There is resistance to the situation of sex workers on both sides of the bay. The new police chief of Oakland has announced a tougher approach on International Boulevard. At the same time, residents of Shotwell Street have sued San Francisco over sex work on this street.

A KTVU report Tuesday night reported a growing sex scene on the sidewalks of International Boulevard in Oakland, and residents of San Antonio’s East Oakland neighborhood complained about what they see as total police indifference. “The police walk by and do nothing,” a resident who identified himself only as Terrance told KTVU.

However, the broadcaster adds that Oakland’s new police chief, Floyd Mitchell, has announced a tougher approach to sex work in the area.

“You’re going to see a huge upsurge in the coming weeks down there on International Boulevard to address these issues,” Mitchell told residents at a recent public safety meeting, according to KTVU. “We’re going to hold these individuals who facilitate sex trafficking on our boulevards accountable for federal crimes.”

Not many details were released about how this “huge surge” will be handled, but KTVU notes that Oakland police plan to spend “a lot of overtime money on combating sex trafficking” and that federal agencies will also be involved, although Mitchell did not say which agencies those will be.

The KPIX report above is from late April, but it describes a common problem in law enforcement’s fight against streets flooded with illegal sex work. Oakland has put up barricades on East 15th Street, which worked, but residents say it has merely shifted the sex trade to International Boulevard.

This probably sounds familiar to residents of the San Francisco Mission District. You’ll remember that barricades and bollards were put up on Capp Street last year in an attempt to curb sex trafficking there. And it seems to have worked, although it only seems to have shifted sex work to Shotwell Street, where pranksters have done satirical work with “Slow Streets” signs.

But Shotwell Street residents are largely not amused. In fact, they are so angry that they have filed a lawsuit against the city of San Francisco, according to the Chronicle, claiming the city has complacently allowed conditions under which public sex takes place and other nuisances that come with punters driving through the streets at low speeds.

“Instead of solving the problem, the city simply relocated the nuisance to Shotwell between 19th and 21st streets,” the lawsuit states.

This part of the Mission District has been a magnet for street prostitutes for decades; it is easily accessible from U.S. 101, and the character of the residential streets allows for slow driving. But the Chronicle has visited Shotwell Street several times after dark and finds that “business has picked up recently” and the place has become more attractive to street prostitutes.

“I have two kids to feed and I can make $1,000 a night here,” a woman named Rene told the Chronicle. “You don’t make that much at a regular job.”

Mayor London Breed’s office told the Chronicle that they are meeting with Shotwell-area residents on Wednesday to discuss new plans to deter sex work. According to the Chronicle, those plans include “‘pan bats’ to close off the street that could shred the bottom of any vehicle driving over it; security cameras to monitor the streets and sidewalks; and ‘Dear John’ letters to be sent to motorists suspected of seeking sex or buying sex.”

But in both Oakland and San Francisco, this is the umpteenth so-called crackdown on a problem that has never gone away, and it’s questionable whether either city has ever done anything about it. Law enforcement efforts seem to simply shift the problem elsewhere and have never truly eliminated the existence of sex work. After all, it’s not called the “world’s oldest profession” for nothing.

Related: SFPD boasts of catching johns seeking sex workers on Capp Street (SFist)

Image: Joe Kukura, SFist