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.”
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.”
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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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.
This year’s council races include an unusually high number of open seats, an unprecedented amount of outside spending, and eight first-time candidates. To help voters keep track, I’m sitting down with this year’s city council contenders to talk about their records, their priorities, and what they hope to accomplish on the council.
Today: District 5 incumbent Debora Juarez. Juarez, a former public defender and pro tem Seattle Municipal Court judge, has served on the council since 2015, and has developed a reputation as a blunt-spoken, fierce advocate for her district. We sat down the same week that a conversation about criminal-justice funding devolved into a debate about why women become sex workers, and we started our conversation talking about that.
The C Is for Crank (ECB): A recent conversation about whether to expand the Law Enforcement Assisted Diversion program went off the rails when the deputy police chief, Mark Garth Green, said some women who engage in sex work aren’t good candidates for LEAD because “aren’t necessarily substance abusers” and do sex work for fun. Unlike your colleagues Teresa Mosqueda and Lorena Gonzalez, you didn’t make any comments during that discussion, so I wanted to ask you what your reaction was.
Debora Juarez (DJ): My reaction was the same as council member Mosqueda and council member [Sally] Bagshaw. We still have this misunderstanding about what sex workers and trafficking, and that it isn’t a victimless crime. They are victims. I’m not outraged. I’m more afraid that if that is what frontline officers think, that affects their ability and their discretion in how they do their jobs. So it could’ve been any officer sitting there saying that. And I’ve heard that [sort of talk] when I was a public defender and a judge.
ECB: It seemed like the larger context that got lost in that discussion was the discussion about whether offering sex workers access to LEAD would be a more effective approach than SPD’s new policy of arresting women on Aurora Ave. And what SPD and the mayor’s office seemed to be saying that there are some people for whom LEAD just doesn’t work. What do you think of that?
“LEAD is just an example of a lot of do-no-harm philosophies that this city has embraced, [though] not in the beginning. I remember when I was a public defender and we started doing needle exchanges and everyone was mad. We had the same arguments then. ‘You’re enabling;’ ‘Drug addicts are going to come from everyone.’ Well, that didn’t happen and now it’s [considered] a public health issue.”
DJ: There is some truth that LEAD doesn’t work for everybody, but I would say overall, it does work if you have a bed ready. If you have somewhere safe for them to go, it does work. And I hate to get into this whole patriarchy thing, but you really need some women in leadership that understand it from a DNA level that sometimes [sex work] is [women’s] last way to take care of themselves. And I would say the majority of women are amenable to LEAD.
ECB: So you think that LEAD needs to be expanded?
DJ: There’s no doubt. I think everyone agrees that it works, that it should be expanded, and that LEAD is just an example of a lot of do-no-harm philosophies that this city has embraced, [though] not in the beginning. I remember when I was a public defender and we started doing needle exchanges and everyone was mad. Now it’s normal stuff, right? We had the same arguments then. “You’re enabling.” “Drug addicts are going to come from everyone.” Well, that didn’t happen and now it’s [considered] a public health issue.
ECB: So do you think LEAD should be funded at the level they’re requesting, which would require an additional $4.8 million?
DJ: I think we just have to land on a number and I err on the side of more than less.
ECB: You’ve supported expanding the Navigation Team, even though a lot of what they do now is just removing encampments and telling people to move along. Do you think that the problem has gotten so bad that just clearing encampments is a worthwhile thing to be spending money on?
DJ: Yes, I do, because I think you have to do something. And I know people don’t want to hear this, but what I’ve seen, particularly in our district, [is that] you have 27 tents and not one person wants to accept services or housing. Or we have these tents and we know that they’re doing sex trafficking and selling drugs. My philosophy has been this: If somebody in Pinehurst is selling drugs out of their house, they should be arrested. If they’re selling drugs out of their tent, they should be arrested. That’s really what I think. We have to do something. Looking away from that issue isn’t good enough.
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ECB: When you say, ‘We’ve offered them all the services,’ I think that the counterargument would be that there aren’t enough treatment beds or even enhanced shelter beds available.
DJ: I’m physically out there [talking to people who refuse services]. I know what I saw. On the flip side, I have also seen where we have offered services and we’ve had success, mainly when we’ve people into enhanced shelters. That is more palatable [to people living in encampments], and that’s what we need more of. That’s been my big push.
ECB: Do you think the region needs more revenue to address homelessness, in addition to the new regional homelessness authority?
DJ: Yes, in a general sense. Absolutely. And in fact, my original thought six months ago was, I wanted them to also have a part in building housing, not just [providing] services. I wanted them to be able to assume debt and issue debt and actually build housing stock, along with the social service piece and the enhanced services piece. Maybe we can get to that point, because I think there’s a lot of for-profit and nonprofit developers that would feel more comfortable writing a check to a [Public Development Authority] than to the city of Seattle or the King County. That’s what I’m hearing from the private sector.
