Category: Crime

City Council, Crime, Mayor Harrell, public safety

Auditor’s Gun Violence Recommendations Prompt Defensive Response from Mayor’s Office

By Erica C. Barnett

Late last month, the City Auditor’s Office released a report on Seattle’s response to gun violence that concluded the city has failed to create the kind of systematic, transparent, multi-departmental approach that has been adopted successfully in other cities like Baltimore and Milwaukee, which have dramatically reduced their rates of gun violence even as Seattle’s has increased. Between 2020 and 2024, the number of (reported) shots fired in Seattle increased 71 percent, non-fatal shootings increased 58 percent, and fatal shootings increased 23 percent.

The auditor’s office, which presented their findings to Council President Sara Nelson’s governance committee last week, made four broad recommendations.

First, they said, the city should develop systemic, transparent reporting on patterns in gun violence and make that information available to the public. Second, the mayor’s office should provide an update on its work to integrate all the city’s violence prevention programs under the CARE (Community Assisted Response and Engagement) Department, which “has not yet begun,” according to the audit, despite being a key element of the department’s mission since it was established in 2023.

Third, the city should implement evidence-based approaches to gun violence, such as problem-oriented policing (a proactive strategy that addresses underlying factors that contribute to crime), homicide review panels, and training requirements for organizations that get city funds for violence prevention to ensure they’re using evidence-based problem-solving methods; a previous audit found that many city-funded programs judged their own success against measures like how many people enrolled in a program, rather than whether the program reduced gun violence.

And fourth, the city should use multi-departmental, place-based methods to prevent and respond to gun violence, rather than just being reactive.

The audit—originally requested by Mayor Bruce Harrell and Council President Nelson as an update on a 2012 report on the city’s crime prevention strategies—noted that the city never implemented many of auditor’s previous recommendations on crime and public safety, including several on street outreach programs that the office “stopped tracking” last year because “we had no evidence that they would ever be implemented.”

The report noted that the city doesn’t need to invent its own strategy out of whole cloth: Other cities have already created frameworks that Seattle could adopt, including public-facing dashboards that provide access to a broad range of data about gun violence, post-homicide review panels, and investment in community-based programs that have been shown to reduce gun violence, rather than those that don’t produce results.

Milwaukee, for example, has a Homicide Review Commission that includes case management and services for victims’ families, along with an ongoing, detailed review of every homicide in the city that includes an analysis of “community-level contributing factors and … community interventions that may be appropriate.”

Baltimore’s comprehensive crime prevention strategy established a new Mayor’s Office of Neighborhood Safety and Engagement (MONSE) that is based on four “pillars”: A public health approach to violence; youth justice and violence reduction; community engagement and interagency collaboration; and evaluation and accountability.” Since the two cities implemented these new approaches, homicides in Milwaukee have dropped 52 percent over eight years; in Baltimore, fatal shootings declined 23 percent between 2023 and 2024.

“We tried to lift up the examples that we found from other jurisdictions where there’s just more visibility and more of a comprehensive view of gun violence,” Claudia Gross Shader, the audit’s lead author, told PubliCola. “There’s not an action plan for gun violence in Seattle that we can look at like like Baltimore has developed.”

For example, Gross Shader said, Baltimore has a public safety accountability dashboard that’s maintained by MONSE, not the police department, and includes information from police, prosecutors, and community-based providers. “That level of visibility into what the city’s doing and how things are changing over time does not exist in Seattle,” Gross Shader said.

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Councilmember Maritza Rivera, who said during last week’s meeting that she felt “validated” by the fact that the audit identified Magnuson Park as number four on a list of city parks with the highest incidences of gun violence, said she spent last summer asking police, the Parks Department, and the mayor’s office to do something about a spate of shootings and other criminal activity in and around Magnuson Park.

“I was asking them what their plan was  for addressing this, and I definitely got responses form SPD and from Parks, in terms of action items, but I felt that the things I was bringing to the mayor’s office were getting diminished or dismissed,” Rivera told PubliCola. “I didn’t feel like there was that recognition that things were happening and we have a plan for addressing it. I didn’t get the sense of urgency.”

Shortly after the meeting, the mayor’s office reached out to Rivera and they had “a great conversation” about what the city can do in the short term to address issues in her Northeast Seattle district, Rivera said.

But, she added, “we should be taking a centralized approach” to gun violence, the way Milwaukee and Baltimore have done. In those cities, “it seems like it’s all-hands-on-deck to address gun violence in general, and the audit showed that the centralization wasn’t there like it should be.”

