Amber, from Green Light Project, and Emi Koyoma, from the Coalition for Rights & Safety for People in the Sex Trade, testify at City Council Tuesday.
By Erica C. Barnett
Advocates for sex workers, activated by a brutal, dehumanizing presentation the King County Prosecutor’s Office delivered to the city council’s public safety committee about sex trafficking, are demanding action from the city and county to rectify the harm done by past actions and statements about sex work and trafficking.
As PubliCola reported, the prosecutors, who were trying to drum up support for a proposed state law that would make it a felony to pay another person for sex. The presentation included identifiable photos of tortured, brutalized women; a lurid recitation of the objects an anonymous victim said had been inserted into her by force; misogynistic quotes about sex workers from an unidentified online forum; and graphic descriptions of rape and violence against women.
The prosecutors also claimed that every sex worker who opposed further criminalizing sex work had been a victim of childhood abuse, and was therefore speaking against their own true interests because of trauma.
In a letter to the council, which three advocates read aloud at Tuesday’s council meeting, a group of advocates for sex workers, survivors, and people in the sex trade made five demands:
• An acknowledgement from the city of the “selective and exploitative uses of survivor stories, voices, and images” by the committee and the prosecutor’s office.
• An examination of the city and county’s policies and trainings, if any, on “trauma-informed, and non-exploitative uses of survivor voices and stories.”
• An analysis by the city’s Office of Civil Rights on “existing and potential policy approaches to reducing violence and exploitation in the sex trade as well as a review of best practices for incorporating diverse voices of survivors, sex workers, and people in the sex trade while minimizing re-traumatization.”
• Strategies to include more perspectives from people with lived experience of sex work in future policy conversations, and to fund peer-led groups that provide services to survivors and sex workers without requiring that they collaborate with law enforcement
• A public safety committee meeting “dedicated to a presentation about human rights-based, noncarceral, pro-sex worker approach to empower survivors, sex workers, and people in the sex trade and combat violence, abuse, and exploitation within the sex trade.”
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The organization also provide a list of several quotes from council members during the presentation along with the derogatory messages they communicated. One was a comment from committee chair Bob Kettle aimed at people who criticize the city’s purely punitive response to the sex trade.
Kettle said that “so many women in our city,” as well as “the chattering classes,” are hypocrites because they criticize Jeffrey Epstein but don’t support carceral strategies like sending sex buyers to prison. “These people, the people come in here and yell at us because when we’re trying to go in after the men, but we’re the target. We as a city need to stop, take a deep breath, and think about that,” Kettle said.
On Monday, the Seattle Women’s Commission sent a letter to the city’s Office of Civil Rights with a list of their own requests, including a public statement from OCR Director Derrick Wheeler-Smith calling on the city to “honor and include diverse perspectives in all Civil Rights Work,” including work on behalf of sex workers, survivors, and people in the sex trade.
As we reported on Monday, the prosecutors’ presentation contributed to efforts in the state legislature to roll back the legislation the two county prosecutors were advocating for, removing the first-strike felony provision and incorporating more humanizing language into the proposal. The changes led supporters of the original bill to mutiny, calling the new version—which still increases paying for sex to a gross misdemeanor for the first two offenses, and a felony for the third—inadequate to deter people from paying for sex.
But an attempt to decriminalize sex work—another component of the “Nordic model”—failed.
By Erica C. Barnett
State legislation that would have made it a first-strike felony, rather than a misdemeanor, to pay another person for sex or “sexual contact” has gone through several revisions since late January, when King County prosecutors gave a lurid, exploitative presentation to the Seattle City Council in an effort to drum up support for the bill. Last week, the proposal passed out of a House committee on a contentious 5-4 vote; from there, it faces an uphill battle in its current form.
In its original iteration, the legislation—sponsored by Democrats Chris Stearns (D-47, Auburn) and Lauren Davis (D-32, North Seattle)—would have made it a Class C felony, punishable by up to five years in prison and a fine of up to $10,000, to pay another person for sex. The bill would have also changed the term “patronizing a prostitute” to “commercial sexual exploitation”—the same term used, incidentally, in Seattle’s anti-prostitution laws.
