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 The council also repealed a similar law banning “drug loitering.”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.”
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.
We had SOAP laws for decades in Seattle. Women and men involved in street prostitution moved out of the SOAP area, and right into another area, sometimes just one block over. As an outreach worker in the 80’s and 90’s, we just saw the active neighborhoods shift — lower Aurora, Yesler, International District, Pac Hwy, Beacon Hill, Rainier Ave, downtown, etc. Before enacting legislation that’s already been tried (and failed), I hope the council will do their research — speak to advocates at Organization for Prostitute Survivors and detectives that worked in Vice twenty years ago. SOAP laws will simply result in a new strip (or multiple strips); SOAP laws will not disrupt trafficking.
Seems like the point, just push troubles to a different neighborhood.
Is this “Whack a Mole”? Perhaps. But it beats the hell out of letting this particular molehill grow into a mountain the way it has been allowed to.
But this council LOVES to do things that have A.) already been done and B.) failed and C.) then been studied in great detail as to why those things failed. It won’t stop them this time and it won’t stop them in the future because almost everyone on this council isn’t ACTUALLY a democrat and they care more about their property values and rich folks than actually helping the people in this city who need help and then solving problems.
Plus, how many council meetings have been wasted just getting those dorks up to speed on how city government works?
I like the idea of looking at the inequality of the neighborhoods in Seattle and exploring how much these already illegal activities are present there. It might also be interesting to look how the area where violence now seems to be more commonplace has been expanding or shifting along Aurora. If I see a shooting death headline, I immediately wonder if it was Licton Springs or downtown. Occasionally now in Lake City (also Cathy Moore’s area…), but there are a few places where this stuff is common.
Seattle has never been that peaceful or idyllic from all I have experienced and read. In a recent bit on one of the comedy/commentary shows, everyone who talked about the “good old days” was eventually revealed to be thinking back to when they about 10…old enough to be independent but not expected to have any adult responsibilities. That’s what comes to mind when I hear old mossbacks talk about how “it didn’t use to be like this.” Right.…here in the city that got Ray Charles hooked on heroin, where Mary Ellen Mark made a compelling photo book about teen prostitutes 40 years ago.
None of this is new. It’s worse now because Seattle’s increasingly libertarian politics — where property rights outweigh human rights — are making it worse. The establishment doesn’t care about people unless they are impacting property values.
No it hasn’t. There are a lot of (or maybe just several?) hysterical people who seem to think crime never happened in Seattle until those nasty progressives introduced it. In reality crime levels in the city are far, far! lower than in decades past. I’ve lived here my whole life and there has always been prostitution on Aurora Ave, so these people who seem to seem like they need a fainting couch over it (oh, the “trauma”) seem to be tacking back and forth between being liars and a state of arrogant and willful ignorance.
These people are just happy with the council who has decided to give poor people a pay cut so their rich donors can get the policies they want. One of the things they want are cops, cops, and more cops, for every problem there’s a cop solution and if there isn’t a cop solution then it isn’t a problem. So don’t complain about it because The Yeller (aka Cathy Moore, above) will have you arrested, and then promptly scream at Tammy Morales over it.
I’ve also lived here all my life and just off Aurora since mid 70’s, and I don’t share your opinion. Yes, prostitution has always been there, but it has ebbed and flowed. This flow, however, is the e worst and most protracted in my experience. Further, I have never seen or heard or read about the gunplay going on now. Like you, I blame the former (and some current) Council members for enabling this situation. I don’t know where you live,but suspect you may not live as close to this mess as some of us. I hope you never do.
“Like you, I blame the former (and some current) Council members for enabling this situation. I don’t know where you live,but suspect you may not live as close to this mess as some of us. I hope you never do.”
No, I live in the south end, where people don’t experience “trauma” from the presence of the world’s oldest profession. We have much more practical concerns down here. What about the cost of living? Something tells me your council will not do anything but focus on these boutique social problems the wealthy would rather not have to see, rather than lift a finger over such existential problems, such as high rent (housing) high cost of food and other life necessities, which are experienced by 100% of the non-wealthy.
Let me be blunt with you whiners: you want sympathy for your boutique streetwalker-phobia then you have to collar your “moderate” city council and prevent them from killing minimum wages for a start. But that’s the problem, even those who call themselves “moderates” aren’t willing to compromise on what their funders demand. Nobody else matters other than the funders who got them into office, a curious (though obvious) problem with high-dollar American democracy.
