1. Just weeks after her appointment to head up the struggling Community Police Commission, acting CPC director Bessie Scott is leaving for a new position as city manager for Antioch, California. The Antioch City Council confirmed Scott’s appointment Tuesday night.
PubliCola reported on Scott’s appointment to head the CPC last week. Scott was supposed to serve as a bridge between current Executive Director Cali Ellis, who is on administrative leave, and whoever fills the position next, whether that’s Ellis again or a new director. Several CPC staffers told PubliCola they left the agency because of Ellis’ management style, which they called authoritarian and condescending.
CPC co-chair Joel Merkel declined to comment last week about why Ellis was put on leave. In the past two months, almost every other member of the CPC’s small staff has resigned or gone on leave. The agency recently hired a deputy director (a new position), and has gone from biweekly to monthly meetings until the staffing problems are resolved.
Scott, who previously served as CPC director, was deputy director of the Office of Inspector General, which oversees the city’s police accountability system. According to the San Jose Mercury-News, Scott will make just over $263,000 as city manager, up from her current salary of $221,000 as acting CPC director.
Still from SPD ad about an officer rescuing a drowning man
2. The Seattle Police Department has begun running recruitment ads on podcasts—part of the city’s $3.4 million contract with the local marketing firm Copacino Fujikado. A reader reported hearing the ads on Unspooled, on the Earwolf podcasting network.
The ads consist of the audio from SPD’s existing video ads, which include simple animations of male officers rescuing people from dangerous situations. (SPD has since replaced the videos with two new live-action ads highlighting women officers). One typically melodramatic voiceover, interspersed with voice actors dramatizing the scene, described a Harbor Patrol response to a man struggling to swim in Portage Bay:
As the boat got closer, the officer could see the fear in the man’s eyes as he struggled to stay above water. (Sounds of gasping and coughing. ‘Help!’) The water was murky, making it impossible to see below the surface. (“Where is he?”) The officer dove into the water… again… and again… and again. The officer dove a fourth time. (“He’s got him!” “Just hang on!”) The officer carried the man to shore. After the officer performed CPR, the man revived, coughing and gasping for breath. (“All clear!”) The officer reassured him that he was safe, that the worst was over. There are many ways to protect and serve the city of Seattle. Find yours.
PubliCola has reached out to SPD to find out how much the ads cost and will update this post if we hear back. Last month, at Mayor Bruce Harrell’s request, the city council approved an $800,000 increase to Copacino Fujikado’s contract, which runs through the end of this year.
3. The Martin Luther King, Jr. County Labor Council—the central body of labor organizations in King County—just adopted a resolution opposing a slate of legislation that would crack down on drug users and sex workers by reinstating anti-loitering laws and creating zones where their mere presence would be grounds for arrest and gross misdemeanor charges.
Councilmember Cathy Moore has proposed legislation that would reinstate an old law against “loitering for purpose of prostitution” that would make it easier for police to question, search and arrest women they suspect of being sex workers; the bill would also create a new “Stay Out of Areas of Prostitution” zone from which judges could ban people who are accused of participating in the sex trade; although prostitution and patronizing a prostitute are misdemeanors, anyone caught violating a SOAP order could be charged with a gross misdemeanor, which carries a maximum penalty of 364 days in jail. The council will also consider legislation establishing similar zones for people caught violating the city’s misdemeanor laws against using or possessing drugs while in public.
The resolution says that SODA and SOAP orders “directly impact freedom of movement, public accommodation, equitable access to resources, and due process by way of restricting people who have been accused of drug or prostitution offenses from certain areas of the city,” and that spending limited city resources to arrest and jail sex workers and drug users could divert funding from already underpaid nonprofit workers “who use evidence based strategies like harm-reduction, housing first, and permanent supportive housing.”
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.”
Councilmember Cathy Moore, with City Attorney Ann Davison
1. Late last Friday afternoon, City Councilmember Cathy Moore announced in her newsletter that in response to public feedback, she plans to amend her proposal to revive the Aurora Avenue “Stay Out of Areas of Prostitution” zone so that only sex buyers and pimps are subject to the orders.
