LGBTQ+, Police

Review Finds Multiple Police Failures Preceded Violent Response to Counteprotests During Anti-LGBTQ Event in May
Police form a barricade at a right-wing rally at City Hall held shortly after the “Mayday USA” event.

Police didn’t engage with community before the anti-LGBTQ event, weren’t familiar with Capitol Hill and its history, and referred to protesters as “transtifa,” the report found.

By Erica C. Barnett

The city’s Office of the Inspector General released a report today finding that the Seattle Police Department’s actions during the anti-trans “Don’t Mess With Our Kids” rally, held by an extremist group called Mayday USA last May, showed a bias against counter-protesters who showed up to demonstrate against the right-wing event. The report also found that officers didn’t understand why it was a provocation to hold an anti-LGBTQ event in Cal Anderson Park, at the heart of Seattle’s historic LGBTQ neighborhood.

Instead, the report found, police assumed that the rally organizers represented no real threat, while assuming that “‘black bloc’ and ‘antifa’ are established, hierarchical organizations intent on inciting disorder and criminal activity,” which—despite President Trump’s decision to ID “Antifa” as a “terrorist organization”—they’re not. Former mayor Bruce Harrell bolstered these assumptions after the rally, claiming any violence was caused by “anarchists” who “infiltrated the counterdemonstration to incite violence,” the report notes.

This “anticipatory defensiveness” contributed to officers’ decisions to overreact to protesters while seeing the far-right group as a mere “church group” holding a prayer event.

At the same time, the report continues, police on the scene served as de facto security for the anti-trans religious group. Cops on the scene “frequently spoke with the MayDay USA security liaison, sharing MayDay USA intelligence with SPD leadership on-scene.”

“After hearing the MayDay USA security liaison refer to counterdemonstrators as ‘transtifa,’ POET officers adopted the term which spread to other SPD personnel,” the panel, which included six community members and six representatives from SPD, found.

During the event, police deployed pepper spray and other “less lethal” weapons against demonstrators, throwing many to the ground and arresting 23 people. Police used bike rack-style barricades to prevent protesters from entering the rally area and arrested people for pushing against or knocking over the barricades, which were connected together and placed on a hill, where they were prone to tipping over.

The report was the result of a police accountability process called a Sentinel Event Review that follows major  incidents, such as police shootings and protest responses that lead to injuries and arrests. A panel that included representatives from the police department, an LGBTQ organization that organized counter-programming, and impacted community members along with OIG Director Lisa Judge held three lengthy meetingsto discuss their experiences in confidence.

However, the report notes that the process was cut short after one panelist leaked details about one of the confidential meetings, preventing the panel from holding its final meeting.

According to multiple sources, Gabriel Dias, a medic who was injured by police at the protest, told Divest SPD about an incident in which SPD arrested people for releasing some of the May Day group’s balloons into the air and trying to tamper with their bubble machine.

Immediately before those arrests, Lieutenant Matthew Didier was caught on body camera telling his team they were “going in with guns blazing” and were “here to fuck people up now.”

“After three successful panel sessions, one panelist violated the agreement not to disclose specific details of the panel discussions,” the report says. “The trust necessary to continue open deliberation was broken, so the SER was discontinued prior to a final meeting to develop consensus contributing factors and recommendations.”

The violation apparently upset SPD so much that one of the police participants suggested SPD would no longer participate in sentinel event reviews, which would effectively end this kind of review. We’ve reached out to SPD and will update this post if we hear back.

Dias denied leaking to Divest SPD. After their report came out, he was one of many people who quoted or played the video of Didier’s incendiary comments at City Council meetings.

Although SPD has a history of ignoring SER recommendations (the new report includes many recommendations that, it observes in footnotes, SPD agreed to in the past but failed to implement), the process is one of the only opportunities for people impacted by police actions to tell SPD directly how they were affected and how police could do a better job in the future.

In one instance, according to the report, a lieutenant “apologized for the statements made and acknowledged that, in hindsight, they would have used different language.” This appears to be a reference to Didier, who was on the panel.