However, after blowback from the county prosecutors’ presentation drew new attention to the bill, the proposal underwent a transformation, including a proposal from Rep. Tarra Simmons (D-23, Bremerton) that would have decriminalized sex work statewide.
Simmons called decriminalization a necessary component of the so-called “Nordic model,” a widely adopted approach that criminalizes sex buyers in an attempt to eliminate demand.
“I was trafficked as a young girl,” Simmons said. “If you want to get to exploitation and get to trafficking and to solve the issue and to protect the victims, you have to do both—not just increase penalties, but allow the victims to be victims and not be criminalized.”
Decriminalization went a step too far for other House Democrats, but the version that passed out of the House Community Safety Committee last week does include some significant changes from the original proposal.
First, it raises the crime of patronizing a sex worker to a gross misdemeanor for the first two offenses, rather than a felony; the third time, it becomes a felony, as in the original version. The amended bill also replaces the phrase “commercial sexual exploitation” with the more neutral term “patronizing a person for prostitution.”
Under the bill, sex work would remain illegal, but sex workers would get two shots at “services”—which Simmons said might include job training, treatment, and counseling—before they’re prosecuted for prostitution, a misdemeanor.
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During last week’s committee meeting, Rep. Davis argued that by not raising the crime of paying for sex to a first-strike felony (that is, by increasing it from a misdemeanor to a gross misdemeanor for the first two offenses) will only result in more women being exploited and trafficked.
“These women are not entrepreneurs. The term ‘sex work’ implies volition,” Davis said.
“Representing North Aurora. I’ve learned some things,” Davis continued. “There’s a kind of pimp called a gorilla pimp. Gorilla pimps dominate their victims by force and violence. I know of a gorilla pimp who took razor blades to his victim’s back, and another who had his victim mauled by dogs.” In her district, which includes Shoreline, street sex work starts at the Seattle city line, she said, because “there’s no enforcement” of anti-prostitution laws in Seattle. (Other theories include a relative lack of cheap motels and significantly better street design north of 145th.)
Charging sex buyers with a gross misdemeanor, rather than a felony, would “also make it easier for pimps to recruit, because there’s no legal liability, there’s no downside,” Davis said. This is a confusing claim: Promoting prostitution—being a pimp—is a Class B felony, punishable by up to ten years in prison, which seems like a pretty big potential downside. Building a case against a trafficker or pimp is harder and more time-consuming than doing the kind of quick-hit sting operations favored by police departments, however.
Davis pointed out that there’s actually a third part of the Nordic model—ample, freely available services, including treatment and housing, none of which are funded through the amended bill. Simmons agreed that the state should fund more services for trafficking victims, and said she’d like to start with more funding for peer support—people with direct experience in the sex trade who can talk to people who are being exploited and “hold their hand and take them to safety” away from their traffickers and pimps.
“I’ve never seen problems solved through increasing penalties,” Simmons said. “I don’t think johns are going to stop and think, ‘This is gonna be two days in jail [versus] a month in jail.’ They’re not thinking about that.”
Rep. Brian Burnett (R-12, Wenatchee) said his own daughter was trafficked and “rapedliterally thousands oftimesoverthecourseofeightornineyears.” As the only trafficking survivor on the panel, though, Simmons said she “felt invisible a lot of times.”
“I also felt like they were missing the point of helping the victims and survivors,” Simmons said. “They’re not going to accept help from law enforcement, because they’re going to run.”
This story originally misattributed Rep. Burnett’s comment to Rep. Stearns. We regret the error.
The point of the prurient presentation: “You can’t make sex work safe,” one senior deputy prosecutor said.
By Erica C. Barnett
King County prosecutors gave an astonishingly graphic presentation about sex work and human trafficking to Seattle City Councilmember Bob Kettle’s public safety committee on Tuesday, showing unredacted images of brutalized women with bloodied and battered faces and bleeding bodies. (Content warning: Although I’ve redacted all identifiable images from the presentation as it appeared yesterday, the graphic language remains).
The carousel of images included a photo of a identifiable weeping, partly nude woman in a bathtub who, according to prosecutors, had been urinated on by her pimp after her he bashed in her eye.
