Tag: Seattle Municipal Court

Courts, Crime

Revived Community Court Will be Paired With Punitive New “High-Priority” Track for Repeat Offenders

Seattle Municipal Courthouse

By Erica C. Barnett

Seattle City Attorney Erika Evans just announced the launch of a revamped community court for low-level misdemeanor offenders, fulfilling a key promise in her 2025 campaign against then-city attorney Ann Davison, who shut down the therapeutic court in 2023.

At the time, Davison and her allies argued that community court—an alternative to prosecution that connected defendants to services through the Seattle Municipal Court’s Community Resource Center—was ineffective.  Campaigning against Davison, Evans called the decision to end community court a “disaster” and promised to restore it.

The new Connection Court, which will be presided over for the rest of the year by retiring Municipal Court Judge Willie Gregory, is similar to the old community court in a few respects: It’s an alternative to prosecution on low-level misdemeanor charges such as theft and public drug use, and it connects defendants to services through the Community Resource Center, which Evans said will offer more direct connections and “warm hand-offs”  to service providers than it did before.

At the same time, the court now imposes new requirements on defendants, such as mandatory service participation, that make it a much different program than the community court Davison ended—one that Davison herself might have supported. Evans’ press announcement Thursday included supportive quotes from a dozen local leaders, including interim police chief Andre Sayles and Downtown Seattle Association president Jon Scholes, all but one including some reference to “accountability.” According to Sayles, that means “[we] offer a real path forward to those ready to take it, and we hold accountable those who continue to cause harm.”

For participants, the two biggest changes are a requirement that they commit no additional misdemeanors for 90 days—the length of the court’s jurisdiction over each case— and that they prove they’ve participated in two types of services, such as addiction counseling or job training. People who fail to meet either of these requirements—by not showing up at appointments, for example, or by committing another low-level crime—will be sent to mainstream court, where they’ll face criminal prosecution on the original misdemeanor charge along with any additional charges. Anyone with a serious felony conviction in the last 10 years is automatically ineligible for Connections Court, as is anyone who has committed a rape or murder.

Evans told PubliCola the requirements isn’t prescriptive; if someone commits another minor offense, for instance, the city attorney’s office can say, “‘You know what? Let’s give  this participant an opportunity to have that second case also be in community court,'” Evans said. Most people will still be eligible, at this stage, for other diversion programs, such as LEAD. “This just another layer for people to be able to get connected to what they need, one that was not there yesterday.”

Purpose Dignity Action co-director Lisa Daugaard, the architect of the original LEAD diversion program, said she’s reserving judgment about the revived community court. :e should be diverting cases prior to filing of charges whenever appropriate, but if cases need to be filed, it’s good to have a plan for addressing defendants’ needs, using whatever leverage the charge provides,” Daugaard said. “Everything depends on whether the services offered are actually matched to the person’s situation and needs.”

Critics of the new court, including the lawyers who defend indigent clients on misdemeanor charges, say Evans is reducing its potential  by setting up barriers to entry and establishing new hurdles for participants to trip over as they try to comply with the new conditions.

Katie Hurley, special counsel for criminal policy and practice at King County’s Department of Public Defense, said she’s concerned that the services available at the Court Resource Center don’t meaningfully address the conditions that lead people to commit petty crimes in the first place, particularly homelessness. About 30 percent of people fail to show up for municipal court hearings because they don’t have an address to receive court notices, Hurley said, yet “there’s no connection to housing, which is what many people who are prosecuted for low-level behaviors struggle with.”

“The whole idea behind Connection Court is that it’s supposed to be expansive and allow these lower-level offenses to receive a quicker, more effective response because we know that the current system has failed,” Hurley said. “Unfortunately, it’s going to exclude precisely the type of folks who should be benefiting from a Connection Court response, which is people who’ve been failed by the system previously.”

A second new program Evans announced today would send more people into that system. Her office is calling it the “High-Priority Repeat Offenses (HiPRO) program.

Under this program,  people who commit misdemeanors more than three times in a 90-day span, or more than six times in six months, will be ineligible not just for Connections Court but for any diversion programs, and Evans’ office will seek “aggravated jail sentences” against such repeat offenders.

This harsher treatment will also apply to anyone steals from a store from which they were previously trespassed for shoplifting, a process that can be handled by private security and is based on policies that vary from store to store. Evans’ office will also seek stiffer penalties against anyone charged with car prowling, a misdemeanor, if they were convicted for felony car theft in the previous year.