“The panelist noted officers did not fully understand the cultural importance of the park and the rally and were unnecessarily focused on identifying ‘bad actors.’ The panelist stated the panel discussions improved their understanding of the impact of this Event on community and the importance of community perceptions and context for future crowd management operations.”

Perhaps unsurprisingly, the report reveals a deep disconnect between SPD (whose officers typically live outside Seattle) and the communities those officers are supposed to serve. Instead of engaging with community groups, SPD looked on social media to gather intelligence on “antifa.” At the same time, police “did not seek additional intelligence about the MayDay USA group,” the extremist organization whose rally prompted counterprotests in the first place.

“[T]he strong visible presence of SPD was itself escalatory for counterdemonstrators, who felt targeted based on their identities and felt SPD was there to protect an anti-LGBTQ+ hate group in a park with historical significance for the LGBTQ+ community,” the report concludes. As an example, SPD was already coordinating with May Day organizers to press charges against counter-protesters even before the balloon incident, which culminated in arrests that violated SPD’s own crowd management policy.

“Crucial to the assessment of SPD crowd management operations for this Event is a broader understanding of the cultural context of the location and event,” the report found. “This context includes the historic over-policing of LGBTQ+ spaces, the history of Capitol Hill as a sanctuary neighborhood for LGBTQ+ communities in Seattle, as well as the current federal posture and climate of anti-transgender rhetoric and legislation.”

At the time of the protests, SPD had no LGBTQ liaison.

Three months after being sworn in as police chief, SPD Chief Shon Barnes promoted Mike Tietjen to head up Capitol Hill’s East Precinct, bypassing the acting commander, a gay lieutenant named Doug Raguso who had served in the precinct for years.

Tietjen became notorious for his actions during the CHOP protests against police violence in 2020, when he drove his SUV onto a sidewalk filled with people, laughing later about how they looked like “cockroaches” as they scattered. He received a temporary suspension and was moved to the North Precinct as punishment for that incident and several others, including the alleged harassment of a trans woman by police driving through the protest area. After PubliCola reported on Tietjen’s promotion, Barnes rescinded it and (eventually) appointed Captain Jim Britt to the position.

Barnes had previously come under fire for overseeing a dramatic crackdown on the historic LGBTQ+ nude beach at Denny Blaine Park,  in which officers showed up prepared to arrest or trespass anyone who wasn’t wearing clothes.

As we reported earlier this year, Barnes’ chief of staff, Alex Ricketts, reportedly brushed off SPD’s general counsel when she advised Ricketts to Barnes to take the concerns of Seattle’s LGBTQ+ community seriously, telling her, “We’re not here for the gays.”

At a meeting of SPD’s LGBTQ Advisory Council earlier this week, Barnes reportedly blamed the Parks Department for permitting the May Day rally at Cal Anderson Park and not informing SPD about the rally until 10 days before the event. According to multiple people who were present, Barnes also claimed the Community Police Commission, an independent police accountability office at the city, had appointed people to the Sentinel Event Review panel, which a CPC staffer had to step in and correct.

In fact, according to CPC Director Eci Emeh, the CPC never got a chance to weigh in on the report or participate on the review panel, beyond forwarding the names of people who expressed an interest in serving on the panel to OIG. Contrary to reporting elsewhere, “we were not in the room,” Emeh said.

“I would have liked to see the CPC play a bigger role,” Emeh continued. “I would have liked to see the CPC be directly involved in the SER panel process—not necessarily the selection, but even being able to attend the SER panel and hear the exchanges that happened between community members and police officers.”

City Council, housing

Tax For Social Housing Brought In Twice the Original Estimate, Mirroring Early JumpStart Results
Mayor Katie Wilson speaks to the crowd at Tuesday’s “State of Social Housing” town hall.

With $115 million (almost) in hand, the social housing developer says it’s ready to start buying up apartments.

By Erica C. Barnett

Funding for Seattle’s new social housing developer, which the City Council approved in a 7-0 vote yesterday, is coming in significantly higher than anticipated: In its first year, the developer will receive an estimated $115 million to acquire existing apartment buildings and develop new ones. That’s more than twice the $53 million the campaign for last year’s ballot initiative, House Our Neighbors, estimated for first-year revenues last year.