Prosecutors accompanied the images with pornographic commentary copy-pasted from online review sites that dehumanized and belittled sex workers. Reading out loud from one of the slides displayed in council chambers, King County Senior Deputy Prosecutor Alexandra Voorhees intoned, “Find them, fuck them, forget them. … Stupid fucking whore. Spread your legs, and that’s it. That’s it. That’s all you’re worth. A cum dumpster.'”
Later in the presentation, Voorhees read a list of objects a victim of sex trafficking said men had inserted into her by force, and read quotes from women who described vomiting and bleeding from forcible sex acts. Sex work, Voorhees claimed, often leads to dangerous physical conditions such as “vaginal prolapse, anal prolapse… fecal incontinence, forced abortion.” The presentation continued in pornographic detail: “Girls in dog cages, girls being waterboarded… stunned with stun guns… burned and strangled.”
During public comment, Emi Koyama—a longtime advocate for sex workers and founder of Aileen’s, a peer-led community space for women working along the Pac Highway in South King County—said the prosecutors “selectively quote and weaponize survivor testimonies that are useful in ceding further power to the law enforcement, while neglecting how the law enforcement itself is also a source of violence in the lives of many women.”
“Policy making should not be adversarial, and efforts should be made together with those who are impacted by any given issue, whether they align with law enforcement or not,” Koyama said.
UPDATE: Kettle apologized for the presentation the day after the committee meeting. On Thursday, he told PubliCola he had “contacted the KCPAO late last week to express my own concern regarding the explicit nature and privacy implications of the presentation. While I advocated for a different approach, the timing of the response, me seeing it, and the pending committee meeting led me to proceed with the KCPAO approach.
“The goal of my committee is to support survivors of sex trafficking – particularly minors and young adults – who are forced into these situations,” Kettle said. “We are careful to distinguish this work from those who choose sex work as a profession, and I appreciate you giving me the opportunity to clarify that.
The two prosecutors argued repeatedly that the public is misinformed about the inherently exploitative nature of all sex work—”this is not ‘Pretty Woman,'” Voorhees said—and said the graphic, exploitative images were necessary for people to understand that pimps and sex buyers need to be punished.
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After other council members, including Alexis Mercedes Rinck and Eddie Lin, expressed concerns about the lurid presentation, King County Prosecutor Leesa Manion sent a letter to the council saying that although “the goal of the presentation was to make clear to Council the violence that survivors experience at the hands of buyers and traffickers,” the prosecutor’s office will “do a better job of protecting victim’s [sic] privacy” in the future.”
The presentation has been removed from the committee agenda but is still available in the full agenda packet and viewable on the Seattle Channel recording of the meeting. UPDATE: As of noon on Jan. 28, he agenda packet has been removed as well.
Douglas Wagoner, the public affairs director for Manion’s office, stood by the intent of the presentation when he spoke with PubliCola on Tuesday evening. “The goal of the presentation was to make clear to City Councilmembers the violence that survivors experience in the hands of buyers and traffickers,” Wagoner said. “Their trauma is incredibly difficult to watch and learn about, but it’s also real and most people don’t know how bad the experiences are of the survivors who are going through it every day in King County.”
“Maybe in the future, we’d make a different choice in terms of the exact images and language in the presentation,” Wagoner added.
Whatever their intent, the images and words had the effect of re-brutalizing the women on the screen, who did not consent to be used as examples by prosecutors pushing further criminalization of sex work. Although the prosecutor’s office denied any political agenda, they noted during the presentation that they’re hoping to drum up support for state legislation that would elevate paying for sex, currently a misdemeanor, to a felony, punishable by a prison sentence of up to five years and a fine of up to $10,000.
The bill would take the question of whether to prosecute sex buyers out of the City Attorney’s Office, where progressive Erika Evans just took over from Republican Ann Davison, and put it into the county prosecutors’ hands. Sex trafficking is already a felony.
Kettle, along with his fellow committee members Maritza Rivera and Debora Juarez, used the presentation as an opportunity to express disbelief that people in Seattle, including advocates for sex workers and sex workers, have the gall to oppose the city’s recent crackdowns on sex buyers, including a law reinstating “SOAP” banishment zones and “john letters” sent to the homes of men identified as possible sex buyers through their license plates.
“There’s so many women in our city who make two points that really not should be made together— ‘Oh, Epstein, this, that whatever,’ but then… they decry the letters by SPD to those johns or potential johns,” Kettle said.