Although HiPRO sounds awfully similar to former city attorney Davison’s “high utilizers” list, Evans and her criminal division chief, Jenna Robert, said it’s different in this key respect: Evans isn’t compiling a list of people who may commit crimes in the future, they’re putting people in the HiPRO program after they’re charged with a crime that warrants escalation into the program.

In contrast, Davison maintained a rotating list of about 150 people who had at least 12 misdemeanor charges in the past year, and at least one misdemeanor charge in the most recent eight months.

It’s a bit of a distinction without a difference. Keeping a list of repeat offenders sure seems more intrusive than imposing harsher penalties on people once they hit a criminal benchmark, but the result is the same—harsher penalties for people who have committed a certain number of misdemeanors over a certain period.

Hurley, from DPD, called the new program counterproductive. The new two-strikes rule for shoplifting, she said, was “very alarming for us” because it means that anyone who steals from the same store twice will be subject to a higher level of prosecution, regardless of what led them to commit the second theft. Many people who steal small items from stores are homeless or have other underlying conditions, Hurley said—like the woman DPD defended last year who was charged with theft for stealing $5 in candy from a CVS that had previously issued a trespass order against her.

Under the new criteria, that client would have been subject to harsher prosecution and ineligible for Connection Court. (Ultimately, she was deemed incompetent to stand trial and her case was dismissed).

Evans said Connection Court, which just started on Wednesday, isn’t set in stone; the details and eligibility could change as the court evolves. But it’s unclear what Evans believes throwing people in jail (a place with no meaningful services) a few days or weeks longer for low-level crimes will accomplish, beyond temporarily removing some familiar faces from the streets. Evans says she’s creating new opportunities for people to access meaningful services, combined with accountability if they fail to meet their commitments. But a plan that deliberately excludes and disproportionately penalizes repeat offenders may just ensure that the people who most need those services won’t be able to access them.

Elections, Police

Former Burien City Attorney and Ex-SPOG Leader Both Run for Office; Seattle Is Paying Two Salaries for One SPD Position

1. Former Burien city attorney Garmon Newsom II has filed to run for the Seattle Municipal Court seat currently held by Judge Willie Gregory, who’s retiring. As PubliCola reported, Newsom was put on leave last year and returned only to be summarily fired by controversial city manager Adolfo Bailon earlier this month. The Burien City Council recently put Bailon on administrative leave.

As Burien city attorney, Newsom defended a city law that makes it illegal to sleep in public in the city, arguing that the ban created an “incentive” for people to go to shelter. (Burien does not have any year-round shelter for single adults).

He also argued for using city permitting rules to prohibit a church from hosting an encampment, and criticized the church for denying access to right-wing commentator Jonathan Choe, who was working for the Discovery Institute but whom Newsom described as a “member of the press.” During the debate over proposed shelter bans in Burien, we reported on a couple of instances in which he described existing or proposed laws inaccurately.

Newsom is represented by Northwest Passage, the Seattle consulting firm founded by Christian Sinderman. Last year, Northwest Passage was the consultant for then-mayor Bruce Harrell (who lost) as well as successful candidates Erika Evans (now Seattle City Attorney), Dionne Foster (now a Seattle councilmember) and Councilmember Alexis Mercedes Rinck (who was reelected).

The other candidates in the race, so far, are Seattle attorney Lindsay Calkins and Snohomish County public defender Gabriel Rothstein.

2. Former Seattle Police Officers Guild director Mike Solan is running as a Republican for the Pierce County Council seat that’s currently held by Democrat Robyn Denson, who isn’t seeking reelection.

Solan has long lived in West Seattle, but Pierce County tax records indicate he bought a house in Gig Harbor last month. Solan is a controversial figure; in addition to (infamously) blaming the January 6, 2020, insurrection on Black Lives Matter protesters, Solan recently mocked the head of the city’s CARE Department and appeared to joke with then-SPOG vice president Daniel Auderer about the death of a young student killed in a crosswalk by a speeding cop.

Solan didn’t immediately respond to a text message asking about about his candidacy this morning.

Brenda Lykins, a former Gig Harbor City Council member, is running for the seat as a Democrat. So far, Solan has not reported any contributions.

