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said she will introduce legislation reinstating the old law against “prostitution loitering,” which the city council repealed unanimously in 2020 with then-mayor Jenny Durkan’s support.
“The former council repealed the law against loitering for purposes of prostitution, and since that happened we have seen an absolute explosion in sex trafficking,” Moore said.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.”
This meeting was convened by the council member to give residents a forum to talk about crime and violence where they live around Aurora Avenue North. They spoke passionately about the fear they live in from drive by gun battles between pimps, how the police don’t respond when they call, etc.
I own a duplex on 101st St, and had to install bright motion detector lights out front, to chase away people having sex there. One tenant has struggled to pay rent after his car was stuck when a pimp was chasing and shooting at another pimp on the street.
The meeting was not convened to propose re-introducing loitering laws. It came up as a concrete action to address the criminal activity threatening the very lives of the people in the neighborhood.
To boil the meeting down to ‘fascists seeking to punish women who are themselves victims’ is completely irresponsible reporting. All the testimony of what people are facing outside their doors was purged or ignored by this account. So readers cans say, ‘where are your facts about the problem,’ etc.
Do you realize it has been four years since they effectively legalized prostitution, and they are still hiding behind bullshit phrases like “there must be a better solution than throwing people in jail. If you want that, you must be a fascist.”
Yeah, well you’ve had four years to come up with something else, and have completely failed. Repealing the loitering laws was touted as ‘a first step towards a better outcome for these women.’ They failed to say they had no idea what the 2nd or 3rd steps were, and still don’t. And they are aided in getting away with it by biased reporting that denies a voice to the affected citizenry by deleting or ignoring their input.
Fascism is the government doing whatever it wants instead of listening and responding to citizens. Who are the fascists here?
Moore is a fascist.
So, you dudes are ok with trafficking minors. Got it. You’re ok with statutory rape. Got it. You’re ok with keeping people in a horrible cycle of abuse. Got it.
Good for Cathy Moore. Thank gawd she can see the genuine harm this disastrous policy has caused.
Calling out the fact no proof was given that sex trafficking is on the rise means you support sex trafficking. Got it.
You’re objectively pro-crime if you question draconian new laws. It’s a simple mathematical formula that is universally true. /sarc
Sex trafficking is an incredibly serious issue that needs to be addressed. When Councilmember Moore states it’s a growing problem of course she has empirical data that everyone can scrutinize to see the gravity of such a grave offense. *Snort, guffaw, /sarc, etc.*
You could look for empirical data. Or you could watch a video.
https://www.fox13seattle.com/news/pimps-fighting-over-turf-concerned-neighbor-attributes-aurora-drive-by-to-sex-crimes
Hmm, don’t see any human trafficking here….
What an idiot… Trying to criminalize a profession that has more demonstrated success than the council.