Councilmember Cathy Moore Says She'll Reintroduce Repealed Prostitution Loitering Law "In Short Order"

The previous council unanimously repealed the law on the recommendation of the city's Reentry Workgroup.

Police Chief Adrian Diaz, City Councilmember Cathy Moore, and King County Councilmember Rod Dembowski

By Erica C. Barnett

During a public safety-focused meeting at Bitter Lake Community Center on Thursday night, District 5 City Councilmember Cathy Moore said she will introduce legislation reinstating the old law against "prostitution loitering," which the previous city council passed unanimously and then-mayor Jenny Durkan signed, "in short order."

"The former council repealed the law against loitering for purposes of prostitution, and since that happened we have seen an absolute explosion in sex trafficking," Moore said. "Now, we can all have differences of opinion about whether prostitution is good or bad. But what I can tell you is that people are being trafficked, and that it's creating a tremendous amount of public disorder and unsafety. And so, we have got to address it. We have several tools; one is, we can reinstate the loitering law."

After pausing for a moment while the crowd applauded, cheered, and shouted "Yes!" repeatedly, Moore continued, saying that the point of reinstating the law would be to give police an opportunity to intercept sex trafficking victims, not to jail and prosecute the "mostly women, and mostly minors, who are victims themselves, many of whom have been prostituted since they were children."

The prostitution loitering law prohibited sex workers, described in one section of the law as "known prostitutes," from being in any public place—notably Aurora Ave. N., where sex workers congregate, with the intent to "commit prostitution." 

Prostitution itself is still illegal, but SPD has only made 25 prostitution arrests since 2019. Instead, the police and City Attorney's Office have enthusiastically arrested and prosecuted sex buyers, who are overwhelmingly men of color, according to attorneys who represent these defendants in court.

Speaking to PubliCola after the meeting, Moore said her "hope" for a reinstated loitering law "is really just to give officers the authority to approach and begin a conversation and to look at opportunities for diversion," including to safe houses, "and to make sure they're not being trafficked."

Amy Smith, director of the city's CARE department, which operates 911, told PubliCola she didn't think sex work "should be treated like a crime," but said the issue is "really complex. ...We've got to figure out what is the mechanism to get [sex workers] indoors and safe and then rehabilitate them. ... Thirty years ago, they used to have a mechanism to get someone in and to try to get them to testify against the pimp, and all of that's gone away."

The Seattle Police Department's policy manual does empower police to initiate "social contacts" with people in public spaces without detaining or arresting them.

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 amount to "criminalization of poverty." 

Before the unanimous 2020 vote, bill cosponsor Alex Pedersen said that repealing "problematic laws on our books, such as these loitering laws, [is] a small but important step that this city council can take" to reduce the "disproportionate impacts of our law enforcement system on Black, Indigenous, and other people of color."