3. During a presentation on the Law Enforcement Diversion program earlier this week, the Seattle Police Department was represented by Chief Shon Barnes as well as Acting Assistant Chief Rob Brown, a longtime captain and former South Precinct commander who now oversees operations.

Why does SPD have an acting assistant chief, rather than a permanent one? As it turns out, they have both. Todd Kibbee, the permanent acting chief, is out on paid leave while Brown does his job.

SPD Chief Operating Officer Sarah Smith would not confirm that Kibbee, who has been at SPD for 33 years, was burning his leave before retiring, a common practice that allows officers to continue receiving full pay and benefits while they use up their accrued sick and vacation time at the end of their careers. Smith said only that Kibbee was on “approved leave.”

Smith did not respond to questions about how long Kibbee would be on paid leave and whether Barnes plans to appoint Brown permanent assistant chief.

Kibbee makes around $313,000 a year, while Brown makes around $266,000, according to city salary data.

 

 

Courts, Drugs

Drug Prosecutions Quadrupled In Final Months of City Attorney Ann Davison’s Term
City Councilmember Sara Nelson and City Attorney Ann Davison in 2024; both will leave office at the end of this year.

By Erica C. Barnett

Seattle City Attorney Ann Davison has accelerated filings of misdemeanor drug possession cases during the last few months of her term, more than quadrupling drug prosecutions from an average of 4 a week between mid-June and mid-September to 16.4 a week between mid-September and December 15.

The city attorney also prosecuted more people for public drug use, increasing prosecutions from virtually none between June and September (an average of 0.5 a day) to 3.5 a day between mid-September and December 15, a seven-fold increase.

The Seattle Municipal Court compiled the numbers for violations of the city’s recently passed drug laws, which made it a misdemeanor to possess any amount of an illegal drug in public, at PubliCola’s request.

The city council passed the law, which empowered the city attorney to prosecute people for drug possession and use for the first time in the city’s history, in 2023. The following year, they passed a companion bill that reinstated special “Stay Out of Drug Area” banishment zones for people accused of violating the new drug laws, a tactic dating back to the early 1990s that the city had long abandoned as ineffective.

Earlier this year, Davison replaced Community Court, which she unilaterally ended in 2023, with a “drug prosecution alternative” that allows people arrested under the new drug laws to have their charges dismissed if they do an assessment to confirm their addiction and don’t get arrested again.

A spokesman for Davison’s office, Tim Robinson, said the spike in filings is “simply a matter of an increase in referrals” by the Seattle Police Department—when police arrest more people for misdemeanor drug violations, they file more charges.

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“When our review and filing unit reviews the referrals, they determine if there are sufficient legal grounds to move the case forward,” Robinson said. “This includes whether or not the alleged conduct violates a specific law and if the evidence supports the elements of the alleged offense. An individual involved in a case is referred to the Drug Prosecution Alternative whenever possible.”

However, the decision to file charges is discretionary, not automatic; the entire premise of the LEAD program, which diverts people involved in the criminal justice system away from prosecution, is that services are more effective than jail.

Incoming city attorney Erika Evans, who defeated Davision by a margin of 34 points in November, said diversion to treatment and services, not prosecution, “should be the default response for people dealing with substance use disorder.”

“Traditional prosecution should only be considered after meaningful attempts at diversion and support have not been successful,” Evans said. “When diversion alone is not working, I believe a community court model for people dealing with substance use disorder can provide accountability for progress while still keeping treatment and services at the center.”

As PubliCola has reported, the overwhelming majority of people arrested for violating Seattle’s drug laws end up cycling through the system without actually getting any kind of treatment.

“I am skeptical of any drug alternative program that relies primarily on increased charging rather than meaningful diversion,” Evans said. “When I take office, I look forward to working closely with the courts, the mayor, DPD, and our office to transform the current model into one that follows the law’s legislative intent, uses public dollars responsibly, and actually helps people get out of this cycle, not deeper into it.”

Courts

Municipal Court Judge Pooja Vaddadi Files Bar Complaint Against City Attorney Ann Davison and Her Former Criminal Chief


Vaddadi says City Attorney Ann Davison’s office made “counterfactual, false, and defamatory” statements to justify a decision to prohibit the judge from hearing misdemeanor cases last year.