Tensions flared during last week’s meeting about how much the city is actually doing to address gun violence holistically and whether the audit was even necessary.

After Harrell’s office initiated the audit last January, Deputy Mayor Tim Burgess told the city auditor to stop working on it in April, “because [the Human Services Department] is preparing to issue a new round of [requests for proposals] that will result in new funding opportunities” for community safety organizations. HSD subsequently postponed the community safety RFP until later this year, and in October, Nelson directed the auditor’s office to move forward with its work.

Harrell formally “concurred” with all the audit’s recommendations, but it became clear during the committee meeting that the mayor’s office considered the audit unnecessarym even insulting. “The mayor’s office agrees with the audit findings, but we were already doing the things that were in the audit findings,” Deputy Mayor Tiffany Washington told the committee.

When PubliCola asked if the mayor’s office or SPD plans to implement any new strategies in response to the audit, as opposed to policies that are already underway,, Harrell spokeswoman Callie Craighead said, “Our office plans to incorporate the findings of the Auditor’s report into existing strategies and initiatives. The report validated the approach of our One Seattle Restoration Framework, which states that improving public safety within our city involves collaboration across multiple City departments and programs and taking a place-based approach to our needs, as seen with the launch of our Downtown Activation Team.”

Speaking more bluntly at last week’s meeting, Washington told Nelson, “When you were getting ready to launch this, my argument to you [was], we are working on this, and we didn’t get that same respect. … It would have been nice to know that you guys heard us when we were telling you that we were already working on it.”

“I have a master’s degree in human services,” Washington added, along with a “personal degree” as someone directly impacted by gun violence. “I don’t need an audit to tell me the things that I can see on the streets and tell me the things that I hear from constituents.”

As examples of things the city is already doing, Washington pointed to the establishment of the CARE dual-dispatch pilot; the Unified Care Team, which removes encampments; Harrell’s “One Seattle Restoration Framework,” which includes a section on gun violence; the establishment of a real-time crime center that will be connected to new CCTV cameras around the city; the enrollment of the city’s gun violence liaison in a national workshop on violence interruption; and new Police Chief Shon Barnes’ plan to implement “stratified policing.”

According to Craighead, stratified policing “focuses on identifying and tackling crime and disorder issues by analyzing immediate, short-term, and long-term patterns, ensuring they are addressed swiftly and effectively through a collaborative approach that emphasizes community partnerships.”

Although the audit found that “the city has not systematically implemented” problem-oriented policing (identifying it as one reason the city hasn’t successfully reduced crime and overdoses at two well-known hot spots), SPD general counsel Rebecca Boatright told the council that “SPD routinely does a fair amount of work with problem- oriented policing and place-based policing” and would continue to do so.

As for the recommendation that the city create a systemic public safety dashboard like Baltimore’s, Boatright said the department is working to put more information online, but that providing too much specific information could harm ongoing investigations.

Gross Shader said she hopes the city will respond to the audit in more detail in the future to explain how some of the city’s existing approaches are working to reduce gun violence and how Harrell’s One Seattle Restoration plan compares to the holistic approach like the ones Baltimore and Milwaukee have.

She also noted that the city already has at least one home-grown example of a systematic public safety plan—the Phố Đẹp (Beautiful Neighborhood) Little Saigon Safety Plan that Friends of Little Sài Gòn released last month, which identifies a list of eight public-safety problems in the neighborhood, interventions to address those problems, and the outcomes that will result when each problem has been addressed. That framework focuses almost entirely on strategies that don’t involve police, such as the creation of a business coalition to combat EBT (food stamp) fraud, increased funding for affordable housing in lieu of policies that “criminalize poverty,” including sweeps, and funding for dedicated outreach workers in the Chinatown-International District.

Crime, Mayor Harrell

When a Top Mayoral Staffer Was Accused of Sexual Assault, These Women Decided It Was Time to Come Forward
A description of evidence submitted as part of Delostrinos’ rape kit—an invasive, lengthy procedure that victims are encouraged to undergo to preserve DNA and other evidence immediately after a sexual assault

By Erica C. Barnett

Late last September, Mayor Bruce Harrell put a high-ranking longtime staffer, external affairs director Pedro Gomez, on paid administrative leave after learning that Gomez was under investigation for alleged sexual assault. His accuser, Cheryl Delostrinos, met Gomez through his work at the mayor’s office, and filed a report with the Seattle Police Department five days after the incident in June. Gomez remained on the city’s payroll until January, when the case advanced to the King County Prosecutor’s office, prompting his resignation.