Anyone arrested for patronizing a sex worker or promoting loitering for the purposes of prostitution could receive a SOAP order that requires them to stay out of an area extending several blocks east and west of Aurora between N 85th St. and N 145th St.; if police caught them inside the area, they could be charged with an additional gross misde,meanor for violating the SOAP order.
The change would remove a part of the proposed new law—which also reinstates a misdemeanor, prostitution loitering—that organizations that work with sex workers regard as highly problematic, from groups that argue for decriminalization to organizations that consider all sex work exploitative.
Audrey Baedke, the co-founder of Real Escape from the Sex Trade (REST), said her organization considers anyone who has traded sex for something of value, such as money or drugs, to be a survivor. But on this issue, REST—which Baedke said does not take official policy positions, such as endorsing legislation—agrees with groups that support decriminalizing and destigmatizing sex work: “SOAP does not have benefits to survivors.”
SOAP orders (and similar Stay Out of Drug Areas orders, for people accused of drug-related felonies) became common in Seattle in the 1990s, and at one point the two types of zones expanded to cover nearly half the city. Baedke, who started REST 15 years ago, said that in the past, women who got SOAP orders “would get a charge on their record … and in our experience, their trafficker would not support them to do diversion, so they would move to Pac Highway,” south of Seattle, or stay in the area and get arrested over and over.
“Will this move people out of the area? Yes. Will it help victims? Not as it’s written,” Baedke said. “Sure, you can move this off Aurora, but it doesn’t get rid of the problem. If you’re not okay with it happening on you street, I hope you’re not okay with it happening online or somewhere else.”
The proposal apparently still includes the prostitution loitering law, which lowers the burden of proof for police to stop women and others they suspect of being sex workers. During public comment last week, sex workers and people who live near Aurora described being stopped by police when simply going about their business because they “looked like” sex workers. According to the 2018 Reentry Work Group report that led to the decision to repeal the loitering law, such laws disproportionately impact “cisgender and transgender women of color.”
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2. The council is currently on recess, and the loitering, SOAP, and Stay Out of Drug Area laws remain among the items they left unaddressed before leaving; another is Initiative 137, the social housing measure. The council decided not to put the measure, which would raise payroll taxes on employers on salaries above $1 million, on the November ballot, instead bumping it to next February; the council plans to put a competing measure that would take funds from the existing housing levy on that ballot, but did not complete that work either before going on recess.
The council said one reason they had to delay I-137 until a less favorable date for the initiative was that initiative supporters took too long to turn in signatures and get their measure qualified for the ballot, which they did on July 23.
A look at recent history is instructive: In 2021, when supporters of Compassion Seattle—a measure that would have required the city to spend 12 percent of its budget on human services while strengthening the city’s authority to sweep encampments—qualified for the ballot on July 28, the council placed it on the November ballot the following Monday, August 1. (Weeks later, a superior court judge struck the measure from the ballot.)
When the council returns from recess, the 2025 budget (and the projected $260 million budget deficit) will consume most of their time; as part of that budget, Moore has said she’ll propose unspecified funding for a “receiving center” for sex workers trying to leave the industry.
3. Nearly three months after Mayor Bruce Harrell removed him as chief, former Seattle Police Department chief Adrian Diaz is still classified as Police Chief and being paid more than $28,000 a month despite the fact that he was officially replaced by Interim Police Chief Sue Rahr in May. According to internal SPD records, Diaz’ “job code” is “Seattle Police Chief.”
UPDATE: According to SPD, Diaz’ time cards show that he has been working full-time, but he is still technically on leave; SPD Chief Operating Officer Brian Maxey said Diaz “has recorded time other than medical leave for hours spent cooperating in litigation or other investigative matters, at the request of the City, all of which is consistent with his current leave.”