By Erica C. Barnett

Seattle Municipal Court Judge Pooja Vaddadi has filed a formal complaint with the Washington State Bar Association against City Attorney Ann Davison and her former criminal division chief, Natalie Walton-Anderson, over their decision last year to preemptively disqualify her from hearing any criminal cases by filing a Affidavit of Prejudice in every case that lands in Vaddadi’s courtroom, disqualifying Vaddadi from hearing these cases.

The bar association has the authority to take disciplinary action against any state-licensed attorney, up to and including disbarment.

By prohibiting Vaddadi from hearing misdemeanor cases, Davison effectively overturned the 2023 election in which voters elected her to the bench. Davison announced her decision in a memo and press release last year.

Davison’s decision prompted the Seattle Times to publish a contemptuous editorial excoriating the “uninformed voters” who elected Vaddadi and calling her a biased ideologue—a term they never used to describe conservative firebrand Judge Ed McKenna, whom the editorial board described as a victim when progressive city attorney Pete Holmes called him out for blatantly political rulings and public statements.

For more than a year, Vaddadi’s job has consisted primarily of reviewing traffic tickets. That changed somewhat in February, when the City Attorney’s Office stopped disqualifying her automatically from cases that don’t involve allegations of domestic violence or DUIs. When these cases come up, a pro tem judge or magistrate usually has to sit in, at the city’s expense. “It’s almost like paying an eighth judge to preside in criminal court,” Vaddadi said.

Davison and Walton-Anderson—who is now Mayor Bruce Harrell’s chief public safety advisor—claimed last year that Vaddadi was biased and incompetent, vaguely citing several cases in which, they alleged, Vaddadi had improperly released a defendant, failed to find probable cause when probable cause existed, and showed what they described as “a complete lack of understanding, or perhaps even intentional disregard, of the evidence rules, even on basic issues.”

Vaddadi’s complaint eviscerates those claims, calling them “counterfactual, false, and defamatory.”

“The statements were untethered to a specific proceeding and published in part to provide political cover for a far-reaching blanket [Affidavit of Prejudice] policy of unprecedented scope,” Vaddadi wrote. “The effect of the policy was to exclude me from hearing all misdemeanor cases for most of 2024, which strained court resources and resulted in litigation against the City of Seattle.”

The Washington Community Alliance and three Seattle voters sued the city for disenfranchising voters by disqualifying Vaddadi last year. 

“It was a tough year,” Vaddadi told PubliCola on Thursday. “There’s this scathing piece of writing that’s published [and repeated] in the media, to my colleagues and the people I respect, and I know it’s full of lies. And what is awful is, because she’s the city attorney, and Natalie Walton-Anderson is now head of public safety at the mayor’s office, they have a powerful voice. And they’ve used it to spread these lies about me, and people believe them—and that’s really hard.”

Vaddadi said that, contrary to what Davison and Walton-Anderson claimed in their memo, no one from the city attorney’s office ever reached out to her to discuss their concerns, or took any of the other other avenues that were available to them before announcing she would be disqualified from all misdemeanor cases.

Municipal Court Judge Damon Shadid, speaking on his own behalf and not as a representative of the court, said the decision to completely exclude Vaddadi from hearing misdemeanor cases appears to be unprecedented. “In the history of the state of Washington, no prosecuting attorney has ever used the affidavit of prejudice to this decree—not even close,” Shadid said. “This blows every other blanket AOP situation out of the water. And it’s worse, because they never came to Judge Vaddadi with their concerns.”

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“This feels to me like they are exploiting a loophole in the democratic process and the legal process in general,” Vaddadi said. “There are avenues to complain about judicial conduct,” such as the Commission on Judicial Conduct and the court process itself. But “they’ve only appealed one case that I’ve ruled on”—a case in which Vaddadi disqualified an assistant city attorney, Victoria Pugh, from prosecuting a case in which she was also a witness. (The city attorney’s office appealed that decision and a Superior Court judge sided with Vaddadi.)

It was that case, Vaddadi believes, that made Davison and Walton-Anderson come gunning for her. “Such retaliation is improper use of the City Attorney’s authority and was calculated to damage my reputation and to chill judicial independence and integrity,” she wrote in her complaint.

A spokesman for Davison’s office said they had not yet seen Vaddadi’s complaint and therefore could not respond to it before publication.

A key claim in Vaddadi’s complaint is that Davison and Walton-Anderson fabricated or misrepresented cases Vaddadi heard in order to make her sound incompetent, then refused to provide case numbers in response to requests, including media requests. (The city attorney’s office did not provide these case numbers when PubliCola asked for them last year).