Oh yeah, and cops cops cops cops cops, more cops with less accountability, more murdering by city officials solves any problem the city has. /sarc
Oh, one thing I forgot: for you street walker-phobics. If you want to see less street walkers in your area, then how about more jobs that pay a living wage? That wouldn’t even cost as much as hiring a bunch of cops at six figures, which the “moderate” city council, under direction of their donors, has made its top priority.
Jobs that pay adequately enough to afford the cost of living in the city would do more to remove the sights wealthy people are afraid to see than any amount of cops will ever do.
But of course the “moderates” are instead doing their best to lower the minimum wage, and any “moderation” over these issues are out of the question. Following that, more cops, cops, cops for any problem. The rich neighborhoods are “traumatized,” after all.
Ah, now I get it: you’re a “sex worker” and you’re defending your opportunity to make a living because _____ enter your perceived persecutor(s), have deprived you of a way to make what you consider to be a reasonable living. Well, while I sympathize with your anger and despair, having come from a deprived background myself, I respectfully suggest you spend your energies finding ways to better your situation rather than trolling people whose background you don’t know for sharing opinions with which you don’t agree. I wish you well.
I’ll be blunt with you, kid. You’re a smug little know-it-all rube who doesn’t have to live with the real-world consequences of the policies you advocate for.
Grow the fuck up.
PS – if I can easily tell who the pimps are in the Lowe’s and Krispy Creme parking lots so can the SPD. Start by busting them.
Oh none of this is new? What complete and utter bullshit. Criminals stepping out of alleys with machine pistols, spraying bullets indiscriminately down residential streets, was not happening 10 years ago, let along 50. But it IS happening now, leaving me hugging trembling traumatized tenants on 101st St after a bullet flew through their kitchen window.
This is denial of reality: past criminalization practices were in fact better than being ‘kind’ to prostitutes by leaving them at the mercy of their violent pimps who have used the council’s ‘hands-off’ policy to not worry about where they fire their guns.
To say that reverting to criminalization ‘has been tried before, it will just move somewhere else’ is so glib and thoughtless it is staggering. Broaden your fucking perspective to include your neighbors fearing for their lives. Go into your kitchen, and imagine a bullet coming through the window at your eye level.
I can appreciate that you want to bring attention to the plight of the sex workers and people of color involved in the sex trade. However, this article does not include the perspective of the residents in this area, including children, who are being traumatized by the surge of gun violence along Aurora Ave.
There was a shooting on Dayton and 112th at 3:02pm, just as students were released from school one block away. My daughter, who all too often hears gunshots, was disturbed to also hear the scream of the female victim at midnight on July 13th.
There are plenty of videos of the gun battles that occurred on 101st just off of Aurora in the local news.
I was with my 11 year old daughter when a man driving a Rolls Royce convertible slowly drove by leering at us. I would bet this man was a pimp. I can’t let my children walk freely in our neighborhood.
Our city needs to take action to protect our residents and our children. Doing nothing is not an option. It might not be perfect. But, steps need to be taken. Our children deserve better!
I hate to break it to you but SODA zones and more cops isn’t going to make this stuff go away. Better jobs, access to housing and social services, and feeling like the system actually cares about you as a citizen no matter your back ground (unlike current Seattle leadership which actually seems to only care about Tesla owners and tech workers) will go a long way to solving these problems. But that takes smarter taxation of citizens and it takes people having empathy and sympathy as opposed to just throwing all the dirty poor drug using whores in jail. Also, maybe instead of planting an “In this house” sign in your yard/window/whatever you could go out there and I dunno… do something to make your city a better place instead of just talking shit on a message board (for example, I started coaching in my neighborhood and it’s been an amazing experience… I suggest something along those lines).
So why are you not banging on the council’s door trying to get them to arrest people shooting guns? Because it’s easier to push women to another neighborhood and arrest them for being in public than it is to intervene in gun violence.
I live in the area and can give a high level answer to where we think the shootings come from and why:
We are extremely confident that most of the shootings are a result of pimps fighting for territory due to a combination of car tracking, pimps’ social media, conversations with police, and conversations with organizations like REST and The More We Love.
There are other shootings that we know are not the result of this, like the somewhat recent one at the Aurora and 105th gas station, which was likely related to drugs based on the people involved and the location.