By the end of August, Diaz will have made $84,000 during the three months since he was removed as police chief. Rahr makes slightly more than Diaz, so the annual compensation for both of the SPD officials being paid as “chief” is nearly $700,000. Under ordinary procedure, a chief who is removed from that position would have to return to their previous rank, which for Diaz is that of lieutenant. Following this rule would reduce Diaz’ salary significantly, but his base salary (not counting any overtime) would still be more than $200,000.
A sad spectacle played out at Seattle City Hall today, as council members who support a crackdown on sex workers made a series of baseless promises to people who live and own businesses on and around Aurora Ave. North. Many of these residents expressed understandable concern about a recent surge in gun violence in the area, but blamed it on sex workers and “pimps fighting over turf.”
Others argued that all or most of the women working on Aurora are victims of trafficking who would benefit from the city’s support, in the form of services after arrest, to escape their abusers.
And many simply expressed disgust at the visible presence of sex workers in the area, saying they could no longer walk outdoors because of scantily clad women, condoms, and “human waste,” which is also a common complaint about unsheltered people who lack access to toilets.
Council members did not address the points made by sex workers, advocates, and experts on sex trafficking who spoke against the bill and asked for the council to engage with them before adopting legislation that will impact them directly. They did respond to supporters of the legislation, assuring them repeatedly that the new laws targeting sex workers will reduce gun violence and eliminate sex work along Aurora once and for all, while giving victims of sex trafficking and exploitation abundant “off ramps” to escape the sex trade.
Finally, Moore claimed, police would have “the ability to approach and inquire and talk about, ‘how do we get you into services’?” Finally, Moore told groups that provide services for sex workers, the city would be able to “provide the tools to go after the buyers and the pimps, and to provide services, off-ramps, and the collaboration, the money that you need, to do the work that you are doing on a shoestring right now.” Finally, gun violence will become a thing of the past, as would-be sex workers are “deterred” by the threat of punishment and pimps find themselves out of a job.
None of these claims is based in fact. The legislation would do nothing to address gun violence, which is already a felony for which the police have full authority to make arrests. It doesn’t address sex trafficking, which is also a felony, beyond asserting, in a lengthy preamble, that the “intent” of the legislation is to stop it from happening. And it creates no “off-ramps,” and provides no money, to anyone working to help sex workers or victims of sex trafficking, saying only that police “should” attempt to divert people to programs when possible, without identifying or funding these unidentified programs.
Substantively, the proposed law would make it easier for police to arrest people they believe are “loitering” in order to engage in sex work. Prostitution is already illegal, as is paying for sex, and the city attorney already has the authority to prosecute people for either crime; felony sex trafficking is handled by the King County Prosecutor. The reinstated loitering law would simply lower the bar for police to search and arrest suspected sex workers—allowing police to target people who engage in behaviors such as waving, asking someone if they’re a cop, or “engag[ing] passersby in conversation,” rather than conducting a lengthy, expensive sting.
The Stay Out of Areas of Prostitution (SOAP) orders, which are part of the same bill, would also do nothing to help victims or address gun violence. Instead, it would empower the Seattle Municipal Court to banish people from hundreds of blocks around Aurora as a form of probation or a condition of their release from jail, pushing them into other areas. The bill would establish a new crime, a gross misdemeanor, for anyone who violates a SOAP order, even if they haven’t been convicted of the underlying misdemeanor crime.
Nearly 140 people signed up to speak about the legislation Tuesday morning; Kettle cut off public comment after about an hour and a half, when just over half the people who signed up had a chance to speak. (Not to be thwarted, many of them stuck around until the 2:00 council meeting and expressed their opposition then). Then he handed the floor to Moore, who showed an eight-minute video featuring supporters of her legislation, surveillance video showing unidentified women who Moore said were “commercially sexually exploited,” and video of several gun battles that sent the sound of gunshots ricocheting loudly throughout council chambers. The sudden, ear-splitting gunfire was an unpleasant surprise, as Moore didn’t warn the audience—which included many people who testified they had been traumatized by gunshots—that it was coming.
