Tag: sex work

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, Morning Fizz, Police

Officer Who Joked About Pedestrian Death Will Speak on Traffic Safety at Conference; Moore Calls for “More Vice Squads”

1. Daniel Auderer, the Seattle Police Officers Guild vice president who was caught on tape joking with SPOG president Mike Solan about the death of Jaahnavi Kandula, a 23-year-old student who was killed last year when SPD officer Kevin Dave struck her in a crosswalk while driving 74 miles an hour, was reassigned to low-profile office duties while the Office of Police Accountability investigates multiple complaints against him.

Despite Auderer’s notoriety, he will appear on a national stage in August, when he will be one of two speakers from the Seattle Police Department at national traffic safety conference put on by the International Association of Chiefs of Police in Washington, D.C.

UPDATE: After this post published, a spokesman for SPD contacted PubliCola to say that Auderer is not “representing” the department at the conference, but could not explain why Auderer and another officer, Tom Heller, are listed on the IACP’s program as Seattle Police Department representatives. The spokesman said SPD is not paying for Auderer to travel to or appear at the conference and did not receive a request for him to attend the conference and speak.

According to the program for the IACP’s Impaired Driving and Traffic Safety Conference, Auderer will lead a workshop called “Becoming a Pickup Artist: How to Get More Out of Interviews,” where he’ll teach other officers how to get accurate information out of crime victims, witnesses, and suspects “using only the power of human psychology.”

“From the roadside to the interrogation room, learn how to use human memory, perception, and motivation to improve investigations,” the panel description promises.

Asked about Auderer’s D.C. appearance and his current assignment within the department, a spokesperson said, “We don’t have any further updates or information concerning Auderer other than what has previously been provided.”

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2. Expanding on her proposal to restore a former law against “prostitution loitering,” City Councilmember Cathy Moore told a North Seattle public safety group yesterday that she would like to see “more vice squads” on Aurora Ave. North, a stretch of road where sex workers have congregated for decades.

“I know that SPD is doing their best, I think they have two vice officers. They need more vice squads,” Moore said. Mayor Bruce Harrell, Moore added, “is not coming to the table on this, and they’re not showing up in a way that they need to show up on Aurora. I have reached out to their office to talk about this. We as a council can’t do it all alone. They are in charge of everything [including] the resources.”

Councilmember Moore said she asked Police Chief Adrian Diaz for an update on SPD’s response to a damning report that revealed a widespread culture of misogyny in the department and “I did not receive a response.” She also called SPD’s PR response to four women’s lawsuit against the department “highly unacceptable.”

Moore, who represents North Seattle’s District 5, made her comments at a forum sponsored by the North Precinct Advisory Council Wednesday night. The forum also included District 4 Councilmember Maritza Rivera (Northeast Seattle) and District 6 Councilmember Dan Strauss (Northwest Seattle).

Rivera expressed her support for Moore’s proposal to bring back the prostitution loitering law, saying it was part of a “holistic” approach that should also include traffic calming measures to slow down cars on Aurora and give the area more of a “neighborhood feel.”

The city council repealed laws against prostitution and drug loitering on the recommendation of a work group convened in 2015 to support and reduce barriers for people with criminal history. According to the work group, the prostitution loitering targets people who are “already at high risk for trafficking, abuse, and other exploitation”—disproportionately women of color—and puts them at further risk. Prostitution itself is still illegal, but the city has only made 25 prostitution arrests since 2019.

3. Moore, along with her council colleagues Bob Kettle and Rob Saka, issued a statement Thursday morning expressing support for an independent investigation Mayor Bruce Harrell announced earlier this week, after four women announced their intent to sue over allegations of sexual harassment by Police Chief Adrian Diaz and communications office director John O’Neil. “We must address barriers to recruiting and retaining women sworn officers to make desperately needed progress on our public safety crisis,” she said.

Asked about the allegations at Wednesday’s meeting, Moore was more explicit, saying she asked Diaz for an update on SPD’s response to a damning report that revealed a widespread culture of misogyny in the department and “I did not receive a response.”

SPD’s “public relations response” to the charges was “highly unacceptable,” Moore added. The department issued a statement responding to the women’s claims that essentially called them all liars, saying their allegations were based on “individual perceptions of victimhood that are unsupported and – in some instances – belied by the comprehensive investigations that will no doubt ultimately be of record.”

 

 

City Council, Crime, Police

Councilmember Cathy Moore Says She’ll Reintroduce Repealed Prostitution Loitering Law “In Short Order”
Police Chief Adrian Diaz, City Councilmember Cathy Moore, and King County Councilmember Rod Dembowski at Bitter Lake Community Center

By Erica C. Barnett

During a public safety forum in north Seattle on Thursday night, District 5 City Councilmember Cathy Moore said she will introduce legislation reinstating the old law against “prostitution loitering,” which the city council repealed unanimously in 2020 with then-mayor Jenny Durkan’s support.