“These people come in here and yell at us when we’re trying to go after the men. … We as a city, need to stop, take a deep breath and think about that. When I read something online by the chattering classes in the city that talk about these pieces, they need to stop and look at themselves.”
Rivera, too, said she couldn’t understand why anyone would participate in “this whole movement of defunding things and ‘We’re not going about it the right way’—No.” The solutions—SOAP zones, “john letters,” and imprisoning sex buyers—”are so clear,” Rivera continued, and the fact “that people can’t see that you all really are helping victims is beyond me.”
Later, Voorhees yes-anded Rivera’s outrage that anyone would question the decisions the council has made in recent years to further criminalize sex work. “You were asking some questions about people who are who are opposed or somehow think that this is consensual, so it’s okay,” Voorhees said. “The problem is, you can’t make sex work safe. It is inherently dangerous. It is inherently a power imbalance.”
The idea that sex work is inherently so dangerous that it must be abolished is far from a consensus view in Seattle or the United States. Juries don’t tend to buy the notion that men who pay for sex are inherently abusive or dangerous, which is one reason they rarely go to trial—it’s harder for prosecutors to sustain a prurient image of monster predators when faced with a real man (in Seattle, typically an immigrant) who got caught trying to pay for sex.
While no one would express sympathy or support for men who beat, rape, or kidnap and traffic women, those crimes are separate from patronizing a sex worker (formally “commercial sexual exploitation” in Seattle law), and can be prosecuted on their own. Treating all men who pay for sex as monolithically evil does not stand up to reality as sex workers themselves describe it. No sex workers were invited to attend the presentation, which allowed prosecutors to paint them as childlike, helpless victims with no agency in their own lives.
Also, the approaches the two prosecutors described as “innovative” — increased penalties, “john letters,” and banishment zones—aren’t new,don’t work, and can put women at risk.
Near the end of Tuesday’s meeting, Saka asked the prosecutors what warning signs parents should watch out for to make sure their daughters aren’t being recruited by pimps..
“When I was a kid, it used to be called ‘fast’— don’t be a ‘fast little girl,’ ‘she’s a fast girl,’ whatever,” deputy prosecutor Braelah McGinnis said. “Kids who comehomeandhaveunaccounted-formoney. Theyhavetheirnailsdoneallofasudden,andthingslikethat.Andso,youknow,thosecanberedflagsof, like, ‘Well,whotookyoutogetyournailsdone?’ …Wealsofindkids,lotsoftimes,mayhaveasecondphone,andit’sbecauseit’susedtocommunicatewiththeirpimportheirtrafficker.Thosearesomeofmytips.”
I called Kettle to find out why he approved the prurient presentation and whether he would invite advocates and sex workers who disagree with the prosecutor’s approach to present their own views and experiences in his committee. I hadn’t heard back by press time, but will update this post if I do.
The city’s schedule for the competitive bidding process for $2 million that got underway last year.
By Erica C. Barnett
Last week, Seattle City Councilmember Cathy Moore directed the city’s Human Services Department to award $1 million in funding for survivors of commercial sexual exploitation (CSE) through a direct contract with The More We Love, a group that began as a company offering private encampment sweeps and now holds most of the city of Burien’s homelessness contracts.
Moore’s move, which the city’s Human Services Department immediately agreed to implement, effectively ended a competitive bidding process that had been underway since last year, when providers who work with sexually exploited adults and minors in Seattle began meeting to discuss what a fair and equitable competitive distribution of new local funding could look like. The groups first met with Moore’s office last September, and came away believing that the funds would be distributed to various groups through a fair, competitive bidding process, according to several people involved in those discussions. HSD later created a timeline for this process and distributed it to the potential bidders.
City staff reiterated their commitment to a fair, open process in meetings that included organizations that work with survivors as well as law enforcement, Harborview, and other “system partners” that could potentially refer people to the new services the $2 million was going to fund.
“From the very beginning, when we heard there might be an opportunity for additional funding and resources to support the community of survivors that work against trafficking, we were thrilled—and the next thing out of our mouth was, ‘Providers deserve an open and fair process,'” said Amaranthia Torres, co-executive director for the Coalition Ending Gender Based Violence.