After this lurid display, Moore introduced a panel to speak in favor of her proposal—a group that included Kirkland real estate broker Kristine Moreland, who runs a controversial group called The More We Love. PubliCola has written extensively about The More We Love and Moreland, who originally performed private encampments sweeps at a rate of $515 for each person removed and now holds the sole contract for all homeless outreach in Burien. Moreland didn’t bring up her work in Burien, instead describing The More We Love as “an anti-sex trafficking organization” and talking about the need for more funding for supportive services for victims of trafficking.
Moore appears to have gone to great lengths to eliminate any suggestion that her legislation could have negative consequences from the official council record. As Ashley Nerbovig reported in the Stranger, she took the highly unusual step of removing references to the potential unintended consequences of her legislation from a council staff analysis, which is supposed to be assiduously neutral.
The language Moore removed included a reference to my reporting on the city’s ongoing use of undercover stings, which primarily target men of color, especially immigrants, who often plead guilty rather than exposing themselves to a risky criminal trial. In an interview, an experienced public defender said she had never had a white, English-speaking client charged with sexual exploitation (the city’s term for patronizing a prostitute).
Moore promised that as part of the fall budget process, she will propose funding for a new “receiving center” for sex workers who need services and help leaving the sex trade.
Reality check: The city is facing a $260 million budget deficit, and so far, the only programs that have received significant new funding are police recruitment initiatives. My prediction is that after the council adopts these new laws criminalizing sex work, they’ll end up giving $85,000 to an existing group such as REST or The More We Love and calling it a “pilot receiving center.”
Ironically, after making outlandish claims about a bill that makes gauzy, unfunded promises about future diversion and prevention programs, a majority of the council later voted against legislation from Tammy Morales that would release the full $20 million collected to pay for youth mental health programs this year—justifying their vote by claiming supporters of the funding failed to understand the perils of voting for legislation that lacks a detailed funding plan.
“It is problematic to be making promises to communities that we very well know we cannot fulfill, because what you saw today is what happens— people leave here and children leave here thinking that we are not supporting them… and that is very upsetting to me,” Councilmember Maritza Rivera said. “We shouldn’t be making promises to community that we know we cannot deliver in an act of symbolism, because community doesn’t understand the difference between a symbolic vote and an actual vote.” She could have been talking about the council.
As the city council prepares to reinstate an old law against “prostitution loitering” and establish off-limits zones for people accused of being sex workers, advocates say the proposed laws will not only harm the people they purport to protect but won’t accomplish their primary goal: “Cleaning up” areas like Aurora Avenue, where the sex trade has persisted for decades.
The legislation, along with a similar law reinstating the crime of “drug loitering” and establishing new Stay Out Drug Areas zones for people accused of violating laws like the recently adopted ban on public drug use and possession, will be heard in the City Council’s Public Safety Committee at 9:30am today, Tuesday, August 13.
North Seattle Councilmember Cathy Moore announced her proposal to crack down on sex work, which she’d been working on since last spring, earlier this month. The first part of Moore’s legislation would reinstate a law against misdemeanor prostitution “loitering,” or street sex work, that was overturned after an official city task force recommended getting rid of it in 2017. Under this law, police would again be empowered to arrest anyone who “remains in a public place and intentionally solicits, induces, entices, or procures another to commit an act of prostitution.”
The second half of the legislation would create an official Stay Out of Areas of Prostitution (SOAP) zone encompassing hundreds of square blocks around Aurora Ave. N. and empower police to banish anyone suspected of engaging in sex work from the area. Police could then charge suspected sex workers with a gross misdemeanor for violating their SOAP order, whether or not they’re ever convicted of the underlying misdemeanor offense. The law would also give police the power to stop and frisk anyone they believe is a sex worker and charge them for additional offenses, such as drug possession, if they find anything incriminating during their search.