—
Separately, I wanted to speak “sex work is work”. Sex work is work and historically most of the women working on Aurora were local women working. Due to a combination of things like FOSTA-SESTA, the previous loitering law being repealed, and a couple motels being shut down, many of the local women if not all of them have been pushed out by pimps or doing human trafficking. — Sex work is work and human trafficking is slavery. Putting victims in jail does not help them. Letting human trafficking be a more profitable business, so that more people get trafficked, does not help them either.
I own a rental duplex on 101st St on Aurora. Last month my tenant had a bullet come through the kitchen window and bury itself in the wall next to their refrigerator, at head height.
When I bought the property as part of our retirement plan in 2014, it was a peaceful neighborhood. Prostitution was a furtive business that did not affect surrounding neighborhoods.
Now we have men with machine pistols racing up the street, shooting at each other and spraying bullets everywhere. I can send you video if you like.
Now we have people parking in front of the house to have sex.
Now we have prostitutes threatening my tenants to ‘pop them’, and slashing their tires if they say anything to them.
It is so stupid, as justification for legalizing prostitution, to say that criminalization affects disproportionate people of color. Is anyone claiming that legalization has changed the proportion of people of color involved? Anyone ‘measuring’ to see if the action taken affected ‘the problem’? Proportions the same for a greater number of exploited women means you have harmed these women, not helped them.
I say the action taken to mitigate a perceived injustice has had no effect on that injustice. Yet the injustice is still being cited in articles like this, as justification of the action. Take responsibility for the mistake and reverse it, rather than leaving your head so far up your back side. So tired of actions taken that sound kind hearted, but have zero thought or follow through after implementation, despite the cruel reality of the results.
See if you can follow this.
Legalization has increased the scale of the activity, leading to greater aggregate money involved.
The increased profits in turn have attracted greater numbers of criminals.
The criminals prey on the women, trafficking and enslaving even more women.
The increased number of criminals competing for dominance leads to more guns and bullets flying at neighboring homes and businesses.
Again, if you want the video, or a picture of the kitchen window with a bullet hole in it, let me know.
I’m sure you’re offering a very affordable market rate for your rental property.
Also, congrats on actually being able to retire.
Now I’d say why don’t you go out there and argue for more money to be spent on education and after school programs and all that sort of stuff that none of you boomers seem to want to actually pay for, which may… wait for it… in the long run help alleviate these problems you’re so upset about.
Arguing for affordable housing might help alleviate those problems as well. But I’m sure you already know that given your landlord status.
Sadly, it appears that all the taxes we’ve paid for decades for education at least have been wasted on the likes of you
Yes I am offering a below market rates to my two tenants, in one unit a mom and her partner, and in the other her daughter and her partner. Sorry if my concern for their safety is invalidated in your mind because I’m they’re landlord.
I am actually providing a tiny bit of affordable housing in the city. Isn’t that what you want? But I’m the bad guy?
So easy to spout stereotypes about what I must believe because of some demographic bucket you’ve made up and dropped me into, extrapolating that I must be an asshole that doesn’t care about you or anyone else.
I have two kids and 5 grandkids in this city, and I do care what kind of city they live in now and in the future.
You want to be able to retire? Get a partner, both of you work and save 20% of what you make for 40 years. Nobody gave us a fucking thing.
I could throw stereotype based insults back, but I don’t know anything about you.
So arrest and restrict the women. Gotcha.
Why aren’t you pushing for your beloved cops to do something about the guys with guns, rather than stacking criminal charges on the women?
When I was a stupid teenager, I stole some underwear from a downtown department store. I was caught and arrested. Life derailed for stealing underwear. It was beyond humiliating and a huge wake-up call.
Did I spend time in prison? No. I was assigned a case worker who explained the facts of life to me, the consequences of recurrence (real jail) and the benefits of not being a dumb-ass again. It was a ‘point of inflection.’
We need to provide something like that to these women.
And for those that keep saying it is cruel to ‘just throw these poor women in jail,’ I sincerely ask that you re-direct your energy into getting the city to provide them with real, tangible alternatives to jail.
Even if the setting for presenting those alternatives is after them being placed under arrest. It doesn’t have to mean jail. It doesn’t have to mean just catch and release, either.