This made it hard for her to prove she did not do the things the city attorney’s office accused her of doing, Vaddadi said, such as as improperly dismissing a DUI case, allowing someone who had committed domestic violence to go free, and dismissing a case against someone who failed to comply with treatment—claims Vaddadi says are inaccurate or misleading.

Shadid confirmed that the city attorney’s office “refused to produce the case numbers to me” when he asked on three separate occasions.

Vaddadi disputes the city attorney’s characterization of several cases Davison and Walton-Anderson described in their memo, something she said she was unable to do until members of the public managed to figure out which cases Davison was describing and show that the facts didn’t match the city attorney’s descriptions.

“I knew from the moment they filed [the blanket affidavit of prejudice] that everything in that statement was false, but at this point, I’ve got the cases that they described, with the actual case numbers, and nothing really matches up,” Vaddadi said.

“By comparing the actual records to the summaries in the Memo, it is a trivial exercise to demonstrate that the Memo’s description of my record contains factual statements that Ms. Walton-Anderson and Ms. Davison knew were false at the time the Memo was published,” her compalint says.

Vaddadi said “the most egregious fabrication” of several “directly falsifiable” cases was a case in which, according to the city attorney’s memo, she dismissed a domestic violence case “even though it was clear that the defendant never got on the transport van to [American Behavioral Health Services] to fulfill his residential treatment requirement that was part of dispositional continuance.”

According to Vaddadi’s complaint, almost everything about this description was false or misleading, including the gender of the defendant (she’s a woman), the reason she “never got on the transport van” (she was in a wheelchair and the van driver “refused” to take her), and the disposition of the case (it was continued, not dismissed, and Judge Faye Chess later dismissed it.)

In a letter responding to a bar complaint by Seattle resident Bennett Haselton, an outside attorney for Walton-Anderson said the original order didn’t rest on any specific cases, but acknowledged that the city attorney’s office had some of their facts wrong in the van case. Shadid said the city attorney’s office should have corrected their original memo and redacted their claim that Vaddadi mishandled this case, but they have not done so.

Reiterating the arguments she made in a statement published by the Stranger last year, Vaddadi wrote that contrary to what Davison and Walton-Anderson claimed in their memo, they never met with her to discuss any concerns about her rulings or purported bias toward defendants.

Vaddadi said Davison and Walton-Anderson’s statements closely resemble the “actual malice” standard required to prove libel against a public official—a high bar that requires proof that someone made a false statement, knowing it was false or with “reckless disregard” for the truth, in a way that harmed the person the statement was about.

According to Vaddadi, the city attorney’s statements didn’t just damage her reputation, making it harder for her to be reelected or get other jobs in the future; they also made her the target for “a barrage of vile, racist, and threatening communications directed personally to me,” forcing her to take steps to protect herself and her family from threats.

Presiding Municipal Court Judge Anita Crawford-Willis declined to comment on Vaddadi’s bar complaint. “Judge Vaddadi is a duly elected judge and valued member of the Seattle Municipal Court bench,” she said.

Shadid, who has picked up some of Vaddadi’s cases and administrative work, said that seeing “a promising young judge, a woman of color, being attacked in this way has really affected other women of color and other people in our court.”

Vaddadi said she wants more than just the ability to preside over cases as an elected judge; she wants to fix the damage to her reputation Davison’s office has caused over the past year.

“I’m looking for the truth to come out and for my reputation to be restored … and I’m looking to do my job that I was elected to do,” Vaddadi  said. “I have never filed a bar complaint in my life, and I would hope that I don’t ever have to do it again … but at some point, bad conduct needs to be addressed.”

 

Courts, Drugs

Ann Davison’s New “Drug Prosecution Alternative” Is Just the Community Court She Ended Two Years Ago

Seattle Municipal Courthouse

By Erica C. Barnett

City Attorney Ann Davison, who unilaterally ended the city’s therapeutic community court two years ago, announced yesterday that she’s rolling out a new option for people accused of drug misdemeanors, such as the recently adopted laws against using or possessing drugs in public spaces. The office announced the new “drug prosecution alternative” in a press release after the Seattle Times posted a story about it yesterday morning.