Delostrinos, who spoke with the Stranger earlier this year,  was the first woman to make public allegations against Harrell’s longtime staffer. In recent weeks, however PubliCola has spoken with several other women who said many of the circumstances Delostrinos described in her police report were unnervingly familiar, down to the Capitol Hill restaurant where he bought them drink after drink, bragging that he was a part-owner of the business. That restaurant, Mercado Luna (previously known as Mezcalaria Oaxaca) shut down in September.

Two of the women said Gomez offered to mentor them or collaborate on future business opportunities, then took them out for a night of heavy drinking and surprised them by suddenly kissing them at the end of the night. Those two women ended up in what they described as consensual (and overlapping) relationships with Gomez that they now regret. “I ended up feeling very violated,” one said.

Another, who worked with Gomez at the city, said she had a single, nonconsensual sexual encounter with Gomez after a night that began as a meeting to discuss city business and ended in a blackout. “I’d have weird sight, where I could see him sitting on my couch and I was very confused,” she recalled. “Somehow it progressed to the bedroom—it was like flashes of memory. I was just like, ‘There’s no way I can be this drunk.'”

Before he resigned last September, Gomez had worked for the city for more than a decade, including several years as a staffer for former mayor Ed Murray. During the Jenny Durkan administration, Gomez was the small business development director for the city’s Office of Economic Development. He returned to the mayor’s office in 2021, before Harrell even took office, as part of an initial wave of insider hires.

Delostrinos said she decided to go public with her story because she wants to reduce the stigma and shame associated with sexual assault and to help other survivors see that they have options. “I have nothing to be ashamed of. This is something that happened to me,” she said.

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Years before Delostrinos filed her report alleging Gomez had raped her, another woman—a city employee who worked with Gomez directly—had a similar experience, she told PubliCola. The woman has never spoken publicly about what happened to her, but says she was inspired to come forward after news of the allegations came out and she began comparing notes with one of Gomez’ ex-girlfriends, who posted on social media about Gomez.

The city employee told PubliCola Gomez sexually assaulted her after a night of drinking that began as a meeting to discuss her progress at work. She never called the police or pursued charges, she said, because as a young, single mom, she couldn’t afford to lose her job. Additionally, the woman said, she belongs to an immigrant community with a deep-seated “stay in culture” ethos of resolving issues internally, rather than going to police, and a lot of “cultural shame and stigma” around sexual assault.

Unlike the other women, the city employee felt she couldn’t say no to meeting Gomez for drinks to discuss work matters. She said she tried to keep their frequent meetings, which took place after hours, focused on business, but Gomez would often turn the conversation to more personal matters—like their previous romantic relationships, their common background as immigrants, and their obligation to support each other.

“It felt really fucked up—really cheap, really dirty, really sad,” she said. “Because what he’s saying is the truth—it is hard, especially as a young Black immigrant woman. We share some of the character traits that he used to prey on me—like, ‘We really have to make a lane for ourselves,’ and talking about what a big deal he is in the community.”

One evening around 6:00, the woman recalled, she met Gomez at Mercado Luna (then known as Mezcalaria Oaxaca) for what she assumed was a routine meeting to talk about issues at work. Very quickly, though “the conversation swayed away from work, and the drinks kept flowing. … “I’m talking about rounds and rounds, just continuous.” Gomez kept saying things were “‘on the house, because I take care of my people,'” she said. As Gomez watched her drink, she said, he nursed a glass of mezcal, which she had never heard of, telling her it was meant to be “sipped.” As the night wore on, things got “blurry” and “kind of messy.”

She had never expressed any romantic interest in Gomez, the woman said. “There was never a progression, like, ‘Oh my god, I have feelings for him.’ It was never, ever, ever, ever mutual.”

By the end of the evening, she recalled, she was disoriented, weak, and losing patches of time.”It was almost as if my vision had a stutter —it was like, ‘Okay, my body’s betraying me and I’m not sure what’s going on.'” When Gomez offered to drive her home, she thought, “this is a good guy taking care of a coworker who got messy.”

Back at her house, she thought to herself, “There’s no way I can be this drunk.” Things seemed to be happening in flashes: Gomez was on her couch, then, the next minute, in her bedroom, and suddenly she was in the middle of a sex act to which she says she did not consent. The next thing she remembers, she was waking up the next day.

“I have no idea when I went to bed. I don’t know how long he was there afterward or when he let himself out,” she said. The next day, she found her phone and wallet “neatly put in a place that I would never normally put them in my house.”