On Tuesday, the City Council unanimously approved an interlocal agreement that will allow the Seattle Social Housing Developer to start spending the money to purchase and develop social housing—mixed-income apartment buildings with permanently affordable rent, governed by a board consisting primarily of renters.

“We continue to have one of the most regressive tax systems in the country in this state,” Mayor Katie Wilson said at a “State of Social Housing” event at El Centro de la Raza Tuesday night, “and it is very gratifying to know that we’re going to be able to use a little bit of that wealth and put it to work building housing and operating housing.”

The higher-than-expected early revenues, Wilson noted, mirror what happened with the JumpStart tax, a tax Seattle’s largest businesses pay on employee compensation above a threshold that grows with inflation every year. (This year, the tax will apply to employees wages above $194,000 a year). “This city is filthy rich,” Wilson said. “We just kind of, like, tapped into a vein and opened a little spigot, and $400 million a year” came out. 

Social housing is funded through a similarly structured tax; employers pay 5 percent of annual compensation to any employee above $1 million; for instance, if an Amazon worker makes $1,100,000 a year in wages and other compensation, such as stocks, Amazon would pay $5,000 for the portion above $1 million.

Tiffany McCoy, the interim director of the social housing developer, said that because of the funding, “hundreds of people this year will benefit from housing that remains permanently affordable, housing that is publicly owned and passed down through generations, housing that works for people that are a variety of income levels and helps prevent them from falling into homelessness.”

McCoy was previously co-director of House Our Neighbors, the group that proposed and passed two social housing initiatives, I-137 and Proposition 1A. She became interim CEO after the developer’s board fired its original CEO, Roberto Jimenez, an affordable housing developer from California. Among other issues, HON and some board members were frustrated that Jimenez never moved to Seattle from California. 

On Tuesday, McCoy noted that “naysayers” will continue to oppose the developer’s model and question whether social housing, including the developer’s model of resident governance, can work in Seattle. “But let them critique us. We will continue to build, and whether we’re opening our first, second, tenth building, our doors will remain open to all,” McCoy said.

The comparison Wilson made to the JumpStart tax is instructive—and could serve as a cautionary tale. While JumpStart continues to bring in more money each year than originally forecast, it never actually brought in $400 million in a single year; that number was an estimate for 2024 that turned out to be optimistic to the tune of $47 million.

Because the city has staked so much of its general-fund budget on the tax, which was originally earmarked for housing and small business support, big revenue fluctuations have the potential to create shortfalls that impact basic city services.

Although former mayor Bruce Harrell’s budget assumed revenues from JumpStart would quickly bounce back, it seems just as possible that they’ll keep declining: Because fewer than 500 companies pay the tax (and fewer than 10 provide the bulk of JumpStart revenues), the funding is volatile and heavily dependent on corporate decisions by companies like Amazon, which just cut thousands of employees in the Seattle area. The money coming in is still higher than the city anticipated when the council approved the tax, however.

The social housing tax applies to a much smaller number of companies (and a smaller number of employees at those companies): About 170, according to McCoy. Taxing the richest of the rich in this way makes sense from a political perspective—it’s easy to get voters to support taxes that will only affect a relative handful of the biggest corporations with the wealthiest workers—but the tax could prove even more variable than JumpStart, and the developer could see diminishing returns if companies fire workers or move them out of the city.

PubliCola is supported entirely by readers like you.
CLICK BELOW to become a one-time or monthly contributor.

Support PubliCola

At a presentation to the council’s housing committee on Wednesday, the developer’s Chief Real Estate Development Officer, Ginger Segal, said the developer plans to issue bonds this year and again in 2028, when the developer will run out of money and need to issue more. Bonds are a type of loan that a developer pays back with revenues, such as rent or public funding. The social housing developer plans to pay the bonds back at a rate of about $20 million a year, Segal said. ”

Segal said market conditions are favorable right now for the developer to focus on buying up buildings. By 2028, Segal said, the organization plans to acquire more than 800 existing units and convert them into social housing; by 2031, they plan to have constructed more than 600 new units.

