In the late eighteenth-century, a new police force began to patrol the streets of Mexico City. While their first goal was to maintain street illumination, they also policed sanitation, plebeian bodies, public sexuality, and prostitution, creating new archives in the form of their nightly log books. This new and more quantitative documentation actually caused more evasiveness on the part of both those under arrest and those doing the arresting. In the 1790s, law enforcement inscribed only a handful of women arrested for working in brothels and a few dozen public sex acts. Despite nightly entries, many official pronouncements regarding changing plebeian street culture, and a greater presence of authority figures on the street, law enforcement, judicial notaries, and the women taken into custody made a conscious effort to avoid recording transactional sex.
Police Training to Align Law Enforcement and HIV Prevention: Preliminary Evidence From the Field