“I felt gross. I was filled with so much deep shame,” the woman said.

Apart from a text saying something along the lines of “last night got crazy,” she said Gomez “pretended like it never happened.” At one point, she said, he seemed to be “testing” her to see what she remembered about that night. “He was like, ‘Do you remember what tattoos I have?’ And I said, ‘You have tattoos?”

The woman stayed at her job for another year. She said she never confronted Gomez, but there were many times when she would have “random outburst of anger” and lash out at him over text. She felt furious that he wouldn’t acknowledge he had done anything wrong. “I’m pretending like this shit didn’t happen. I didn’t tell a fucking soul. And I know for a fucking fact that he remembered more than I did.”

Shortly before she left her position, the woman said Gomez drove to her home one night and invited himself in. “Conveniently, he had a bottle of mezcal in his car.” The woman said he tried to convince her to “do what we did last time. He was like, ‘I can really trust you. You’re good people because you don’t gossip.  You don’t tell other people your business.” She told him her brothers were coming to drop her kids off, she said, and “he was quick to get out of there.”

Because Gomez was involved in Harrell’s campaign and said he could help her get a better position at the city once Harrell was in office, “I didn’t want to burn a bridge, because he really put a heavy emphasis on how a recommendation from him goes so far,” she said. “He said, ‘Bruce is going to win and I’m going to be working for him. … I’ll be the reference of a lifetime.'”

The woman said Gomez never followed through on his promises to help her get a better job at the city, and after she left, she fell into a deep depression. At one point, she went to a barber in the Central District and asked him to shave off her hair—and suddenly found herself facing a placard from the city touting Gomez’ work relocating the shop as part of an anti-displacement effort. “This guy was raving about how much a savior he was. He had a great rapport with all these small businesses, and you felt it,” she sighed.

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Arts, Courts, Crime, Mayor Harrell

“Illegal Vandalism” Is “Not Art”: Prosecutors Announce Felony Graffiti Charges
“Not art,” according to prosecutors and Mayor Bruce Harrell

By Erica C. Barnett

Seattle Mayor Bruce Harrell, King County Prosecutor Leesa Manion, and City Attorney Ann Davison announced charges against 16 people for graffiti in and around Seattle. According to Manion, it cost more than $100,000 to clean up graffiti by the 16 charged individuals.

One tagger whose name came up frequently in the charging papers, Joseph Johnson—best known by his tag GRIDE—died earlier this year.

The investigation took more than a year, according to Manion, who declined to estimate the cost of investigating, arresting, jailing, prosecuting, and potentially imprisoning the 16 charged individuals.

“I can tell you that I’m sure that it cost way less than $6 million for us to bring this case, but we know that in the city of Seattle alone [it costs] $6 million to remove graffiti, and that does not consider the expenses that private business owners have to spend,” Manion said.

According to Harrell’s office, the $6 million includes all annual expenditures for an interdepartmental team that includes the Office of Arts and Culture, Seattle Center, Finance and Administrative Services, Seattle City Light, the Seattle Department of Transportation, Seattle Public Libraries, Seattle Parks and Recreation, and Seattle Public Utilities. It’s unclear how much of that is direct graffiti abatement. Harrell’s “One Seattle Graffiti Initiative”  includes 11 full-time employees in the parks department, including executive-level staff and nine “graffiti rangers.”

Charging documents show that much of the evidence collected over the past year stems from a publicly available documentary called “Make It Rain,” posted on Youtube in June. Investigators watched the video (which is dedicated to Johnson’s memory) and compared it to publicly available images on Instagram and mug shots of the featured taggers, most of whom had arrest records already. In addition to the videos, some of the charges stem from arrests made as far back as 2021, as well as messages and videos on phones seized by police.

Ewing and Clark president Tom Graff: “How would you feel to go to your favorite restaurant and the glass has this caked film on it and is scratched to death? You would not feel safe and it would no longer be your favorite restaurant.”

Tom Graff, president of the Ewing and Clark real estate company and the head of the group Belltown United, told reporters that graffiti has made his neighborhood, and the condo tower where he lives, feel unclean and unsafe.

“How would you feel if your garage door was spray-painted [by] a tagger?” Graff said. “That happened on my tower. … How would you feel to drop off your child in a school that has its front door covered with a graffiti image? You would not take your child there, and we expect the people who live and work downtown to put up with it, and it is unacceptable, and it has to stop.”