According to the announcement, “The Drug Prosecution Alternative will provide an incentive for defendants arrested for drug use and possession to connect with services and commit no new law violations to have their drug cases dismissed.”

The new alternative will include a “warm hand-off” from the court to the city’s Community Resource Center, where they will be able to access resources directly. After that, if they don’t violate the law for 60 days, their charges will be dismissed. This process will, in theory, free up the city attorney’s office to focus on other cases instead of going through a discovery process for every drug case they pursue.

If most of that sounds awfully familiar, it should. The structure of the new “drug prosecution alternative” is identical to the community court Davison shut down two years ago as the fentanyl epidemic raged. Put another way, what Davison is proposing is effectively a restoration of the old community court.

When Davison’s office announced it was ending community court two years ago, they derided the court as as ineffective and soft, in part, because defendants retained their right to trial and were not required to do community services as a condition for receiving services.

At the time, the office called this work requirement a non-negotiable “central component” of community court. “Community service was an essential and fundamental component of the original conception of Community Court, then-criminal division chief Natalie Walton-Anderson (who is now Mayor Bruce Harrell’s public safety director) wrote.

The new drug prosecution alternative has no community service requirements. Nor does it require defendants to give up their right to trial.

Municipal Court Judge Damon Shadid, who ran the old community court, wrote a proposal for a revamped version of community court back in 2023 in response to Davison’s concerns. Among other concessions to Davison, Shadid proposed eliminating a  “level 1” track that allowed people to attend a life-skills class and get their charges dismissed and starting defendants at Level 2—going to an appointment at the service center.

Davison’s new proposal is substantively identical to what Shadid recommended in 2023.

Shadid said he was glad that Davison had come around on community court, retaining the elements he said were essential to its success when he tried to save a version of the  court two years ago.

“I am pleased that the city attorney has adopted the Seattle Municipal Court Community Court structure for Drug Diversion Court,” Shadid said. “Ensuring defendants don’t have to give up rights to receive services allows us to start connecting defendants to services on their first court appearance.”

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Advocates generally agree that existing services are inadequate, particularly for unhoused people with severe substance use disorders.

Although the new adjudication process will be almost identical to the old community court, some of the details are new. The court will require participants to go through an initial urinalysis and a substance use disorder assessment, which will likely require the city to pay for a new staffer to do this arguably unnecessary task. (Assessments determine the severity of a person’s substance use disorder; someone arrested for using fentanyl on a sidewalk probably doesn’t need a test to know that he’s using drugs problematically.)

According to Tim Robinson, a spokesman for the City Attorney’s Office, “Substance abuse assessment assists in determining the level of care necessary.” As for the new drug test requirement, Robinson said, “a clean UA can lead to an expedited successful completion in the program. A dirty UA would not provide that same expedited pathway, but the individual could end up successfully completing the program and having their charges dropped.”

The new version of community court also gives the city attorney, not the court, sole authority to determine who is and isn’t eligible—another concession Shadid included in his2023 proposal. Davison’s office said they didn’t plan to apply any specific criteria to cases, but would instead decide on a “case by case” basis. “It is a complex endeavor,” Robinson said.

Previously, Davison excluded everyone on her list of frequent misdemeanor offenders (so-called “high utilizers”) from community court. This was problematic, even arbitrary, at the time; it may be even more so now that drug use is itself a misdemeanor, because the rule would explicitly exclude frequent drug offenders from services designed to help them out of addiction.

City Council, Police

Focusing on “Johns” Doesn’t Reduce Street Sex Work, Disproportionately Targets Men of Color, PubliCola Analysis Shows

There’s no evidence that banishing sex buyers from Aurora and other “areas of prostitution” has had any impact, either.

By Erica C. Barnett

The Seattle City Council is currently considering legislation sponsored by Councilmember Cathy Moore (D-5, North Seattle) that would reinstate a recently repealed law against “prostitution loitering,” which the former city council repealed in 2020 in response to recommendations the city’s Reentry Work Group made in 2018.

Moore’s bill would also formalize a new Stay Out of Areas of Prostitution (SOAP) zone around Aurora Avenue from North 145th St. to North 85th, known as “SOAP Zone 1,” allowing courts to impose orders that bar people accused of loitering from going inside the area. In the 2000s, the city repeatedly added new SOAP and SODA (Stay Out of Drug Area) zones from which drug users and people involved in the sex trade could be banned; at their peak, these zones encompassed roughly half the city.