“The former council repealed the law against loitering for purposes of prostitution, and since that happened we have seen an absolute explosion in sex trafficking,” Moore said. “Now, we can all have differences of opinion about whether prostitution is good or bad. But what I can tell you is that people are being trafficked, and that it’s creating a tremendous amount of public disorder and unsafety. And so, we have got to address it. We have several tools; one is, we can reinstate the loitering law.”

After pausing for a moment while the crowd applauded, cheered, and shouted “Yes! Yes! Yes!,” Moore continued, saying she is “looking at coming forward with that legislation in short order, and hoping that I will get the support that I’m hearing from the community for taking that concrete action.”

The prostitution loitering law prohibited sex workers, described in one section of the law as “known prostitutes,” from being in any public place—notably Aurora Ave. N., where sex workers congregate, with the intent to “commit prostitution.”

The point of reinstating the law, Moore said, would be to give police an opportunity to intercept sex trafficking victims, not to jail and prosecute the “mostly women, and mostly minors, who are victims themselves, many of whom have been prostituted since they were children.”

Prostitution itself is still illegal, but SPD has only made 25 prostitution arrests since 2019. Instead, the police and City Attorney’s Office have focused on arresting and prosecuting sex buyers, who are overwhelmingly men of color, according to attorneys who represent these defendants in court.

Speaking to PubliCola after the meeting, Moore said her “hope” for a reinstated loitering law “is really just to give officers the authority to approach and begin a conversation and to look at opportunities for diversion,” including to safe houses, “and to make sure they’re not being trafficked.”

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Amy Smith, director of the city’s CARE department, which operates 911, told PubliCola she didn’t think sex work “should be treated like a crime,” adding that the issue is “really complex. …We’ve got to figure out what is the mechanism to get [sex workers] indoors and safe and then rehabilitate them. … Thirty years ago, they used to have a mechanism to get someone in and to try to get them to testify against the pimp, and all of that’s gone away.”

The Seattle Police Department’s policy manual already empowers police to initiate “social contacts” with people in public spaces without detaining or arresting them.

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 amount to “criminalization of poverty.”

Before the unanimous 2020 vote, bill cosponsor Alex Pedersen said that repealing “problematic laws on our books, such as these loitering laws, [is] a small but important step that this city council can take” to reduce the “disproportionate impacts of our law enforcement system on Black, Indigenous, and other people of color.”

 

Courts, Crime, Mayor Harrell, Police

Despite Public Opinion, Seattle Cops and Prosecutors Still Prioritize Cracking Down on Sex Work

 

Last year, City Attorney Ann Davison’s office pursued charges against 30 men accused of “sexual exploitation,” or patronizing a sex worker. Most people charged with this misdemeanor are men of color, and many are immigrants; of the 30 prosecuted la required a court interpreter.

By Erica C. Barnett

Shortly before dark one evening last April, a young woman stood outside the Lowe’s hardware store at the corner of 125th and Aurora, looking for customers. Clutching a silver fanny pack, she stood alone near the entrance to the parking lot, dressed in eye-catching moon boots, a reddish cropped tank top, and a black skirt she later described as “a very, very short skirt that barely covered my rear.”

According to her later account, a young man driving a decades-old sedan honked his horn, made a U-turn, and pulled into the driveway of the parking lot, blocking traffic in his haste. After a quick negotiation, the woman later testified, the man said he would give her $80 for “quick sex,” prompting the woman—Seattle police officer Kortney North—to give a signal.

Within moments, the parking lot became a blur of activity, as teams of uniformed officers swooped in. Simultaneously, a detective driving a vehicle filled with other “decoys”—more female officers, also dressed up as sex workers—arrived to whisk North away. Four surveillance officers remained just out of sight, as did a second surveillance vehicle nearby. Once police had the man—we’ll call him James— in handcuffs, an officer drove him a nearby precinct, where still more officers awaited to process and release him.

A few weeks later, City Attorney Ann Davison’s office charged him with one misdemeanor count for soliciting a sex worker—a crime that carries a maximum of 90 days in jail, plus fines that can add up to several thousand dollars..

Most men charged with sexual exploitation—the city’s official term for soliciting a sex worker—end up agreeing to a deal with prosecutors. Last year, according to the Seattle Municipal Court, the city attorney’s office brought sexual exploitation charges against 30 individuals. Only one, James, insisted on his innocence.

And so, late last month, North found herself testifying before a jury as a witness for the prosecution in a courtroom on the 11th floor of the Seattle Municipal Court building in downtown Seattle.