Manion is charging all 16 suspects with second-degree malicious mischief, a Class C felony that carries a prison sentence of up to five years and a fine of $10,000. She said her primary goal is to make the taggers pay restitution to all the property owners they have harmed.

“We are seeking accountability for what amounts to felony- level behavior, so it is appropriate to file felony charges,” Manion said. “It is not the jail time and the incarceration that we think will make a difference. It is getting folks to pay for the damage that they have caused.”

MSP tag on a billboard that previously read “Cool Cats, Happy Homeowners”; from “Make It Rain”

During the press event, officials repeatedly offered their own definitions of what is, and isn’t, “art.”

Manion insisted that there is a “clear distinction between art” and “illegal vandalism.” Art, she said, includes government-sanctioned wall murals displayed in “appropriate outlets for talented artists and appropriate places for them to display public art,” like the county-funded murals visible to light rail riders in SoDo.

Art, Graff added, is an officially sanctioned mural that “the landlord approved,” like 12 city-funded murals in Belltown that received city funding. “The artist was assigned this wall,” Graff said. “It is not done randomly, and it doesn’t damage the property.”

Art, Harrell said, might include a freeway wall that, with approval from the state Department of Transportation, might be used as “a canvas that can be painted by an artist, some of our beautiful sunsets, sunrises, or some of our Native American art.”

What isn’t art? Manion gave a few examples. “Dangling above freeway lanes to tag a traffic sign is not art,” she said. “Destroying a mural in Kent with a tag is not art. … Tagging Metro buses and Sound Transit cars is not art.” The charging documents say graffiti tags exist for two purposes, and art is not one of them: They can either be “ideological”—a category that includes hate speech—or designed for “fame and glory.”

The history of government officials deciding what is and what is not art has, shall we say, a long and ignominious history.

But even assuming officials’ definition of “art” (to summarize: pre-approved murals; sunsets and/or sunrises; “Native American art” generally) is partial and not didactic, Seattle has an obsession with graffiti, cleanliness, and the need for “order” that warps city spending and serves as cover for cracking down on people whose ideologies (or existence, in the case of encampment “cleans”) conflict with official government priorities.

City Council, Courts, Crime, Police, Women

Advocates, Scholars, and Legal Experts Say Criminalizing Sex Work Harms Workers, Fails to “Clean Up” Neighborhoods

 

City Attorney Ann Davison

By Erica C. Barnett

As the city council prepares to reinstate an old law against “prostitution loitering” and establish off-limits zones for people accused of being sex workers, advocates say the proposed laws will not only harm the people they purport to protect but won’t accomplish their primary goal: “Cleaning up” areas like Aurora Avenue, where the sex trade has persisted for decades.

The legislation, along with a similar law reinstating the crime of “drug loitering” and establishing new Stay Out Drug Areas zones for people accused of violating laws like the recently adopted ban on public drug use and possession, will be heard in the City Council’s Public Safety Committee at 9:30am today, Tuesday, August 13.

North Seattle Councilmember Cathy Moore announced her proposal to crack down on sex work, which she’d been working on since last spring, earlier this month. The first part of Moore’s legislation would reinstate a law against misdemeanor prostitution “loitering,” or street sex work, that was overturned after an official city task force recommended getting rid of it in 2017. Under this law, police would again be empowered to arrest anyone who “remains in a public place and intentionally solicits, induces, entices, or procures another to commit an act of prostitution.”

The second half of the legislation would create an official Stay Out of Areas of Prostitution (SOAP) zone encompassing hundreds of square blocks around Aurora Ave. N. and empower police to banish anyone suspected of engaging in sex work from the area. Police could then charge suspected sex workers with a gross misdemeanor for violating their SOAP order, whether or not they’re ever convicted of the underlying misdemeanor offense. The law would also give police the power to stop and frisk anyone they believe is a sex worker and charge them for additional offenses, such as drug possession, if they find anything incriminating during their search.

People who “promote prostitution loitering,” which police are supposed to decide based on ill-defined “particular circumstances of each case,” could be charged with a gross misdemeanor, but would not—unlike sex workers—be subject to banishment.

Emi Koyama, an advocate with the Coalition for Rights and Safety for People in the Sex Trade, said repealing the prostitution and drug loitering laws was one of the few concrete victories to come out of the Black Lives Matter movement in Seattle. “We never actually tried defunding and investing in community the way the movement wanted. … On the other hand, we tried exclusion zones in the past, and it wasn’t working, it was causing harm, and it was racist —that’s why they got rid of it.”