Moore has said that, in response to public feedback, she’ll amend the proposal so that only men accused of “sexual exploitation”—the term Seattle law uses in incorporating the state law against “patronizing a prostitute”—will be subject to future SOAP orders. This, along with the prostitution loitering law, will help “address…commercial sexual exploitation in this area, and associated gun violence,” Moore said in a newsletter in August.

However, a PubliCola analysis of SOAP orders and charges against sex workers and patrons during between 2004 and 2020 shows that focusing on sex buyers did not result in a decrease in the sex trade on Aurora and in other SOAP zones. It also had a highly disproportionate impact on Black and Latino men, including many immigrants and non-English speakers, who typically agreed to SOAP orders in exchange for a dismissal.

PubliCola obtained court data through a public disclosure request, and used the municipal court’s public database to do a deeper case-by-case analysis of thousands of prostitution loitering and patronizing cases. A note on the numbers: We only reviewed the cases of sex workers charged with prostitution loitering—street sex work, which is the focus of the current crackdown proposals—as opposed to the broader category of prostitution. Had we included charges involving people arrested for non-street-based sex work, the number of prostitution charges would be much higher. With men (and they were all men), we included every charge of patronizing a prostitute, a singular crime that encompasses all types of sex work. Overall, far more people (mostly women) have been charged with prostitution in Seattle than with patronizing a prostitute.

The records we reviewed did show a significant spike in prosecutions against men who were caught attempting to pay for sex after then-city attorney Pete Holmes announced he was going to start focusing on “johns” rather than women doing street sex work in 2012. (In the chart above, this announcement is denoted by a vertical line.) But that spike leveled off after about three years and prosecutions returned to previous levels after that, with no discernible long-term impact on Aurora.

A city council central staff memo describing Moore’s proposal says that judges “occasionally” issued SOAP orders prior to 2010. But an exhaustive review of court records at the Seattle Municipal Court’s public database, which we performed using the data from the court for prostitution loitering and patronizing charges, shows that between 2004 and 2009, judges actually issued nearly 1,000 SOAP orders for prostitution loitering and patronizing a prostitute, combined.

Far from issuing SOAP orders “occasionally,” judges actually issued them dozens of times a year until 2019, when they dropped dramatically before starting to rise again in 2020.

Source: Seattle Municipal Court data. De-duplicated data; numbers represent individuals, not charges. Hispanic/Latino is an estimate based on surnames.

One thing that did change dramatically after Holmes announced he would focus on “johns” in 2012 is that the City Attorney’s Office began and obtained SOAP orders against men more frequently The numbers, however, never topped 70 per year—a fraction of the high-water mark for SOAP orders against sex workers, the vast majority of them women; that happened in 2005, when judges issued 219 SOAP orders against the sex workers charged with prostitution loitering whose cases PubliCola reviewed.

Holmes told PubliCola his office decided to focus on “johns,” rather than sex workers, because the women getting caught up in stings and arrested for loitering on Aurora clearly needed services, not time in a jail cell. “We saw a lot of so-called perpetrators in our courtroom that looked a hell of a lot like victims themselves,” Holmes said. When cops go after women who solicit on the street, rather than online or through an escort service, “you’re going to sweep up the most desperate people, and that’s what we were seeing in court.”

Holmes says the shift toward focusing on men who buy sex (framed, at the time, as a renewed focus on men who “exploit” women by paying for sex) was “the sounder approach, in lieu of a comprehensive regulatory approach to prostitution or some other legal approach.” The city was “not interested in the consensual sale of sex,” he said, but “we couldn’t ignore the human trafficking that was happening, and we needed to get them into services.”

But public defense attorneys who represented men charged with sexual exploitation for patronizing a street-based sex worker say their clients were almost invariably men of color, many of them non-English-speaking immigrants, which is suggested by the data PubliCola obtained.

Overall, of about 1,270 men charged with patronizing a prostitute between 2004 and 2020, nearly a quarter—304—appeared to be Latino, and 213 were Black. Only about a third of the men charged—418—were white. The final three racial categories were Asian/Pacific Islander, “Unknown,” and American Indian/Alaska Native.

(Because the city’s data subsume all Latinos into the “white” category, making Latinx sex workers and buyers invisible, we attempted to disaggregate the data by labeling people with unambiguously Hispanic surnames as “Latino/Hispanic”—an inexact method of surfacing a racial identity that would otherwise be hidden in a misleading “white” category.)