Unless Moore rescinds her directive—or HSD decides not to fulfill her request—the funding decision will be final. The mayor’s office, which oversees HSD and was included in email conversations about Moore’s directive to forego the usual bidding process, directed all of our questions to HSD. After this story posted, HSD responded to PubliCola’s questions with the following statement: “No contract or award has yet been processed for [Moore’s budget action[. HSD is continuing conversations around next steps for implementing these investments.”
“It was shocking that all of the work to engage with the community this whole time is being thwarted,” Torres said. “It seemed obvious to me that the way city funds get allocated shouldn’t feel like its rigged. Everyone should have a fair shake.”
The $1 million, which is supposed to add 10 beds to The More We Love’s shelter for sexually exploited women in Renton, was part of $2 million Moore set aside to help survivors of commercial sexual exploitation in the city budget last year to help providers respond to a new law reinstating Stay Out of Areas of Prostitution (SOAP) zones. Currently, the only overnight space specifically for people escaping the sex trade in Seattle is a six-bed temporary housing facility run by Real Escape from the Sex Trade (REST).
Representatives from existing Black-led groups that work with survivors said that by giving $1 million to a white-led group that has not previously held a contract to work with CSE survivors, the city is ignoring and undermining the expertise of organizations that focus on Black and brown survivors, who make up a disproportionate number of people in the commercial sex trade. In recent years, organizations that help survivors have made concerted efforts to end what several described as a “white savior” mentality, in which white leaders (often women) believe they know what’s best for Black and brown survivors.
The news was “a slap in the face,” a leader from one Seattle organization, who requested anonymity because her group works with the city, said. “It’s more than a funding issue—it’s about power and whose voices get amplified.”
Another longtime organizational leader said she was disappointed, but not surprised, that Moore was directing the funds to The More We Love. “It’s not to say their organization couldn’t have been funded, but you should not be giving this organization all the funding,” she said. “You’re saying, ‘We’re going to fund this white-led group and let them run this pilot without any of you,’ but they need all of our support.”
It’s highly unusual for an individual council member to ask an executive department to spend a large amount of money on a single organization through a direct contract without holding a vote to release the funds. It’s perhaps even more unusual for an executive department to take this kind of direction from a legislator.
And there’s another odd wrinkle in this case: Moore apparently asked HSD to give $500,000 of the $2 million to REST to expand its own receiving center in February, but rescinded that offer after HSD had already informed REST that they were getting the money, according to emails and sources familiar with the offer. REST participated in all the conversations leading up to the planned RFP and supported the process; the organization’s leaders were reportedly surprised to learn that the city had decided to bypass the RFP and award some of the money to them directly.
Earlier this year, the Mayor’s Office on Domestic Violence and Sexual Assault (MODVSA), which is part of HSD, launched a series of meetings to discuss the upcoming request for proposals (RFP) for the funds, which was supposed to come out in May. Under an expedited schedule, the city was set to release the funds to the winning bidders in September.
“We’re going to focus on how to get that $2 million and get all of this work organized and coordinated in a very timely fashion,” HSD Director Tanya Kim told Moore’s housing and human services committee during a public meeting in January. “That $2 million requires us to expedite an RFP to get those services online as soon as possible.”
Elizabeth Dahl, executive director of Aurora Commons, said a competitive RFP “is the only way to ensure a fair and equitable process, with appropriate oversight, to ensure the funds allocated to respond to the SOAP legislation are used effectively. Organizations and leaders in the [gender-based violence] field, including ours, were leaned on for their expertise throughout the SOAP legislation process, and we were ensured there would be a fair process for distributing the funds awarded through an RFP. That is not what is happening.”
“Bypassing the RFP process is a blatant dismissal of the work we did and the expertise of those of us who have been doing this work for years,” the first CSE organization leader who requested anonymity said.
Neither Moore’s office nor HSD responded to questions by press time, but we’ll update this story if we hear back.
Emails between Moore and her staff and Kim, Deputy Mayor Tiffany Washington, and other city officials show that Moore directed HSD to give the funds to The More We Love about a week after visiting their shelter in Renton, where she spoke to women living there and found their stories “compelling.”