Jenna Robert, who worked as an assistant city attorney under Pete Holmes, said Holmes stopped prosecuting most prostitution loitering cases and issuing SOAP orders before the Reentry Work Group—voted into existence by then-Councilmember Bruce Harrell’s public safety committee— finalized its recommendations because Holmes was convinced that the laws made it harder for sex workers to access services, which are concentrated on Aurora, and did nothing to reduce sex work or address trafficking.

“I think the Reentry Work group did a really good job of bringing up the harms that [the loitering law] caused,” Robert said. “We stopped charging even before it came off the books… so I thought, ‘I can’t imagine that anyone would ever put this this back on the books,’ because it’s so harmful to the people it’s supposed to protect.”

In its final report, issued in 2018, the Reentry Work Group concluded that the prostitution loitering law, adopted in 1973,  “targets individuals in the commercial sex industry, a group already at high risk for trafficking, abuse, and other exploitation”—particularly Black women and other cis and trans women of color, who were disproportionately targeted under the law. “Bringing them into the criminal legal system will only exacerbate any underlying unmet needs and exposes them to further physical and sexual harm caused by incarceration.”

Jazmyn Clark, the ACLU of Washington’s Smart Justice Policy program director, told PubliCola that the proposed new penalties for drug users and sex workers “expand police power to harass our vulnerable neighbors and continue the failed war on drugs. Rather than provide support and resources, these zones push people to the margins of society and further stigmatize individuals struggling with substance use disorder or engaging in sex work.”

In a letter to City Attorney Ann Davison and the city council, Clark wrote that the laws also raise constitutional concerns because they deprive people who have never been convicted of a prostitution or drug-related crime of their right to free travel and association. The diversion group Purpose Dignity Action has described this aspect of the SOAP and SODA laws as a prohibition on “future otherwise-lawful conduct–just being present in a place, and doing nothing wrong.”

Proponents of the legislation, including business owners and homeowners near Aurora, have said their primary goal is to reduce gun violence and sex trafficking in the area— claiming, for instance, that a number of recent shootings were caused by “turf wars” between pimps in the area. Moore recently said this was one of her reasons for proposing the law, citing SPD as the source for her information.

But advocates for sex workers question that claim. “If it’s actually a turf war, we would see a drastic decline in the number of people who are [on Aurora], Koyama said. “The women won’t feel safe … and the buyers won’t come either if they realize there’s a huge risk.”

Koyama notes that supporter of the law who see women as an “access point” to fight against felony crimes, like murder and assault, are treating sex workers as people “outside the community”—saying, in effect, “‘We are just a peaceful neighborhood; it’s other people who are completely different from us who cause these problems.” During the press announcement, Moore, Kettle, and Davison repeatedly cited overwhelming support from “the community,” referring to the overwhelmingly white property and business owners who showed up to support the legislation.

Sex workers, as a demographic group, are disproportionately Black and brown women.

Madison Zack-Wu, an organizer with Strippers Are Workers, said that while the legislation includes a lot of references to sex trafficking and gun violence, the policy language “really just focuses on criminalizing and policing sex workers and people in the sex trade.”

“When it comes to being at risk for trafficking, the main cause of vulnerability for trafficking is financial instability and poverty,” Zack-Wu said. “This bill focuses on pushing people away from community and into more marginalized areas. And that also increases trafficking,” because they have less access to communities that help keep them safe.

When Backpage, an online marketplace for sex workers and buyers, was shut down in 2018, many sex workers went from working online to more dangerous street work, and “even people that disagree with us acknowledge that it was really bad,” Koyoma said. “When conditions get worse, people have less bargaining power. More people get banished to more dangerous areas and more dangerous acts—people have to say yes to things they wouldn’t otherwise.”

Advocates also note that arresting and charging people for prostitution upends their lives and makes it harder to get jobs, access services, and find stable housing. Amarinthia Torres, director of the Coalition Ending Gender-Based Violence, said, “I think, honestly, that sometimes we underestimate the scope and reach of the criminal legal system—that one arrest can really follow a person for a long time, and it can follow them into all aspects of their life for the long term. People who  have had that happen to them understand the way it can hang over your life and the choices you have access to.”

Historically, banishment zones and loitering laws have not been effective at reducing exploitation of sex workers, decreasing violent crime, or even “improving” the areas that are off-limits to sex workers or drug users, according to the 2010 book Banished, by Katherine Beckett and Steve Herbert, a sweeping study of exclusion zones in Seattle. One major reason, the scholars wrote, is that people simply returned to the places where they knew people and feel safest, ignoring off-limits orders even when it meant going to jail repeatedly and racking up thousands of dollars in fines.