People who “promote prostitution loitering,” which police are supposed to decide based on ill-defined “particular circumstances of each case,” could be charged with a gross misdemeanor, but would not—unlike sex workers—be subject to banishment.
Emi Koyama, an advocate with the Coalition for Rights and Safety for People in the Sex Trade, said repealing the prostitution and drug loitering laws was one of the few concrete victories to come out of the Black Lives Matter movement in Seattle. “We never actually tried defunding and investing in community the way the movement wanted. … On the other hand, we tried exclusion zones in the past, and it wasn’t working, it was causing harm, and it was racist —that’s why they got rid of it.”
Jenna Robert, who worked as an assistant city attorney under Pete Holmes, said Holmes stopped prosecuting most prostitution loitering cases and issuing SOAP orders before the Reentry Work Group—voted into existence by then-Councilmember Bruce Harrell’s public safety committee— finalized its recommendations because Holmes was convinced that the laws made it harder for sex workers to access services, which are concentrated on Aurora, and did nothing to reduce sex work or address trafficking.
“I think the Reentry Work group did a really good job of bringing up the harms that [the loitering law] caused,” Robert said. “We stopped charging even before it came off the books… so I thought, ‘I can’t imagine that anyone would ever put this this back on the books,’ because it’s so harmful to the people it’s supposed to protect.”
In its final report, issued in 2018, the Reentry Work Group concluded that the prostitution loitering law, adopted in 1973, “targets individuals in the commercial sex industry, a group already at high risk for trafficking, abuse, and other exploitation”—particularly Black women and other cis and trans women of color, who were disproportionately targeted under the law. “Bringing them into the criminal legal system will only exacerbate any underlying unmet needs and exposes them to further physical and sexual harm caused by incarceration.”
Jazmyn Clark, the ACLU of Washington’s Smart Justice Policy program director, told PubliCola that the proposed new penalties for drug users and sex workers “expand police power to harass our vulnerable neighbors and continue the failed war on drugs. Rather than provide support and resources, these zones push people to the margins of society and further stigmatize individuals struggling with substance use disorder or engaging in sex work.”
In a letter to City Attorney Ann Davison and the city council, Clark wrote that the laws also raise constitutional concerns because they deprive people who have never been convicted of a prostitution or drug-related crime of their right to free travel and association. The diversion group Purpose Dignity Action has described this aspect of the SOAP and SODA laws as a prohibition on “future otherwise-lawful conduct–just being present in a place, and doing nothing wrong.”
Proponents of the legislation, including business owners and homeowners near Aurora, have said their primary goal is to reduce gun violence and sex trafficking in the area— claiming, for instance, that a number of recent shootings were caused by “turf wars” between pimps in the area. Moore recently said this was one of her reasons for proposing the law, citing SPD as the source for her information.
But advocates for sex workers question that claim. “If it’s actually a turf war, we would see a drastic decline in the number of people who are [on Aurora], Koyama said. “The women won’t feel safe … and the buyers won’t come either if they realize there’s a huge risk.”
Koyama notes that supporter of the law who see women as an “access point” to fight against felony crimes, like murder and assault, are treating sex workers as people “outside the community”—saying, in effect, “‘We are just a peaceful neighborhood; it’s other people who are completely different from us who cause these problems.” During the press announcement, Moore, Kettle, and Davison repeatedly cited overwhelming support from “the community,” referring to the overwhelmingly white property and business owners who showed up to support the legislation.
Madison Zack-Wu, an organizer with Strippers Are Workers, said that while the legislation includes a lot of references to sex trafficking and gun violence, the policy language “really just focuses on criminalizing and policing sex workers and people in the sex trade.”
“When it comes to being at risk for trafficking, the main cause of vulnerability for trafficking is financial instability and poverty,” Zack-Wu said. “This bill focuses on pushing people away from community and into more marginalized areas. And that also increases trafficking,” because they have less access to communities that help keep them safe.