“I don’t think I’ve ever had a white, English-speaking client charged with this.”—Northwest Defenders attorney Virginia Branham

Because undercover officers don’t wear video cameras or carry recording devices—and don’t collect money from the men they target—the outcome of prostitution cases depends almost entirely on whose story the jury believes. Without tangible evidence proving that James was guilty, the prosecutors tried to tell a story about a hypothetical woman forced into sex work by circumstances beyond her control.

“Eighty dollars. That’s how much [he] thought sex with Officer North was worth that day,” assistant city prosecutor Alisa Smith said in her closing argument. “There is no question about what [was] going on. [He] was out to buy sex with … someone whose life circumstances had brought her to a place where she needed some quick cash.”

The jury took four hours to find James not guilty.

Criminalizing sex work is broadly unpopular; during jury selection, echoing national sentiment, 23 of 25 potential jurors said they didn’t think sex work should be illegal. But the city remains deeply invested in penalizing the practice—and pouring resources into prosecuting men who patronize sex workers.

Like James, most of the people prosecuted for patronizing prostitutes are men of color, and defense attorneys say many are immigrants—mostly Latino—who don’t speak English fluently or at all.

“I don’t think I’ve ever had a white, English-speaking client charged with this,” Northwest Defenders attorney Virginia Branham, the supervising attorney on James’ case, said. “Often, with clients who are charged with [sexual exploitation], English is not their first language and they often have immigration issues, so this charge is not a good one for a client of be convicted of.”

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Publicly available police reports don’t usually indicate defendants’ race or immigration status, but it’s suggestive that a large majority of the men prosecuted for sexual exploitation last year had Hispanic, African, or Asian surnames, and that half requested an interpreter from the court. Because solicitation stings are based entirely on an officer’s claim that she made a verbal agreement to exchange sex for money, a defendant’s ability to understand what an officer is saying could be a strong argument against a guilty verdict—if any of those cases ever went to trial.

To understand why the city puts so much energy, effort, and money into chasing down men for a low-level misdemeanor that most people think should be legal, it’s helpful to know that under city law and SPD policy, sex work is virtually synonymous with human trafficking—one police source described women being sent around the country on a circuit, which—police argue—prevents women from developing ties or getting help.

This view is reflected in the language of the law itself; in 2015, then-city council member Bruce Harrell sponsored a bill, which passed unanimously, changing the crime of “patronizing a prostitute” to “sexual exploitation.”

The idea, backed strongly by then-city attorney Pete Holmes (who later vacated all outstanding charges against sex workers) was to focus on the demand side of the equation by focusing on the men buying sex rather than the people, mostly women, selling it. As Harrell  summarized in 2015, “we will now refer to [solicitation] as a crime relative to sexual exploitation [because] that’s what actually occurs when people are being forced to use their bodies in the commerce of prostitution.”

In about eight years of representing defendants in such cases,” Branham countered, “I’ve never seen a case where there has been any link to sex trafficking.”

A spokesman for the city attorney’s office said there has not been any “greater emphasis on sex work” since Davison took office in 2022. “However, the City Attorney is very aware of the continuing problem and the tragic impact on women and girls who are preyed upon by criminals engaged in human trafficking,” he said.

Since taking office in 2022, Davison has emphasized the need to make filing decisions quickly so that cases involving serious misdemeanors, like driving under the influence and domestic violence, can take top priority. But a look at any weekly municipal court docket shows that many of those more serious cases are languishing.

Pursuing men who buy sex is time-consuming and expensive, although it’s surprisingly difficult to determine just how time-consuming and how expensive. SPD did not respond to questions about what its sting operations cost and how they operate, and a spokesman for Davison’s office said “there is not a cost tracking system in place for criminal trials.”

But with the median SPD employee making well over $150,000 —and with a three-day trial that required, at minimum, dozens of hours of preparation for both prosecutors and defense attorneys—it’s easy to see how the costs can add up. According to data from the city, in 2022, SPD arrested 28 people for “purchasing prostitution” on Aurora over the course of five operations. In 2023, that number was 41, in six operations. Those numbers were down significantly from 2019, when police arrested 87 people, and up dramatically compared to earlier in the decade, when SPD stings were aimed at sex workers, not their customers.

Testimony at the trial provided a closer look at the scale of these stings, which can involve as many as 20 officers. In addition, before going undercover, officers have to go through “decoy school”—a two-day training where they learn the “language” of sex work, act out various scenarios they might encounter, and practice hand signals to let observing officers know if they’re in distress and when it’s time to make an arrest.

“There was probably 10 pages of acronyms that we went over, just so that we would be familiar with those kinds of terms and not be thrown off if somebody approached us,” North said.

