100 years ago in Spokane: Police pledge ‘purity squads’ to crack down on prostitution

The police chief ordered all houses of ill-repute on Trent Avenue to close down – all 17 of them.

“Every house in Spokane in which prostitution is practiced must go,” said the police chief. “We know that there is traffic in women in Spokane and that many of the hotels and lodging houses are fostering women who practice vice clandestinely. We are going to clean them out.”

He said he would use a new weapon against them: a “purity squad.”

This was a dedicated group of officers “whose sole duty will be the ferreting out of such places.”

He said that houses of vice are “the source of much of the trouble that is aired in police court.”

“Hardly a day passes without a raid in which anywhere from three to a dozen women are taken,” said the chief. “The majority of those women are willing to sacrifice bonds which are usually set at $100. We are going to make Spokane so hot for them that they will either move on or discontinue the practice.”

From the Red Cross beat: A prominent society leader from Yakima, Mrs, Horace S. Rand, “quit society” to devote herself entirely to teaching Red Cross classes in the making of surgical dressings.

She went to Chicago, New York and Washington, D.C., to be educated in this field. Now, she was coming to Spokane to teach a class to 30 Red Cross women.