Well, no wonder. The Orlando Police Department is run by theocrats:
"Operation Armor All
The Orlando Police Department Chaplains are calling on the community to reclaim the city through prayer over the next 40 days. For a detailed schedule of prayer locations and times, click here"...
http://www.cityoforlando.net/police/
The story says "Agents say many of the johns go back to their unsuspecting families and loved ones and put them at risk and that's just one of the dangers."
They're not implying that one prostitute is DIRECTLY infecting 18,000 people, just that who they infect can go out and infect others too, and so on. Kind of like that saying goes "When you have sex, you have sex with every person that person has ever had sex with."
Admittedly, 18,000 people seems rather high anyway, but you can't say that that doesn't happen (johns getting infected, then spreading that to their next partner, etc.)
Starr: that is still patiently absurd. First they don't put their family at risk only their spouse. Do the math it would still take millions of customers to achieve this. If every single man got AIDS and then gave it to his wife as well it would take 9,000 men in one year. With an infection rate of 1 per 1000 for vaginal intercourse that still means the prostitute had to sleep with 9 million men during the year. Because I doubled the infection rate in my "fun" estimate it we could pretend that 2 in 1000 are infected mean each hooker now had to be HIV+, each man had to have intercourse, each one had to refuse to use a condom and each one had to a have a 100% infection rate for his wife that would still require 4.5 million customers per year per prostitute.
The "family" is not at risk unless you think AIDS is spread by toilet seats or some absurd thing -- which for the cops is a possibility.
And when you get your head into reality you realize most prostitutes are not infected, many clients don't have intercourse. Of those that do quite a few use condoms. Not every client who has intercourse with an infected prostitute, without using a condom, gets infected and many of them aren't married or won't pass it on to anyone. Even if you try to go through several levels of infection to reach 18,000 infections per year would actually require that the prostitutes sleep with hundreds of millions of citizens.
And if you want conclusive proof this police claim is entirely bogus consider that the total number of HIV infections per year in the United States is around 40,000. That would mean that per year one prostitute in Orlando causes almost half of all US HIV infections. Two of them would be responsible for all the HIV infections per year in the US. And I suspect there are more than two. Just admit that this is so patiently and obviously false that the police made the entire thing up and are lying.
...and whoever said cops aren't paid to think. 
This is similar to their statistics on the "War on Drugs", (another *ahem* valiant effort by the boys in blue to "protect" the public) which they just seem to pull straight from their asses. One will hear headlines such as "$100,000,000 of cannabis seized in a daring raid!", but when one works out the amounts involved, it turns out that the cops are using absolutely absurd estimates as to its value- usually many times what the drugs would actually get on the street. Could it be that they're struggling to justify the billions spent every year on this pointless endeavour?
Those police and officials who are involved with various consensual crime wars often use wildly inaccurate statistics in an attempt to justify their noble interventions to the public. Furthermore, if there isn't an ample supply of sinners in a community they won't hesitate to create them by staging sting operations. Apparently, wearing a badge entitles one to engage in false advertising and deceptive practices if the purpose is to stamp out vice.
Commenting by HaloScan
