The council called in two top police officials to subdue a small group of people who wanted to give public comment against the proposals.

By Erica C. Barnett

When then-King County Prosecutor Norm Maleng first proposed Stay Out of Drug Areas (SODA)—parts of town from which people accused of drug-related crimes, including use and possession, could be banned—in 1990, city leaders and the Seattle Times hailed the innovation as a solution to “open-air drug dealing,” particularly in an area centered around Pike Street and Third Avenue downtown.

At the time, crack was the drug most people were using in public, and supporters of the new banishment zones, located in neighborhoods across the city, said they would disrupt drug activity and reduce problematic drug use by making crack less available; addicts, the idea went, would stop smoking so much crack if the city made it harder to get by arresting people for going inside the new “drug areas.”

At the same time, supporters of the banishment areas—which also included Stay Out of Area of Prostitution, or SOAP, zones—were explicit that the primary goal was to “clean up” neighborhoods where homeowners said they were frightened and disgusted at the sight of sex workers and drug users. One neighborhood activist from the Denny Regrade area told the Seattle Times in 1992 that she was glad the orders would prevent “a very small number of people to control our lives”; a police officer added that that the program was successful because drug users and sex workers were “going somewhere else.”

Over time, the crack epidemic waned and the drugs causing successive waves of SODA orders changed, from Oxycontin to heroin to meth. Research has shown that the orders did not reduce drug use or sex work, but they did make the lives of drug users and sex workers harder, by physically banning them from areas in which they used to access services and by turning them into hunted people who could be, and were, jailed when they were caught simply being inside the areas from which they were banished. Eventually, some 25 years after the first SODA orders, the city largely abandoned the experiment, concluding on the basis of decades of evidence that it hadn’t worked.

On Tuesday, a majority of the Seattle City Council voted to start the cycle over again, by legislatively creating six new banishment zones for drug offenders and one for clients of sex workers and pimps. The new SODA areas, approved by the council’s public safety committee in a 5-0 vote, will include parts of Belltown, downtown around Third and Pine, Pioneer Square, Capitol Hill, the University District, and the Chinatown/International District; anyone accused of violating the city’s misdemeanor drug law, which bans people from using or possessing illegal drugs in public, may be subject to a ban—even if they are never convicted of a violation.

The new SOAP zone, which will stretch several blocks to the east and west of Aurora Avenue North from 85th to 145th Street, is included in legislation that will also reinstate a repealed “prostitution loitering” law that will allow police to arrest people for engaging in behavior that, according to the legislation, suggests they are sex workers, such as waving at people, repeatedly “engag[ing] passersby in conversation,” or asking someone if they are a police officer. The law will make it significantly easier for police to arrest sex workers and men attempting to buy sex; under current law, undercover cops must obtain a verbal agreement to trade money for sex before they can make an arrest.

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Council members added five new drug areas to the bill, each arguing that a particular spot in their council district was especially dangerous and that this danger would be fixed by creating a no-go zone for drug users; although the bill explicitly refers to the misdemeanor drug law, which targets users, many council members suggested it would target a completely separate group of “dealers” who were preying on addicts. In reality, many drug users sell drugs as a form of subsistence income.

Arguing for a new SODA area encompassing 21 blocks of Capitol Hill, including all of Cal Anderson Park, for example, Councilmember Joy Hollingsworth said, “the outdoor drug consumption [in the area] has been incredibly unsafe. It is a severe hazard and has created an incredibly dangerous environment for our community.”

Maritza Rivera, supporting a SODA zone encompassing 18 blocks around University Way NE, said she had grown up in an “inner-city neighborhood” where, as a child, she had to “walk every day through those areas, constantly fearing for being caught in the crossfire between between the drug dealers … in my neighborhood.” The new SODA area on the Ave, she said, would disrupt a similarly dangerous situation there.

And Rob Saka, adding a new SODA zone in Pioneer Square, said, “the headline for this piece of legislation is clear, and let it be known from the rooftops, Seattle is no longer a safe place, a safe space to do your dirt. It’s no longer a tolerable, permissive place where pushers and drug dealers can come and take advantage and exploit our most vulnerable residents and neighbors suffering from debilitating behavioral health crisis and drug addiction challenges.”

Saka also inadvertently acknowledged the expansionary nature of SODA zones, noting that with new SODA areas to the east and west of Pioneer Square, there would be a “spillover effect” unless Pioneer Square was also made off-limits to drug users.

As PubliCola has reported, SODA and SOAP zones were not effective in improving the lives of the people they targeted (by reducing addiction, for example), or eliminating drug use and sex work in the areas where they were in effect. Instead, drug users and sex workers generally returned to the areas from which they were banished, dodging police or facing arrest again and again.

Nonetheless, Council President Sara Nelson said it was incorrect to say these zones didn’t work in the past, because according to a council central staff report, between 2006 and 2009, “defendants in 83 percent of SODA cases did not violate their orders, and 58 percent did not commit another drug offense.”