When Backpage, an online marketplace for sex workers and buyers, was shut down in 2018, many sex workers went from working online to more dangerous street work, and “even people that disagree with us acknowledge that it was really bad,” Koyoma said. “When conditions get worse, people have less bargaining power. More people get banished to more dangerous areas and more dangerous acts—people have to say yes to things they wouldn’t otherwise.”
Advocates also note that arresting and charging people for prostitution upends their lives and makes it harder to get jobs, access services, and find stable housing. Amarinthia Torres, director of the Coalition Ending Gender-Based Violence, said, “I think, honestly, that sometimes we underestimate the scope and reach of the criminal legal system—that one arrest can really follow a person for a long time, and it can follow them into all aspects of their life for the long term. People who have had that happen to them understand the way it can hang over your life and the choices you have access to.”
Historically, banishment zones and loitering laws have not been effective at reducing exploitation of sex workers, decreasing violent crime, or even “improving” the areas that are off-limits to sex workers or drug users, according to the 2010 book Banished, by Katherine Beckett and Steve Herbert, a sweeping study of exclusion zones in Seattle. One major reason, the scholars wrote, is that people simply returned to the places where they knew people and feel safest, ignoring off-limits orders even when it meant going to jail repeatedly and racking up thousands of dollars in fines.
“Most people do return to the neighborhoods that they’ve been banned from,” Beckett told PubliCola. “[The vast majority] said it didn’t change where they went; they just accepted that they could be picked up on those charges and then lived with that. It didn’t accomplish what anyone was hoping to accomplish.”
Yet the city council, and Moore in particular, seem convinced that this time, everything will turn out different. During the press conference earlier this month, counncil public safety committee chair Bob Kettle said “the focus needs to be on those carrying out the sex trafficking and profiting off the abuse of women. For those caught up in this sad situation, we need to find diversion and support options. The goal here is not to punish those who are also victims, but instead to offer an opportunity to walk away and get help.”
Yet the legislation proposes no new diversion programs or funding, nor does it lay out a process by which arrested sex workers would “walk away and get help.” And if the goal is for police to become a conduit for sex workers to “escape” their current jobs (a dubious prospect, but one the council and city attorney have embraced), there is nothing whatsoever stopping cops from approaching and speaking to people they believe are sex workers now, without arresting them.
Beckett says people have a tendency to forget past failures and grab for easy-seeming solutions, even those that have failed in the recent past. “Our memories are fairly short-term. We forget that we’ve already tried all this,” Beckett said. “It’s also what we want to think is true. We want to believe there are cheap, easy fixes to structural problems that require actual investments.”
Councilmember Cathy Moore speaks about her legislation on Thursday, with City Attorney Ann Davison in the background
By Erica C. Barnett
As PubliCola previewed yesterday, City Councilmember Cathy Moore introduced legislation on Thursday to reinstate a law banning “prostitution loitering” that was overturned in 2020 by a unanimous vote of the city council, with the support of then-mayor Jenny Durkan.
The legislation also creates a new Stay Out of Prostitution Area zone that encompasses between N. 85th Street and Seattle’s northern border at n. 145th, along with the blocks immediately to the east and west of Aurora. Like the Stay Out of Drug Area legislation City Attorney Ann Davison announced this morning, the SOAP law would allow the city to issue trespass orders to people who have been arrested for being a sex worker or buying sex, even if they have not been convicted, and to charge and jail people who are caught inside the off-limits area.
Like the SODA proposal, Moore’s legislation creates a new gross misdemeanor—punishable by up to 364 days in jail and a $5,000 fine—for simply being caught inside the off-limits area which includes many social service agencies, recovery meeting locations, health care providers, and other services—not to mention places of legal employment. Aurora is also a bus corridor used by tens of thousands of people every day.
Under the proposal, which largely mimics the overturned law, a person could be found guilty of prostitution loitering, a misdemeanor, “if he or she remains in a public place and intentionally solicits, induces, entices, or procures another to commit prostitution.” The council also repealed a similar law banning “drug loitering.”
