In the middle of the night last week, two plain-clothes police officers with the Special Enforcement Division of the Charleston Police Department watched as a young woman walked across the Kanawha City McDonald's parking lot to the Go-Mart truck stop, on her way to knock on the truck drivers' doors and offer sex for money.
Sgt. Charles Young, commander of the unit, said that like so many of the more than 100 women they estimate are actively working as prostitutes in Charleston, they had dealt with her before.
"That's terrible," he said, frustrated with his memory. "I can't remember her name."
Wednesday night, the four officers who make up the unit, informally referred to as street crimes, decided to attempt a prostitution sting, the fourth this year. This one was slower than others. They only picked up a couple girls.
Others have been more successful, but even on busier nights, there is still a sense of futility to the work.
"A lot of these girls know us," said one of the officers with the unit, who didn't want to be named because he wasn't authorized to talk to the media. "Some of them know us on a first-name basis. We've dealt with them for years."
While they acknowledge sex work continues to happen, despite their efforts, they don't think legalization is the answer. They worry about spreading disease, increased sex trafficking and supporting addiction. They also say they are responding to requests from community members, who they say complain about used condoms in the streets and sex acts in vehicles in broad daylight.
"There's no personal satisfaction in making an arrest," Young said. "It's just - we all live in this community as well. You want to make a difference in it because we live here too."
But they acknowledge they are fighting an uphill battle. A prostitution citation, which results in a fine on first offense in the city of Charleston, is no match for a heroin addiction.
They said in the past two years, they've only arrested one woman they can remember who did not struggle with a drug problem.
"They will do what they have to do to avoid being dope sick," one of the detectives said.
Prostitution arrests vary by department in West Virginia, but stings are regularly conducted.
In Charleston, 64 prostitution offenses were filed with the city in 2014.
In Huntington, prostitution arrests are up 40 percent compared to this time last year as part of a targeted effort driven by community complaints, according to Police Chief Joe Ciccarelli.
Ciccarelli and Jim Johnson, Huntington's director of drug control policy, said drugs are fueling the problem in Huntington as well.
Ciccarelli called prostitution a "symptom of the bigger drug crisis we're facing."
Huntington recently announced the city had received a $140,000 grant for the Women's Empowerment and Addiction Recovery Program, an expansion of the current drug court. About 20 prostitutes per year will be provided intensive supervision and counseling to help them target the core problem behind the sex work, which is drug addiction, according to Johnson.
"What good does it do to put them in jail and they go in and stay for 30 days and come back out with the same problems that caused them to enter into being prostitutes?" Johnson said. "These girls don't want to be prostitutes. It's not like years ago with pimps. Their pimp is heroin."
Prostitution doesn't typically result in incarceration in the state.
Still, some say the work's status as illegal has an unintended side effect. Some sex worker advocates say the work's status as illegal makes a notoriously dangerous job even more dangerous.
Like Heather, the Charleston woman who killed a potential serial killer on July 18, another Charleston woman told the Gazette-Mail she knows firsthand the danger of working as a prostitute.
The woman, who asked that her name not be used to protect her privacy, was working at a truck stop about a year ago when the driver attacked her.
"I was in a truck with a trucker and he just didn't want me to go," she said. "He was like, 'you're gonna be my friend, you're gonna be my friend,' and didn't want me to go. And you know, I got my knife and I basically defended myself and I actually got away. But ever since then, it's scary out there... It just kind of goes with the territory."
She suffered three cracked ribs and a concussion, but didn't report the crime to police.
"You're not gonna call - oh yeah by the way, officer, I was attacked by a 'date,'" she said. "You're not going to call and say that."
Alison Bass, an assistant professor at the WVU Reed College of Media who wrote a book on sex workers and the law, said serial killers routinely prey on sex workers.
"They prey on sex workers precisely because police don't believe them and they don't go to police in the first place because they are afraid of being arrested," Bass said.
Katherine Koster, spokeswoman for the Sex Workers Outreach Project, said the riff between law enforcement and prostitutes is nationwide.
"When you criminalize something, it destroys the relationship between sex workers and law enforcement, who are supposed to be there to protect them," Koster said.
Some sex worker advocates, including Koster, also say the criminal approach is a waste of time.
"I think we need to focus our resources and our energy on providing nonjudgmental services, whether that's keeping people safe and as healthy as possible or that's helping them exit the sex trade," Koster said. "It's not deterring people from entering the sex trade, and it's not helping people get out of the sex trade."
The four officers of Charleston's Special Enforcement Division are sympathetic.
As they looked for women to arrest Wednesday night, the detectives described how they always offer to match the women up with drug addiction treatment, but no one ever takes them up the help the next day.
Sitting in the front seat of an unmarked van, Young remembered one woman in particular whom he felt particularly sympathetic for who was raped by a gang of men while she was working.
Hearing stories like that, and about other women struggling with poverty and addiction, a Gazette-Mail reporter commented that she felt sorry for the women.
"We do too," Young said.
Reach Erin Beck at erin.beck@wvgazette.com, 304-348-5163, Facebook.com/erinbeckwv, or follow @erinbeckwv on Twitter.