.

“Legalizing prostitution is not the way to bring down crime,” former Gov. Andrew Cuomo said earlier this month.

“I am not going to leave this city to someone who wants to legalize prostitution on our streets,” Mayor Eric Adams said last week.

Because leading Democratic candidate for mayor, Zohran Mamdani, has supported legislation in Albany that would decriminalize sex work in New York.

“What I would tell these critics, and they include Mayor Adams and Andrew Cuomo, is to look at what the policies of the last few years has actually left us with,” Mamdani told NY1 earlier this month.

In reality, there has been a dramatic shift in how the city treats sex workers in the last decade.

According to data NY1 obtained through the state freedom of information law from the NYPD, arrests for prostitution related offenses by the NYPD have fallen drastically in the past 10 years — from thousands a year in 2014 to just 302 last year as of early December.

Both the Manhattan and Brooklyn district attorneys told NY1 they have not prosecuted sex workers for years.

The Queens district attorney dismisses prostitution cases if the worker accepts and completes services, like counseling.

The Staten Island DA says the office offers diversion programs when appropriate. The Bronx DA has no policy on prostitution arrests.

“The way that police in New York police, and really throughout the country but in New York City, engage in policing sex work has shifted. The exception really is what is happening in Queens,” Melissa Broudo, the legal director for Decriminalize Sex Work, a national group aiming to decriminalize prostitution, said.

Arrests in Queens appear to be going up this year, specifically on Roosevelt Avenue.

That’s where the NYPD and the Adams administration are cracking down on illegal brothels.

Since the crackdown started in October, there have been 397 prostitution-related arrests as of the end of June, according to the mayor’s office.  

Advocates acknowledge the idea that prostitution would be completely decriminalized in New York is a long way off.

“That is something that we know as advocates that this is not something that’s going to happen tomorrow, but we are laying the ground work to have the complex conversation so that consenting adults can do what they want to do safely,” Broudo said.

At least for now, the Mamdani campaign says it’s not something that’s part of his agenda at City Hall.

Some hope that changes.  

“Criminalizing any aspect of the industry only leads to driving the industry further underground,” Torlaschi said. “It leads to cutting sex worker’s income, which makes them more desperate and more willing to compromise their boundaries. And I want to see a New York City where sex workers are not afraid of being revictimized by a carceral system.”