I believe that our city government is not doing that simply because, (whine, wringing of hands) it’s just so hard to figure out how to actually do stuff, you know? Easier to just decriminalize, make bold empathetic statements with no followthrough, then disappear without taking responsibility for the collateral damage to neighboring citizens.
That is not what we’re paying our city government for. We’re paying them to provide services, services even to our citizens working as prostitutes.
Well, I applaud this as a start, but the Stay Out of Prostitution Zone must be expanded at the south end to the north end of the Aurora bridge. I live several blocks south of 85th and just off Aurora. I had a used waterbed mattress and liner out for a special garbage collection 2 days ago and was startled to see a pretty young woman with bleached blonde hair wearing a sweater that just covered her butt cheeks, a couple of pairs of fishnet and other patterned stockings, and a pair of taxicab yellow 5″ stillettos with black heels and toes. Her “profession” could hardly have been more obvious unless she’d had a john with her. She was making a mess unfolding the mattress and liner. I opened my door and asked her what she was doing. She responded something to the effect that she thought the stuff was for free. I told her it was waiting to be collected but she was welcome to take it if she wanted, but she should know the mattress had a small leak and that’s why I was throwing it out. She started to leave at that point and I told her to wait, that she needed to put those things back neatly the way she found them. She kind of halfheartedly attempted this but didn’t do much good, so I told her to just leave it and go away, and not to return.
If the SOPZ or whatever the right acronym would be was in effect from the north end of the Aurora bridge, I might have had some success getting someone in LE or social services to respond. Prostitutes like the alley behind the Mosaic Church at the corner of 77th. Even though the church put night lights out there, the intersecting alley running perpendicular is mostly dark at night and the lights don’t seem much of a deterent regardless.
I see plenty of stuff moving south and we have the reports of gunfire moving south as well. For now, they’d be included in the proposed zone, but that would just drive the problem closer to me and my neighbors. Not good enough, but again,, I appreciate that Moore is trying to do something at least. I’m Dan Strauss’ constitutent and if it’s not Ballard and/or doesn’t offer any opportunity to appear to be doing something down there when he’s really just trolling for attention, he doesn’t respond or appear to have any interest in constiutents close to Aurora, unless perhaps they’re developers or want to site yet another housing block for damaged people,the very ones the criminals like to prey on, and like to cruise our neighborhoods for theft opportunities while they’re at it.
Ms. Barnett, I’d sure love to see you dig up how many of these types of housing there are in this whole Aurora area, how many people they house, and how long they’ve been there. I’ve asked Strauss’ office and gotten crickets – the same ones I always get if I choose to waste my time trying to communicate with him. I’ve asked the papers and TVs to investigate this, too, but no one’s biting. My contention is that this area is being used as a dumping ground for folks with difficulties of various types that make them easy prey for the criminals. I’d like to know a comparison for here with similar stats for neighborhoods like, say, Laurelhurst, Broadmoor, Madison Park…I’m sure you get the idea.
For that matter, it would be great to find out how those areas are able to keep mass transit minimized since availability of it seems to be one driver for siting the housing for troubled folks. So if those neighborhoods have less transit they escape what so many of the rest of us are getting stuck with.
Thanks!
Inducing the potentially highest taxpayers to despise “mass transit” (is that a bus with a priest?) is a BRILLIANT idea!
Oh shut the hell up. Someone informs us of her attempts to engage with city government and how she is ignored, and you ridicule her for… I don’t know what. You’re saying she didn’t phrase her answer in the form of a question or something, in proper Seattle bureaucracy speak? Listen to what she’s saying.
That’s nothing new. Up to the 70s there was no bus from the U District to downtown because Roanoke Park et al. didn’t want the riffraff to have easy access.
I can appreciate that you want to bring attention to the plight of the sex workers and people of color involved in the sex trade. However, this article does not include the perspective of the residents in this area, including children, who are being traumatized by the surge of gun violence along Aurora Ave. I was with my 11 year old daughter when a man driving a Rolls Royce convertible slowly drove by leering at us. I would bet this man was a pimp. I can’t let my children walk freely in our neighborhood. There was a shooting on Dayton and 112th at 3:02pm, just as students were released from school on block away. My daughter, who all too often hears gunshots, was disturbed to also hear the scream of the female victim at midnight on July 13th. Our city needs to take action to protect our residents and our children. Doing nothing is not an option. It might not be perfect. But, steps need to be taken. Our children deserve better!