King County Department of Public Defense deputy director Gordon Hill, who represented felony and misdemeanor clients during 16 years as a public defender, said Moore’s proposal targets lower-income men, including men who don’t speak English and are more susceptible to signing police reports that say they offered to pay for sex, which makes them harder to defend.

“What Cathy Moore is saying to the city of Seattle is: If you’re wealthy enough to arrange for a sex worker to drive to your house, knock on your door and come inside, then you go on about your business. But if you are poor, if you’re a person of color, and you engage in street level crime, we are coming after you,” Hill said.

“I think what this law does is going to be incredibly disproportionate. It’s going to be people with immigration challenges, it’s going to be poor people, it’s going to be people of color. So the degree to which it works at all is only going to [exacerbate] the inequities in our criminal legal system.”

In contrast, James Egan, an attorney who has represented both women accused of prostitution and men accused of patronizing a prostitute, said his private clients have all been white—and even they have been subject to fines Egan says some of them could ill afford. “The total fines for getting busted are in the neighborhood of $4,000—the city does not deal,” he said.

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Holmes said the city’s goal in pursuing sex buyers was “not trying to go after the poor guys of color who are out trying to find some love. They’re not a big public safety issues. It was the middle-aged white guys that were using their work computers to arrange online dates [with] people that had likely been trafficked.”

Based on court data, it’s unlikely that SOAP orders will serve as much of a deterrent for men subjected to them. Men, unlike women, essentially never get accused of violating SOAP orders; of the 1,270 SOAP orders issued against sex buyers between 2004 and 2020, only one man was charged with a violation. In contrast, 145 of the 1,110 SOAP orders against sex workers resulted in a violation, which usually resulted in jail time.

Hill said the reason SOAP orders have impacted sex workers, not sex buyers, could be simple profiling—the repealed prostitution loitering law allows tremendous leeway for an officer to decide someone “looks like” a sex worker or is acting like one. Additionally, cops get to know the women who work on Aurora by sight, making them more vulnerable to arrest. In contrast, “they’re less likely to know the johns,” who are typically in cars and don’t have frequent contacts with police.

“It’s a law that historically has failed to have really any impact whatsoever,” Hill said. “I think Aurora will look the same in a year, until it gentrifies like the rest of Seattle, and then some other place that’s a little further away will look like Aurora. I don’t think these orders will have anything to do with it.”

A review of news stories about prostitution on Aurora over the past 50 years shows the same repetitive cycle that is playing out now in the new council’s vow to finally “do something” about the issue.Ever since the area became a locus for sex work in the early 1970s, it seems, the city has never stopped trying, and failing, to eliminate it.

Over at least the last four decades, the city has periodically taken a supporsedly more enlightened approach, as Moore says she wants to do now, by focusing on sex buyers— or “target[ing] hookers’ customers,” as this 1987 Seattle Times piece put it. At other times, they have proposed shutting off parts of the neighborhood with physical barricades, a strategy Moore also supports; in 1990, for instance, the city attempted to address what police called a “cesspool of illegal activity” by blocking off “a neighborhood near Aurora Avenue North that’s riddled with prostitutes and drug dealers,” as the Seattle Time put it at the time.

None of those efforts, nor any in the three decades since, appears to have reduced visible sex work on Aurora for more than short periods.

Katherine Beckett, the co-author of “Banished: The New Social Control in Urban America,” which came out in 2010, told PubliCola earlier this month that business owners she talked to generally favored tougher enforcement. But, she added, “I think if one had pressed them to say, ‘Really? Are you seeing significant improvements?,’ I’m not sure it would have gotten an affirmative response, because they continued to complain about how bad things were even though the prostitution loitering law and SOAP orders were being used.”

Former city attorney Holmes lost his seat in the 2021 race that sent abolitionist Nicole Thomas-Kennedy and Republican Ann Davison to the general election, which Davison won, beginning a wave of backlash against the supposed anti-police excesses of 2020. Now, he said, “you’ve got a lot of people who rode that wave into office and…. the fact that they’re going back to the same old shit that failed in the past is pretty sad. It reminds me of Winston Churchill, who said*, ‘Americans can always be counted on to do the right thing after exhausting every possibility.’ Well, here we go again.”

*Apocryphally.