Moore and other elected officials, including Davison and council public safety committee chair Bob Kettle, said the law would help end gun violence in North Seattle, which Kettle has said is directly tied to “pimps fighting over turf,” they did not explain how they had come to this conclusion. Nor did they provide evidence for their claim that pimps and sex workers are targeting children at Cascadia Elementary School, along with middle and high school students.
“We … need to give police officers additional tools to disrupt this violence, to disrupt the sex trade that’s affecting girls as young as 12 years old,” Moore said.
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In comments that were remarkably similar to her comments about the proposed new SODA zones, Davison said banning sex workers from Aurora was a way of caring for them. “We will not overlook these women and girls any longer,” Davison said. “We will not act like they are invisible and unseen. We will say, ‘You are worth it. We care enough to act and to intervene and to disrupt this criminal enterprise of trafficking women and girls.'”
Prostitution is already illegal, as is buying sex; sex trafficking is a felony.
Moore said her intent was to provide “public safety” to the businesses and residents around Aurora, and to “shut down the track, the historical track that has been Aurora,” an area where sex workers have congregated for decades. Prostitution may not go away entirely, but “they will no longer be here, which is the main thing that we’re looking for— to create safety for this community.” Kettle added that “the result” of the previous council’s vote to overturn the anti-loitering law “is what we’re seeing on Aurora.”
The legislation proposes a no-go zone for sex workers that extends from 85th to Seattle’s northern border.
Although officials who spoke in favor of the new law on Thursday said they preferred to focus on sex buyers, and to offer services for the “victims of sex trafficking” on Aurora, the new legislation focuses primarily on sex workers and includes no new services to help women and others who want to get out of sex work. It says that “diversion” should be the “preferred alternative” for sex workers caught violating the proposed new laws, but does not specify what the city considers “diversion” or propose new funding for diversion programs.
Officials focused on the need to target sex buyers with criminal sanctions, such as fines and jail—a strategy the city has tried again and again, without measurable success, justifying it with the argument that sex work is always exploitative. Davison said it might be acceptable to divert men to sex buyer education classes, AKA “john school,” on a first offense, “but after that we need you to understand you’re contributing to this criminal enterprise continuing and growing, and then aiding to the escalating gun violence that’s associated with it.”
Davison has repeatedly prosecuted men for soliciting sex on Aurora, and the Seattle Police Department pays overtime for cops to run elaborate sting operations that usually net an arrest or two. According to defense attorneys, most of the men arrested for solicitation on Aurora, like the sex workers themselves, are men of color, and a disproportionate number are immigrants.
The council amended the language of the law against buying sex from “patronizing a prostitute” to “sexual exploitation” in 2015, arguing that anyone engaged in sex work is “being forced to use their bodies in the commerce of prostitution,” according to then-council member Bruce Harrell.)
As with the proposed new SODA zones, judges would be able to ban anyone arrested for prostitution from entering the SOAP area even if they are never convicted of a crime—creating a situation in which someone who is found not guilty of misdemeanor prostitution loitering could be charged with a more serious crime for being caught inside the SOAP zone.
The council repealed the laws against prostitution loitering and drug loitering after the Seattle Reentry Workgroup, established to come up with recommendations to help formerly incarcerated people reenter their communities, recommended repealing both laws on the grounds that they disproportionately harm people of color and that involvement in the criminal legal system “exacerbates already unmet needs.” Former city attorney Pete Holmes stopped prosecuting prostitution loitering even before the repeal.
PubliCola reported on Scott’s appointment to head the CPC last week. Scott was supposed to serve as a bridge between current Executive Director Cali Ellis, who is on administrative leave, and whoever fills the position next, whether that’s Ellis again or a new director. Several CPC staffers told PubliCola they left the agency because of Ellis’ management style, which they called authoritarian and condescending.
The change would remove a part of the proposed new law—which also reinstates a misdemeanor, prostitution loitering—that organizations that work with sex workers regard as 