Initially, the developer plans to encourage existing tenants to stay and rent units to lower-income people as they become vacant in order to meet a planned balance between lower- and higher-income residents; eventually, Segal said, units will become vacant and the developer will maintain a mix by renting to renters at all income levels, from 0 to 120 percent of the Seattle median income.

During that presentation, McCoy said one issue the developer could face soon is a section of the social housing developer’s charter that says the housing it creates “must be permanently protected from being sold or transferred to a private entity or public-private partnership.”

“We are finding, with some banks, that they don’t feel we could put the buildings up as collateral if we wanted to take out big debt to fund our mission,” McCoy said.

“After the next few years, I think we’ll have to reevaluate and see if we want to encumber more of that tax revenue,  or if we want to start encumbering the buildings” by putting them up as collateral for loans, Segal said. “But I think we need the flexibility to encumber the buildings, because otherwise we might have financing tools that we can’t use.”

Courts, Police

Family of Jaahnavi Kandula, Pedestrian Killed by SPD Officer in 2023, Reaches $29,011,000 Settlement with City

photo of Jaahnavi Kandula

In an incident that sparked widespread outrage, police guild leader Daniel Auderer joked that the 23-year-old student was only worth $11,000.

By Andrew Engelson

The Seattle City Attorney’s Office reached a settlement last week with the family of Jaahnavi Kandula, who was struck and killed in a South Lake Union crosswalk in January 2023 by a Seattle Police Department officer traveling 74 miles an hour. In September 2024, the family brought a lawsuit against the City of Seattle and SPD officer Kevin Dave for $110 million, plus an additional $11,000. 

The settlement, obtained by PubliCola on Thursday, is for $29 million plus $11,000.

The added figure is a reference to callous remarks made by SPD officer Daniel Auderer, vice chairman of the Seattle Police Officers Guild at the time, who had been called to the scene to investigate Dave for signs of intoxication. Caught on body cam video in conversation with police union leader Mike Solan, Auderer joked and laughed about Kandula’s death, saying, “Just write a check. $11,000. She was 26, anyway. She had limited value.”

“Jaahnavi Kandula’s death was heartbreaking, and the city hopes this financial settlement brings some sense of closure to the Kandula family,” city attorney Erika Evans said. “We also recognize that her loss has left unimaginable pain. Jaahnavi Kandula’s life mattered. It mattered to her family, to her friends, and to our community.”

In their claim, filed in King County Superior Court, attorneys wrote that Kandula “experienced terror, severe emotional distress, and severe pain and suffering before dying.”

Kandula, a 23-year-old engineering student from the Indian state of Andhra Pradesh, was crossing Dexter Avenue at Thomas Street when she was killed on the evening of January 23, 2023. The legal complaint was filed by Kandula’s mother and father, Vijaya Laksmi Gundapuneedi and Sreekanth Kandula, who both live in India. 

Interim police chief Sue Rahr fired Auderer in July 2024. In response, he filed a $20 million tort claim against the city for “wrongful termination,” and added an addition five million dollars to the claim, which is currently in King County courts.

Rahr fired Dave in January 2025 after the Office of Police Accountability issued a report finding Dave failed to drive with “with due regard for the safety of all persons.” The report also noted that Dave had been involved in a separate “preventable collision” as an SPD officer, and—as PubliCola first reported—did not have a valid Washington driver’s license when he struck Kandula.

Before joining SPD, Dave was fired by the Tucson Police Department; SPD was aware of what one sergeant flagged as his “checkered history” in Tucson before SPD hired him in 2019.

Tucson fired Dave in 2013 after numerous investigations, including one involving a “preventable collision” for which he was suspended being fired. 

In a troubling incident that occurred shortly after he was fired, an officer pulled him over for speeding and observed Dave acting erratically. According to a police report on that incident, the investigating officer filing suspected Dave was “possibly on some type of narcotic.”