ECB: Would you be open to revisiting any of the recommendations that came out of the city’s Progressive Revenue Task Force, besides the head tax?
DJ: I wouldn’t;. I’m going to be candid with you on that. That was seven months of not our finest hour. You know, I wrote this memo deconstructing the progressive revenue task force’s report. My position had always been from the beginning that that should be a voter initiative and I wanted it on the ballot. I worked with Mayor Ed Murray when we were looking at imposing a tax, and then you saw what happened—he and the county executive [Dow Constantine] said the people are tax-weary [and dropped it]. It was ready to go, raising $52 million a year for five years.
The topic that was actually on the table: LEAD’s ballooning caseload.
A council discussion about whether to expand funding for the successful Law Enforcement Assisted Diversion (LEAD) program, which is understaffed and over capacity, was derailed Wednesday afternoon when deputy police chief Marc Garth Green defended SPD’s recent return to the old, widely discredited policy of targeting sex workers, rather than buyers, for arrests. (That story was reported by Crosscut.)
The exchange came after council member Teresa Mosqueda challenged claims that the city needed tools besides diversion, such as “enhanced probation,” to address “prolific offenders” because LEAD wouldn’t work for certain people. (Mosqueda’s point was that there’s no way to prove diversion doesn’t work for people who have never had the chance to enter a diversion program, and that the problem was funding, not lack of evidence that LEAD works).
I’ve transcribed much of the exchange, but here’s where it got heated:
Garth Green: We have people who are working the streets that aren’t necessarily substance abusers. They have homes. Some of them choose to do what they’re doing. [From the dais, Mosqueda can be heard saying, “No.”] We need to have some type of intervention with them, whether it be LEAD or something else, but we have to address these types of things. To simply go about doing the same thing over and over again becomes problematic. … We’ve had two homicides in the North Precinct on Aurora directly related to prostitution activities and we have to make that population safe as well. [At this point, Mosqueda tried to speak.] Please, ma’am. I firmly believe in LEAD. We should fund LEAD. All I’m saying is I need a lot of resources to deal with the complex problems that we have up there.
“We have people who are working the streets that aren’t necessarily substance abusers. They have homes. Some of them choose to do what they’re doing… That [knowledge] comes from my experience of actually working the street up there and talking to a young lady who specifically told me that she was there to make money and enjoyed it “—Seattle Police Department Deputy Chief Marc Garth Green
Mosqueda: You’re talking about people on Aurora making choices? The only people making a choice in terms of prostitution are the johns on Aurora who are stopping to see if people are willing to get in their car. Those folks who are working on the street are not making a daily choice to go out there. They are… sustaining themselves, their families, their kiddos. This is not a choice people are making, as in, they’re housed, they have all access to health services, and they feel economically stable. … If you’re basing referrals for arrests instead of to LEAD based on your assumption or gut or sense that somehow it was better to arrest them than to get them into LEAD, then I want to see the data.
I’d also like to see data that shows that people are making this choice, because absolutely, in my 15 years of working on this issue, from human trafficking and labor trafficking and standing up for workers’ rights, I have never been so shocked by such an assertion.
Garth Green: I appreciate that, councilwoman. And that comes from my experience of actually working the street up there and talking to a young lady who specifically told me that she was there to make money and enjoyed it and I still believe that that young lady had some problems—
Sawant: This is just unacceptable. Did you just say that that young lady enjoyed it? I mean—
Garth Green: That’s her words, not mine, but what I’d like to say—
Sawant: I don’t think you should be speaking for women at all, much less in the context of the worldwide statistics that the people who get into sex work primarily get into it because of financial constraints imposed on them by the system.
Deputy Seattle Police Chief Marc Garth Green
Later in the afternoon, SPD’s official Twitter account responded with a statement attributed to Garth Green, clarifying his “earlier remarks that I was unable to finish at City Council today.” The statement suggested that, contrary to his previous “she enjoyed it” claim, SPD considers all sex workers to be trafficked victims who may be safer behind bars.
“There is a reason we refer to those engaged in prostitution as High Risk Victims,” the SPD account said. “In our experience, victims are forced into prostitution through violence, deception, and other factors not of their choosing. Diversion options can be limited, and we may need to arrest them to disrupt the cycle of violence and abuse. For people trafficked in prostitution, jail can be a safer place than out on the street. That said, our primary enforcement focus will ALWAYS be those who profit from and support this form of human trafficking.”
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Garth Green’s comments came in the middle of a presentation on LEAD by representatives from the budget office, the mayor’s office, and the police department, who were defending the mayor’s decision to effectively flatline LEAD’s funding in 2020. (The mayor’s office proposed a $288,000 increase, but Public Defender Association director Lisa Daugaard said that increase will be eaten up by rent increases and boosts to caseworker pay aimed at reducing turnover). Continue reading ““She Told Me She Was There To Make Money and She Enjoyed It”: Diversion Funding Discussion Derailed by Crass Cop Comments”→
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.”