“Most people do return to the neighborhoods that they’ve been banned from,” Beckett told PubliCola. “[The vast majority] said it didn’t change where they went; they just accepted that they could be picked up on those charges and then lived with that. It didn’t accomplish what anyone was hoping to accomplish.”

Yet the city council, and Moore in particular, seem convinced that this time, everything will turn out different. During the press conference earlier this month, counncil public safety committee chair Bob Kettle said “the focus needs to be on those carrying out the sex trafficking and profiting off the abuse of women. For those caught up in this sad situation, we need to find diversion and support options. The goal here is not to punish those who are also victims, but instead to offer an opportunity to walk away and get help.”

Yet the legislation proposes no new diversion programs or funding, nor does it lay out a process by which arrested sex workers would “walk away and get help.” And if the goal is for police to become a conduit for sex workers to “escape” their current jobs (a dubious prospect, but one the council and city attorney have embraced), there is nothing whatsoever stopping cops from approaching and speaking to people they believe are sex workers now, without arresting them.

Beckett says people have a tendency to forget past failures and grab for easy-seeming solutions, even those that have failed in the recent past. “Our memories are fairly short-term. We forget that we’ve already tried all this,” Beckett said. “It’s also what we want to think is true. We want to believe there are cheap, easy fixes to structural problems that require actual investments.”

City Council, Courts, Crime

Council Legislation Would Ban Sex Workers from Aurora Ave. North
Councilmember Cathy Moore speaks about her legislation on Thursday, with City Attorney Ann Davison in the background

By Erica C. Barnett

As PubliCola previewed yesterday, City Councilmember Cathy Moore introduced legislation on Thursday to reinstate a law banning “prostitution loitering” that was overturned in 2020 by a unanimous vote of the city council, with the support of then-mayor Jenny Durkan.

The legislation also creates a new Stay Out of Prostitution Area zone that encompasses between N. 85th Street and Seattle’s northern border at n. 145th, along with the blocks immediately to the east and west of Aurora. Like the Stay Out of Drug Area legislation City Attorney Ann Davison announced this morning, the SOAP law would allow the city to issue trespass orders to people who have been arrested for being a sex worker or buying sex, even if they have not been convicted, and to charge and jail people who are caught inside the off-limits area.

Like the SODA proposal, Moore’s legislation creates a new gross misdemeanor—punishable by up to 364 days in jail and a $5,000 fine—for simply being caught inside the off-limits area which includes many social service agencies, recovery meeting locations, health care providers, and other services—not to mention places of legal employment. Aurora is also a bus corridor used by tens of thousands of people every day.

Under the proposal, which largely mimics the overturned law, a person could be found guilty of prostitution loitering, a misdemeanor, “if he or she remains in a public place and intentionally solicits, induces, entices, or procures another to commit prostitution.” The council also repealed a similar law banning “drug loitering.”

Moore and other elected officials, including Davison and council public safety committee chair Bob Kettle, said the law would help end gun violence in North Seattle, which Kettle has said is directly tied to “pimps fighting over turf,” they did not explain how they had come to this conclusion. Nor did they provide evidence for their claim that pimps and sex workers are targeting children at Cascadia Elementary School, along with middle and high school students.

“We … need to give police officers additional tools to disrupt this violence, to disrupt the sex trade that’s affecting girls as young as 12 years old,” Moore said.

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In comments that were remarkably similar to her comments about the proposed new SODA zones, Davison said banning sex workers from Aurora was a way of caring for them. “We will not overlook these women and girls any longer,” Davison said. “We will not act like they are invisible and unseen. We will say, ‘You are worth it. We care enough to act and to intervene and to disrupt this criminal enterprise of trafficking women and girls.'”

Prostitution is already illegal, as is buying sex; sex trafficking is a felony.

Moore said her intent was to provide “public safety” to the businesses and residents around Aurora, and to “shut down the track, the historical track that has been Aurora,” an area where sex workers have congregated for decades. Prostitution may not go away entirely, but “they will no longer be here, which is the main thing that we’re looking for— to create safety for this community.” Kettle added that “the result” of the previous council’s vote to overturn the anti-loitering law “is what we’re seeing on Aurora.”

The legislation proposes a no-go zone for sex workers that extends from 85th to Seattle’s northern border.