Many of the details from PubliCola’s reporting were included in the Kandula family’s claim against officer Dave and the city. “He should have never been hired,” Vonda Sargent, an attorney for the family, told PubliCola shortly before the lawsuit was filed in 2024. “You can’t take just all comers. Everyone is not suited or fit to be a law enforcement officer.” 

Sargent did not respond to a request for comment on Tuesday. PubliCola will update this post if we hear back.

In November, 2024, in response to community outrage over the collision, SPD released new policies on emergency driving which direct officers to “drive no faster than their skill and training allows and [what] is reasonably necessary to safely arrive at the scene.” 

King County Prosecutor Leesa Manion declined to file felony charges against Dave, and City Attorney Ann Davison issued him a negligent driving traffic ticket with a $5,000 fine.

City Council, Courts

ACLU Drops Lawsuit After City Attorney Evans Drops Blanket Affidavit Against Judge; Council Gets New Central Staff Director

 

City Attorney Erika Evans

1. City Attorney Erika Evans and the ACLU of Washington jointly announced this week that the ACLU is dropping their lawsuit against the city over a policy instituted by Evans’ Republican predecessor, Ann Davison, that disqualified an independently elected judge from hearing criminal cases for almost two years.

In 2024, Davison disqualified Seattle Municipal Court Judge Pooja Vaddadi, an independently elected judge, from hearing any criminal cases for the rest of Davison’s term through a procedure known as a blanket affidavit of prejudice. Davison justified her decision by claiming Vaddadi was biased and incompetent, vaguely citing unspecified past cases in which they alleged Vaddadi had demonstrated “a complete lack of understanding, or perhaps even intentional disregard, of the evidence rules, even on basic issues.”

As one of her first official acts in office, Evans issued an order to her criminal division banning all blanket affidavits of prejudice and requiring attorneys to request such affidavits individually, on a case-by-case basis, returning to standard practice for every modern city attorney prior to Davison.

The move by Davison and her deputy, Natalie Walton-Anderson was widely viewed as political—Vaddadi is progressive—and further investigations by Vaddadi’s legal team and independent advocates made it clear that Davison’s office misrepresented the cases they cited in the memo denouncing Vaddadi.

In a statement on Thursday, Evans said, “As an experienced prosecutor, I believe in litigating cases—not attempting to ban judges we do not like. Under my leadership, the only time a Seattle prosecutor will seek to disqualify a judge from a case is in the rare instance where there’s a clear, strong, reason that the individual prosecutor believes the case will not receive a fair hearing.”

PubliCola is supported entirely by readers like you.
CLICK BELOW to become a one-time or monthly contributor.

Support PubliCola

 

2. City Council President Joy Hollingsworth just announced that Lish Whitson, a member of the Seattle City Council’s Central Staff for the past 13 years (and a 20-year City Hall veteran) will take over as head of Central Staff in March, when Ben Noble retires from the city. Central staffers are the council’s policy shop; unlike legislative aides, they provide policy advice and write legislation for the entire council.

The council president is nominally in charge of central staff, and picks their boss; former council president Sara Nelson fired central staff director Esther Handy and replaced her with Noble. Under Nelson, who took an atypically active role overseeing central staff, a large number of veteran council staffers left for other positions, creating a brain drain (particularly among women) at the council’s primary source of institutional knowledge.

Noble led Central Staff for about 14 years before heading up the City Budget Office and Office of Revenue Forecasts and returning as Central Staff director in 2024. A PhD economist who (unlike certain other city staffers) never made a point of his credentials, Noble was a budget expert and diplomat, one reason he was able to last in high-level city positions as council members and mayors came and went.

Whitson, similarly, is part of the deep state (complimentary) that keeps the city running. He oversaw the adoption of Phase 1 of former mayor Harrell’s “One Seattle” comprehensive plan update, and has worked on all four of the city’s comp plan updates since the original plan was adopted in 1994. His new deputy director, Calvin Chow, led the council’s budget process last year. Former central staff deputy director Aly Penucci left after more than 11 years at the city to become deputy Whatcom County executive in 2024; she returned as Mayor Katie Wilson’s budget director this year.

