1. Seattle Police Chief Shon Barnes, responding to a question from PubliCola, said the police department does not plan to slow down hiring, despite a city council presentation this week that concluded, “SPD may need to slow hiring to live within its budget” because the speed at which it’s hiring new officers is outpacing the department’s spending capacity.
“I have not been notified that the police department will slow down on our current hiring plan for this year. We’re moving forward,” Barnes said. “I think we all share [the belief] that we need more police officers, but we also understand the constraints of a budget, and until I hear anything differently, we’re going to continue moving forward.”
A planned briefing of the council’s public safety committee, which was postponed due to time constraints earlier this week, found that SPD hiring will outpace the department’s budget by a projected $1.7 million this year. Recruitment has been up ever since a new police contract raised starting salaries, after training, to $126,000 last year, and the number of highly paid late-career officers leaving the department has declined. SPD is on pace to have just under 1,200 officers by the end of the year.
Mayor Katie Wilson has asked all city departments to come up with cuts of 5 to 10 percent to help close a budget gap of at least $175 million. The police department, whose nearly-$500 million budget is by far the city’s biggest general-fund obligation, was reportedly asked to come up with $20 million in potential cuts.
2. Barnes made his comments during an announcement about the city’s latest efforts to address gun violence and sex trafficking on Aurora Ave. N. City Attorney Erika Evans announced she would use Extreme Risk Protection Orders, a tool typically used to take guns away from domestic violence offenders, to remove guns from people accused of committing gun-related crimes, whether or not they have been convicted. (Violent gun-related offenses are typically prosecuted by the King County Prosecutor.) Evans also said she would seek funding for a full-time prosecutor to pursue the orders.
At the same press conference, Mayor Katie Wilson announced the Seattle Department of Transportation will install barriers on four streets that intersect with Aurora Ave. N to block traffic from getting through; residents who have demanded the city do something about increasing gun violence in the area have installed makeshift barricades in recent weeks.
City Attorney Evans broke with council members on one key issue, saying that she did not believe banishing men who pay for sex from the area around Aurora, which is designated as the city’s Stay Out of Areas of Prostitution (SOAP) zone, are an effective way to protect women and girls from pimps and traffickers. (Former Councilmember Cathy Moore, who sponsored the SOAP legislation, then skedaddled off the council, was in the audience for yesterday’s event.)
Noting that the city has had SOAP orders off and on for 30 years, Evans said, “If they were effective, Aurora and other areas of Seattle, including Little Saigon, would be safe, and they’re not. … SOAP orders don’t work. ERPO orders work.”
3. The press conference, which took place on the same day Wilson announced internally that she was reorganizing her office and that her communications director, Seferiana Day, was leaving, featured some internal drama of its own. According to sources, councilmembers frustrated with what they viewed as inaction on Aurora planned to hold their own press conference without Wilson at which they would criticize her lack of action on gun violence and sex trafficking in the area.
After a flurry of discussions, the mayor and council agreed to hold the press conference in the awkward, narrow space outside council chambers, rather than outside Wilson’s office. Councilmembers have repeatedly refused to participate in the mayor’s press conferences, despite being invited—an indication that council-mayor relations still have a long way to go after some dramatic early missteps by the Wilson administration.
LOL, street prostitution has nothing to do with economic conditions just like street homelessness has nothing to do with housing prices. Both are the direct result of unabated drug abuse. Lock up dealers. Force users into treatment, against their will if necessary. And after a long while, we will see street prostitution and homelessness largely disappear.
I think there is a data/evidence gap between certain centrist-right-wing council members (Kettle, Rivera, Hollingsworth) and the City Attorney’s Office. ALL public policy must be data driven and evidence-based, and it is peculiar that these three council members are ignoring the data when it comes to Aurora but then cling to data everywhere else. Smells like bad faith politics.
A politician who is more interested in gaining political power over an issue than the truth will ignore data in favor of rhetoric and hyperbole. Their hope is that the voting public is dumb and not paying attention, and will never look up the data for themselves. The Urban Institute (see link below) did an exhaustive study of underground prostitution in 8 cities, including Seattle, and found that only 10% of cases involved trafficking or coercion. Prostitution involving minors was even less, maybe 1%. Yet, if you listen to Kettle, Rivera, and Hollingsworth, you would think that 100% of the prostitution on Aurora involves minors, sex trafficking, and coercion, not adult women consciously choosing to do this work in the vast majority of cases. These three councilmembers are engaged in a boldfaced, politically-motivated lie.
Erika is right. We have had several decades of SOAP and it doesn’t work, and ERPO is MUCH more effective in dealing with gun violence, which is the recent concern of the neighbors near Aurora. Prostitution is a POVERTY CRIME – these women do not earn enough in a normal job to make ends meet. Punishing Johns dries up demand, and therefore lowers prices for these women (basic economics), making the economic pinch felt by these women much worse. Kettle, Rivera, and Hollingsworth do not address this economic issue at all by offering effective job training for these women at living wage jobs. They just blame the Johns and women like many of the neighbors living there. It’s bad politics, not evidence-based policy and common sense.
Aurora is a known prostitution hot spot for the lowest segment (street prostitution) of the profession. Most of these street prostitutes are people of color who are unable to earn as much online as their white colleagues where the majority of prostitution transactions take place. Yes, there is even racial discrimination in prostitution. SOAP therefore acts as a double-whammy, it punishes black and brown women who are only out there on the street because of online racial discrimination in the sex trade.
Long-term, maybe the Aurora activity can be moved to some industrial area where there are no neighbors. At least that would allow these women who choose to participate in the sex trade at the street level to do so without bothering neighbors. It would also prevent exploitation by certain councilmembers who want to exploit their poverty and racism in the sex trade to get votes from unsuspecting neighbors. And in all instances, if you really care about these women, then put together a serious job-training program that targets them and their needs, and that will result in a living wage job so they don’t have to do this work any more.
https://www.urban.org/research/publication/estimating-size-and-structure-underground-commercial-sex-economy-eight-major-us-cities
You take for granted that living wage jobs will continue to exist. Are you sure about that?
Thank you for your thoughtful post and thank you for posting that link. Do you happen to know of any more recent studies? This one is from 2014.