“Given the urgency of the need for additional receiving beds in a safe location … and The More We Love’s ability to immediately add an additional 10 beds with wrap-around support and 24/7 access, I am requesting $1 million of the $2 million [allocation] be awarded to The More We Love for the provision of 10 emergency receiving center beds at their facility as soon as a contract can be finalized,” Moore told Kim in a March 12 email.
“HSD will move forward with the below, piloting The More We Love’s emergency receiving center—ensuring there’s a clear nexus to Seattle given the location [in Renton]—at $1 million, and implementing the remaining as proposed by HSD,” Kim responded. Renton is about 20 miles away from Aurora Ave. North, where Seattle’s street sex trade is concentrated.
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In a subsequent email directing HSD staff to “move forward with implementation,” Kim said it was unclear how much will be left over from the original $2 million, which also has to pay for a new city staffer, consultants, and any costs associated with the work the city has already done on the planned competitive bidding process.
The More We Love recently opened a small shelter at a house in Renton, but otherwise does not have any track record working with CSE survivors; the group’s leader, Kristine Moreland, worked at REST for a couple of years but was never a direct service provider, according to several people familiar with her role there.
Moreland did not respond to a request for an interview.
In an email inviting Moore to visit The More We Love’s Renton shelter, Moreland said a staffer for the group had recently sat down with the group of women and learned about gaps in service they faced, finding the revelations “both eye-opening and heartbreaking because many of the challenges they described seem like they should be simple to fix, yet they persist.”
The language is similar to the pitch Moreland made to city officials in Burien, where she claimed that she, unlike existing groups with more experience working with chronically homeless people, could easily get people into housing and treatment; subsequently, the Burien council ended the city’s contract with the longstanding outreach group REACH and handed that money to The More We Love.
It’s unclear what services The More We Love provides at its Renton facility. According to Moore’s email to HSD Director Kim, Moreland told the city her organization offers “substance use treatment, counseling, job training, advocacy in the criminal legal system as victims as well as defendants, and assistance accessing housing.”
But people that have been working in the field for years or decades are skeptical. Because the groups that assist CSE survivors have varying levels of funding and offer different services, they typically work together to provide wraparound support rather than trying to do everything themselves, several representatives from these organizations said. Moreland’s group has never been part of those conversations.
A slide from The More We Love’s five-page “year end report” for 2024
Moreland’s claims about The More We Love’s results have been hard to verify.
Earlier this year, Moreland presented The More We Love’s “year end report” to the Burien City Council. The five-page document says The More We Love “assisted” 303 people, including “25 survivors helped,” between August and December 2024, with a numberless pie chart providing a very high-level breakdown of the services the group claims to have provided. The More We Love provided the same five-page report to Seattle leaders, including Moore, as part of their pitch for funding.
The group has not published a more detailed breakdown of its services or data showing more detailed measures of effectiveness, such as how many people obtain and remain in permanent housing, how many people are able to stay sober or in recovery after treatment or detox, and how many people return to the sex trade after going through their program.
The More We Love has been criticized in the past for distributing private health information about their clients to police, elected officials and at least one private business owner in Burien, and one provider we spoke to expressed concern about the fact that the organization publishes the photos of sexual exploitation survivors on its Facebook page, potentially revealing information about their location and lives to their former traffickers.
Despite holding a major homelessness contract with Burien and securing a million-dollar promise from Seattle, The More We Love just organized as a nonprofit in mid-2023, and did not have enough revenue to file a full 990 tax form with the IRS that year. “They haven’t been on the scene long enough to have results,” the longtime provider said.
Many of the organizational leaders who spoke to PubliCola said they felt the city had not only wasted their time but violated their trust.
The longtime CSE leader called the outcome “really sad, because at the end of the day, the city is breaking the trust of the community. … The city talked about providing a forum to share critical information about investments, and now they’re going behind our backs.”
“We already know that white people are in power and that Black and brown people have to fight ten times as hard to get the same respect,” the other CSE organization leader who requested anonymity said. “It reinforces a harmful pattern where white-led groups secure resources and Black-led groups that have the solutions to these critical issues are sidelined.”
The city council adopted legislation on Tuesday reinstating a repealed law against “prostitution loitering” and creating new banishment zones for people accused of engaging in sex work or breaking local drug laws, including a recently passed law against public drug use and possession. The prostitution loitering law was repealed unanimously in 2020; that legislation was sponsored by Alex Pedersen, at the time one of the council’s two most conservative members.