City Council, Courts, King County

Sex Worker Advocates Demand Action from the City After Prosecutors’ Dehumanizing Presentation

 

Amber, from Green Light Project, and Emi Koyoma, from the Coalition for Rights & Safety for People in the Sex Trade, testify at City Council Tuesday.

By Erica C. Barnett

Advocates for sex workers, activated by a brutal, dehumanizing presentation the King County Prosecutor’s Office delivered to the city council’s public safety committee about sex trafficking, are demanding action from the city and county to rectify the harm done by past actions and statements about sex work and trafficking.

As PubliCola reported, the prosecutors, who were trying to drum up support for a proposed state law that would make it a felony to pay another person for sex. The presentation included identifiable photos of tortured, brutalized women; a lurid recitation of the objects an anonymous victim said had been inserted into her by force; misogynistic quotes about sex workers from an unidentified online forum; and graphic descriptions of rape and violence against women.

The prosecutors also claimed that every sex worker who opposed further criminalizing sex work had been a victim of childhood abuse, and was therefore speaking against their own true interests because of trauma.

In a letter to the council, which three advocates read aloud at Tuesday’s council meeting, a group of advocates for sex workers, survivors, and people in the sex trade made five demands:

• An acknowledgement from the city of the “selective and exploitative uses of survivor stories, voices, and images” by the committee and the prosecutor’s office.

• An examination of the city and county’s policies and trainings, if any, on “trauma-informed, and non-exploitative uses of survivor voices and stories.”

• An analysis by the city’s Office of Civil Rights on “existing and potential policy approaches to reducing violence and exploitation in the sex trade as well as a review of best practices for incorporating diverse voices of survivors, sex workers, and people in the sex trade while minimizing re-traumatization.”

• Strategies to include more perspectives from people with lived experience of sex work in future policy conversations, and to fund peer-led groups that provide services to survivors and sex workers without requiring that they collaborate with law enforcement

• A public safety committee meeting “dedicated to a presentation about human rights-based, noncarceral, pro-sex worker approach to empower survivors, sex workers, and people in the sex trade and combat violence, abuse, and exploitation within the sex trade.”

PubliCola is supported entirely by readers like you.
CLICK BELOW to become a one-time or monthly contributor.

Support PubliCola

The organization also provide a list of several quotes from council members during the presentation along with the derogatory messages they communicated. One was a comment from committee chair Bob Kettle aimed at people who criticize the city’s purely punitive response to the sex trade.

Kettle said that “so many women in our city,” as well as “the chattering classes,” are hypocrites because they criticize Jeffrey Epstein but don’t support carceral strategies like sending sex buyers to prison. “These people, the people come in here and yell at us because when we’re trying to go in after the men, but we’re the target. We as a city need to stop, take a deep breath, and think about that,” Kettle said.

On Monday, the Seattle Women’s Commission sent a letter to the city’s Office of Civil Rights with a list of their own requests, including a public statement from OCR Director Derrick Wheeler-Smith calling on the city to “honor and include diverse perspectives in all Civil Rights Work,” including work on behalf of sex workers, survivors, and people in the sex trade.

As we reported on Monday, the prosecutors’ presentation contributed to efforts in the state legislature to roll back the legislation the two county prosecutors were advocating for, removing the first-strike felony provision and incorporating more humanizing language into the proposal. The changes led supporters of the original bill to mutiny, calling the new version—which still increases paying for sex to a gross misdemeanor for the first two offenses, and a felony for the third—inadequate to deter people from paying for sex.

legislature, Women

Bill Targeting Sex Buyers Would No Longer Result in Immediate Felony Charges

But an attempt to decriminalize sex work—another component of the “Nordic model”—failed.

By Erica C. Barnett

State legislation that would have made it a first-strike felony, rather than a misdemeanor, to pay another person for sex or “sexual contact” has gone through several revisions since late January, when King County prosecutors gave a lurid, exploitative presentation to the Seattle City Council in an effort to drum up support for the bill. Last week, the proposal passed out of a House committee on a contentious 5-4 vote; from there, it faces an uphill battle in its current form.