“The trial really highlighted the immense expense involved in these stings and the resources that are thrown at them, and I just can’t see what value they are getting,” said Branham, who, along with lead attorney Claire Beckett, worked on James’ defense over several months and appeared in court during all three days of his trial..

Since taking office in 2022, Davison has emphasized the need to make filing decisions quickly so that cases involving serious misdemeanors, like driving under the influence and domestic violence, can take top priority. But a look at any weekly municipal court docket shows that many of those more serious cases are languishing.

Last week, for example, the domestic violence arraignment calendar included six assault cases—cases in which women described being punched, beaten, and strangled by intimate partners—that sat around for 60 days or longer before Davison’s office filed charges. According to a 2017 report by the Washington Association of Prosecuting Attorneys and the King County Prosecuting Attorney’s Office, the longer it takes to file charges in a domestic violence case, the less likely a victim is to cooperate with prosecutors, and the harder it becomes to track down witnesses; delay also “diminishes the quality of DV cases as its sends a message to victims and courts that the case is not a priority.”

DUI cases are also stacking up. Out of 14 cases on the docket for the first week of February, 11 involved cases from early 2022 for which the two-year statute of limitations was about to run out. Delays at the state toxicology lab, which examines blood samples in DUI cases, are only responsible for about half of this two-year delay, which has been consistent for much of the last year. With two years’ lag time, successful prosecutions are rare; in 10 of the 11 cases on last week’s docket, court records indicate the defendant could no longer be found.

Should the city be spending time, money, and court resources prosecuting men who pay for sex? The question is especially relevant at a time when both the police department and the city attorney’s office say they’re short-staffed and stretched thin.

At a time when SPD claims it doesn’t have enough officers to respond to 911 calls promptly, it’s worth looking at the sheer quantity of resources they pour into apprehending sex buyers on Aurora. At a time when the city attorney’s office says it’s having trouble staffing its criminal division with qualified attorneys, it’s worth questioning why they have chosen to use those scarce attorneys prosecuting men for buying sex, rather than the “serious” misdemeanors, like DUIs and domestic violence, that Davison has said are among her top priorities.

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Courts, criminal justice, Police

Court Approves City Attorney’s Motion to Clear Outstanding Prostitution Warrants
Seattle Municipal Courthouse
Seattle Municipal Court image via SMC Facebook page

By Paul Kiefer

On Thursday morning, a Seattle Municipal Court Judge approved a motion by Seattle City Attorney Pete Holmes to quash all outstanding warrants for misdemeanor prostitution, including some issued well over a decade ago.

The motion, which Holmes’ office filed last Friday, requested that the court dismiss 37 warrants involving 34 people arrested for selling sex between 2001 and 2019; the office also asked the court to dismiss cases or vacate charges against the individuals named in the warrants, on the condition that a future city attorney cannot refile the cases at a later date. The warrants represent less than one percent of the outstanding warrants issued by the municipal court.

The City Attorney’s Office hasn’t prosecuted anyone for selling sex since 2019, when the Seattle Police Department ramped up arrests and sting operations targeting both sex workers and buyers in response to public pressure driven by an increase in the presence of sex workers along Aurora Avenue North—an uptick partially driven by the federal shutdown of Backpage, a website sex workers used to find clients. Because Seattle’s pre-arrest diversion programs were stretched to capacity, officers booked dozens of sex workers into the King County jail; the City Attorney’s Office opted not to file charges against most of them, though eight of the warrants quashed on Thursday stemmed from charges that the office filed in 2019.

Lisa Daugaard, the executive director of the Public Defender Association and co-founder of Let Everyone Advance with Dignity (LEAD), previously known as Law Enforcement Assisted Diversion, told PubliCola on Thursday that public criticism of SPD’s arrests in 2019 likely prompted the department to reverse course. The change in police department leadership (from Carmen Best to interim chief Adrian Diaz), the COVID-19 pandemic, and SPD’s ongoing staffing challenges also played key roles in curtailing low-level arrests in general, Daugaard added. SPD officers have made 55 prostitution arrests this year, compared to 78 in all of 2020 and 175 in 2019.

The City Attorney’s Office has also seen a sharp decline in the number of sex buyers the police department refers to the office for charging. Because of a delay between arrests and filings, the office received 88 referrals in the first two months of 2020—sex buyers arrested during SPD sting operations the previous year—but only a single case between early March and the end of the year. In 2021, SPD has only referred four sex buyers to the office for charging. SPD has also made fewer arrests of sex buyers in the past two years: seven in 2021 and nine in 2020, compared to 76 in 2019.

The City Attorney’s Office did not attempt to contact the people subject to outstanding prostitution warrants before filing the motion; Holmes spokesman Dan Nolte told PubliCola on Wednesday that his office planned to wait until the court accepted their motion before reaching out.