Although prostitution loitering and public drug use or possession are misdemeanors, violating the new Stay Out of Drug Area (SODA) and Stay Out of Areas of Prostitution (SOAP) orders will be a gross misdemeanor, a far more serious offense. Because judges can issue the new orders as soon as someone has been charged with a crime—including as a condition of release from jail—people will soon be faced with the Sophie’s choice of staying out of areas where they spend most of their time or facing up to 364 days of jail time even if they’re never convicted of the underlying crime.
City Attorney Ann Davison applauded the council’s 8-1 vote (with Tammy Morales dissenting), saying in a statement, “For the past two years I have heard loud and clear from law enforcement that they need new legal tools to disrupt both open-air criminal drug market activity in many areas of our City and the tragedy of human trafficking on Aurora Avenue North. … I look forward to partnering with the Seattle Police Department on strategic enforcement to help impacted neighborhoods and protect vulnerable victims.”
Like Davison, Cathy Moore, the sponsor of the loitering and SOAP bill, has suggested that every person engaged in sex work is a victim of human trafficking and exploitation. Her legislation expresses support for a future “receiving center” for victims of the sex trade; during her comments yesterday, she applauded the work of Kristine Moreland, a volunteer with Real Escape from the Sex Trade whose group The More We Love has proposed building just such a receiving center.
PubliCola readers will be familiar with Moreland from our coverage of homelessness in Burien, where The More We Love (originally a private company offering encampment sweeps at $515 a head) recently took over the city’s homelessness response contract from the established nonprofit REACH. The group has since reinvented itself yet again, as an expert on sex trafficking in Seattle equipped to run a program and receiving center for victims.
Although Moore has said she’ll seek funding for a small receiving center in this year’s budget, her legislation does not call for any interventions or assistance for the majority of sex workers, who say they need health care, housing assistance, and destigmatization, not jail and criminal records.
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Organizations including the MLK Labor Council, King County Coalition on Homelessness, ACLU of Washington, and sex worker advocacy groups like the Green Light project all opposed the bill. In a statement, Chief Seattle Club director Derrick Belgarde called the legislation a “bandaid on the deeper, systemic issues that continue to plague Seattle. Though framed as a public safety measure, this policy further marginalizes vulnerable populations who already face barriers to housing, employment, and healthcare.”
The Chief Seattle Club is located right across the street from the Pioneer Square SODA zone, which includes the large plaza near the Pioneer Square pergola where unsheltered people often hang out, along with the Pioneer Square light rail station.
More than 100 people showed up in council chambers yesterday, the vast majority of them to speak in opposition to the two proposals. Establishing what has recently become a standard scene, a half-dozen police milled about, joined by a half-dozen security officers, to deal with any potential “disruption,” which council president Sara Nelson helpfully defined at the start of the meeting. Another four officers were reportedly waiting in the wings all afternoon. Altogether, that means the council used at least 60 hours of police time (from roughly 1:00 pm until roughly 7, when the meeting ended) to protect itself from public commenters.
Although Nelson repeatedly called for security when someone shouted from the back or a commenter opposed to the legislation went too far over their allotted 60 seconds, no one was arrested and most people got to speak. (Some of those who had showed up starting at noon—a group that included many sex workers who outed themselves publicly to urge the council not to adopt the loitering law—gave up and left after Nelson halted public comment for the council to discuss and vote on their alternative to the social housing initiative)
On Wednesday, a staffer for Joy Hollingsworth said on X that the police were needed to protect the women on the council, who he said have been subjected to many violent and misogynistic threats from “activists.” None of those threats appear to have occurred in council chambers, however; the “activists” who have showed up to oppose the bill were largely sex workers and sex work advocates, people who live near the proposed SOAP zone, and groups like the ACLU of Washington.
During the debate over a street vacation for a new basketball arena, five female councilmembers were subjected to violent, misogynistic emails and phone calls, mostly from self-identified male sports fans, over their votes against the street vacation. The threats and insults, which PubliCola coveredextensively at the time, thankfully did not occur in person, and therefore would not have been addressed by police officers standing in council chambers.
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.