Although Nelson suggested that people who were banished from SODA areas stopped going into those areas and ceased using drugs, it is far more likely—according to research by academic Katherine Beckett into the impacts the bans had on the people they targeted—that during those years, only 17 percent of people were caught inside the areas from which they were banned. Back then, SODA areas only applied to felonies, and a relatively small number of people faced prosecution—the 58 percent of people who “did not commit another drug offense” represent just 121 people prosecuted for felony drug offenses who were subject to SODA order, a tiny sample that says nothing about overall drug use in the city.

Speaking in favor of her SOAP zone proposal, Councilmember Cathy Moore said she had heard repeatedly from constituents that sex workers were a threat to their safety, including “constituents whose elderly parents were actually assaulted” by sex workers, that “school children” were being “solicited” by sex workers on their way to and from school, and that “a tremendous amount of violence,” robberies, and assaults in her district, including shootings, have “truly been fueled by the sex trade.”

This, like the rhetoric about drug use, is a common refrain in Seattle’s history; residents near Aurora have blamed sex workers for crime in the area since at least the late 1960s, when the city began pushing sex workers out of downtown, and successive crackdowns, including thousands of arrests for prostitution loitering and SOAP order violations, have failed to eliminate the sex trade in the area.

The council’s votes for the new banishment areas came after an hour and a half of public comment, most of it opposed to the two proposals, which committee chair Bob Kettle cut off in the interest of “time.”

More than 100 people had signed up to speak, and comments were already reduced from the standard two minutes to 60 seconds, strictly enforced—public commenters, including Alison Eisinger of the Seattle/King County Coalition on Homelessness and King County Department of Public Defense director Anita Khandelwal, were cut off mid-word, as if the council couldn’t abide letting a single person finish their sentence. Kettle’s decision to cut off public comment prompted an entirely predictable outburst of anger from the crowd, which demanded that the council listen to the remaining people who had taken time out of their days to give feedback to their elected representatives.

Ironically, Kettle sent out an email before the meeting encouraging people to show up and comment on the legislation; he may have assumed that the response to his request would be a groundswell of supportive comments, rather than the overwhelming opposition to both laws the council has heard in public comment so far.

Faced with negative feedback, the council has repeatedly shut down public comments, marching off the dais en masse and retreating to their offices for recesses that typically last longer than it would have taken to let people speak.  Yesterday was no exception. As people began to yell things like “shame!” “this is going to exacerbate the problem!” and “You wouldn’t listen to all the people!,” Kettle, Council President Sara Nelson, and Councilmember Joy Hollingsworth shouted “point of order!” and accused the crowd of being “disruptive” and violating council rules.

After calling out “security!” several times, Kettle summoned the captain of SPD’s West Precinct, Steve Strand, and Assistant Police Chief Thomas Mahaffey, along with several other officers, to deal with with a small group of stragglers who continued to demand that the council let them speak.

Moore went so far as to suggest that sex workers who showed up to explain how the bill would impact them, among others who spoke in opposition to her bill, were “delegitimizing” the experiences of women who were trafficked, “which is very, very traumatizing in itself.” And Hollingsworth said members of the public who continued to speak were being disrespectful and preventing people with actual “lived experience” from delivering a planned presentation—never mind that many of the speakers who opposed the bill were people who took the risky step of identifying themselves as sex workers in a very public forum.

The “people with lived experience” Hollingsworth was referring to turned out to be two representatives from a one-year-old group called The More We Love run by Kirkland mortgage broker Kristine Moreland, plus a sex trafficking consultant who supports Moore’s bill.

PubliCola has extensively covered Moreland’s strange rise to prominence, from a volunteer with the Union Gospel Mission to the owner-operator of The More We Love, originally a private business offering encampment “sweeps” at $515 per person removed, or $20,000 for a “40-person sweep.” Earlier this year, Burien City Manager Adolfo Bailon ended the city’s longstanding contract with REACH, an established outreach organization, and transferred their million-dollar contract to The More We Love and Moreland, who has claimed—without offering evidence—to be more successful than any organization in Burien’s history at housing and providing services to unsheltered people.

Lately, Moreland has been positioning herself as an expert on getting women out of the sex trade, and now refers to The More We Love as a “direct service provider that works with commercially exploited people.” Moreland’s rebrand has apparently convinced the Seattle City Council; Moore has invited Moreland and people affiliated with The More We Love to council chambers twice to give extensive presentations, and has described Moreland—who previously volunteered with Real Escape from the Sex Trade (REST)—as an expert on the sex trade.

Moore has repeatedly said she wants to proposed funding for a “receiving center” for women wanting to escape sex trafficking—the carrot to go along with the stick of prosecutions and jail for people caught “loitering” on Aurora. Moreland’s group, conveniently enough, has proposed just such a receiving center, which would “offer transitional housing to survivors” of sex work, according to the Federal Way Mirror. All they need is for money to begin flowing from some new government source—like, say, the City of Seattle.