Although officials who spoke in favor of the new law on Thursday said they preferred to focus on sex buyers, and to offer services for the “victims of sex trafficking” on Aurora, the new legislation focuses primarily on sex workers and includes no new services to help women and others who want to get out of sex work. It says that “diversion” should be the “preferred alternative” for sex workers caught violating the proposed new laws, but does not specify what the city considers “diversion” or propose new funding for diversion programs.

Officials focused on the need to target sex buyers with criminal sanctions, such as fines and jail—a strategy the city has tried again and again, without measurable success, justifying it with the argument that sex work is always exploitative. Davison said it might be acceptable to divert men to sex buyer education classes, AKA “john school,” on a first offense, “but after that we need you to understand you’re contributing to this criminal enterprise continuing and growing, and then aiding to the escalating gun violence that’s associated with it.”

Davison has repeatedly prosecuted men for soliciting sex on Aurora, and the Seattle Police Department pays overtime for cops to run elaborate sting operations that usually net an arrest or two. According to defense attorneys, most of the men arrested for solicitation on Aurora, like the sex workers themselves, are men of color, and a disproportionate number are immigrants.

The council amended the language of the law against buying sex from “patronizing a prostitute” to “sexual exploitation” in 2015, arguing that anyone engaged in sex work is “being forced to use their bodies in the commerce of prostitution,” according to then-council member Bruce Harrell.)

As with the proposed new SODA zones, judges would be able to ban anyone arrested for prostitution from entering the SOAP area even if they are never convicted of a crime—creating a situation in which someone who is found not guilty of misdemeanor prostitution loitering could be charged with a more serious crime for being caught inside the SOAP zone.

The council repealed the laws against prostitution loitering and drug loitering after the Seattle Reentry Workgroup, established to come up with recommendations to help formerly incarcerated people reenter their communities, recommended repealing both laws on the grounds that they disproportionately harm people of color and that involvement in the criminal legal system “exacerbates already unmet needs.” Former city attorney Pete Holmes stopped prosecuting prostitution loitering even before the repeal.

 

 

 

City Council, Crime, Drugs, King County

Seattle Nice: Will Locking Up More People Fix What Ails Downtown Seattle?
The crowd at Third and Pike on a recent afternoon.

By Erica C. Barnett

For this week’s episode of Seattle Nice, we brought in a guest expert—Purpose Dignity Action Co-Director Lisa Daugaard, whose organization established the LEAD diversion program in Belltown—to discuss the latest efforts to address misdemeanor criminal activity in downtown Seattle.

As we reported exclusively last week, King County’s Department of Adult and Juvenile Detention agreed to resume booking people who commit misdemeanor crimes, including violations of the recently adopted law re-criminalizing drug use and possession, in the “downtown activation zone,” an area that extends from the Chinatown-International District to South Lake Union. Booking decisions will be up to individual police officers.

Since the onset of COVID, the jail has limited bookings to the most serious misdemeanors, such as domestic violence and driving under the influence, with exceptions for so-called “high utilizers” of the criminal justice system and areas the city periodically designates as “hot spots,” like the area around 12th Ave. S. and South Jackson St.

Simultaneously, the city council will discuss a contract this week that would to send people arrested for misdemeanors in Seattle to the SCORE jail in Des Moines. Proponents have argued that expanding the number of jail beds the city can access is necessary to get disruptive people off the street—or, as Sandeep likes to put it, making them “spend some time in the pokey”—and deter crime. Opponents say it makes little sense to move people from Seattle to South King County for short jail stays (most people booked in jail for misdemeanors are detained for three days or less), and argue that locking people up while they wait for charges to be filed against them does nothing to reduce low-level crime.

Daugaard positions herself somewhere between both of these positions. She agrees, basically, that jail isn’t a deterrent, but argues that for people who are committing destructive crimes, like breaking windows, it can have a positive disruptive effect. “I don’t actually think this is a debate about more versus fewer people in jail,” Daugaard told us. “It’s about the city’s ability to determine when individuals, in their view, need to be booked into jail, and to not be met with an administrative barrier to that decision.”

She also suggested that booking restrictions “build up an appetite” to jail people for misdemeanors, because policy makers start to see the restrictions themselves as the cause of visible problems, such as concentrated drug use downtown. “I don’t think putting people in jail for those offenses would fix conditions on our streets,” Daugaard said, “but I do understand that absolutely prohibiting that fosters that belief. So in my opinion, it is better to allow discretion and then have a system wide conversation on [why] that is not effective. And it doesn’t really make sense to do it, except in very unusual circumstances.”

Listen to our conversation on Apple Podcasts, or on your favorite podcast app.