In its original iteration, the legislation—sponsored by Democrats Chris Stearns (D-47, Auburn) and Lauren Davis (D-32, North Seattle)—would have made it a Class C felony, punishable by up to five years in prison and a fine of up to $10,000, to pay another person for sex. The bill would have also changed the term “patronizing a prostitute” to “commercial sexual exploitation”—the same term used, incidentally, in Seattle’s anti-prostitution laws.

However, after blowback from the county prosecutors’ presentation drew new attention to the bill, the proposal underwent a transformation, including a proposal from Rep. Tarra Simmons (D-23, Bremerton) that would have decriminalized sex work statewide.

Simmons called decriminalization a necessary component of the so-called “Nordic model,” a widely adopted approach that criminalizes sex buyers in an attempt to eliminate demand.

“I was trafficked as a young girl,” Simmons said. “If you want to get to exploitation and get to trafficking and to solve the issue and to protect the victims, you have to do both—not just increase penalties, but allow the victims to be victims and not be criminalized.”

Decriminalization went a step too far for other House Democrats, but the version that passed out of the House Community Safety Committee last week does include some significant changes from the original proposal.

First, it raises the crime of patronizing a sex worker to a gross misdemeanor for the first two offenses, rather than a felony; the third time, it becomes a felony, as in the original version. The amended bill also replaces the phrase “commercial sexual exploitation” with the more neutral term “patronizing a person for prostitution.”

Under the bill, sex work would remain illegal, but sex workers would get two shots at “services”—which Simmons said might include job training, treatment, and counseling—before they’re prosecuted for prostitution, a misdemeanor.

PubliCola is supported entirely by readers like you.
CLICK BELOW to become a one-time or monthly contributor.

Support PubliCola

During last week’s committee meeting, Rep. Davis argued that by not raising the crime of paying for sex to a first-strike felony (that is, by increasing it from a misdemeanor to a gross misdemeanor for the first two offenses) will only result in more women being exploited and trafficked.

“These women are not entrepreneurs. The term ‘sex work’ implies volition,” Davis said.

“Representing North Aurora. I’ve learned some things,” Davis continued. “There’s a kind of pimp called a gorilla pimp. Gorilla pimps dominate their victims by force and violence. I know of a gorilla pimp who took razor blades to his victim’s back, and another who had his victim mauled by dogs.” In her district, which includes Shoreline, street sex work starts at the Seattle city line, she said, because “there’s no enforcement” of anti-prostitution laws in Seattle. (Other theories include a relative lack of cheap motels and significantly better street design north of 145th.)

Charging sex buyers with a gross misdemeanor, rather than a felony, would “also make it easier for pimps to recruit, because there’s no legal liability, there’s no downside,” Davis said. This is a confusing claim: Promoting prostitution—being a pimp—is a Class B felony, punishable by up to ten years in prison, which seems like a pretty big potential downside. Building a case against a trafficker or pimp is harder and more time-consuming than doing the kind of quick-hit sting operations favored by police departments, however.

Davis pointed out that there’s actually a third part of the Nordic model—ample, freely available services, including treatment and housing, none of which are funded through the amended bill. Simmons agreed that the state should fund more services for trafficking victims, and said she’d like to start with more funding for peer support—people with direct experience in the sex trade who can talk to people who are being exploited and “hold their hand and take them to safety” away from their traffickers and pimps.

“I’ve never seen problems solved through increasing penalties,” Simmons said. “I don’t think johns are going to stop and think, ‘This is gonna be two days in jail [versus] a month in jail.’ They’re not thinking about that.”

Rep. Brian Burnett (R-12, Wenatchee) said his own daughter was trafficked and “raped literally thousands of times over the course of eight or nine years.” As the only trafficking survivor on the panel, though, Simmons said she “felt invisible a lot of times.”

“I also felt like they were missing the point of helping the victims and survivors,” Simmons said. “They’re not going to accept help from law enforcement, because they’re going to run.”

This story originally misattributed Rep. Burnett’s comment to Rep. Stearns. We regret the error.