Focusing on "Johns" Doesn't Reduce Street Sex Work, Disproportionately Targets Men of Color, PubliCola Analysis Shows

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

There's no evidence that banishing sex buyers from Aurora and other "areas of prostitution" has had any impact, either, our analysis shows.

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considering legislation sponsored by Councilmember Cathy Moore (D-5, North Seattle) that would reinstate a recently repealed law against "prostitution loitering," which the former city council repealed in 2020 in response to recommendations the city's Reentry Work Group made in 2018.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

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 all they did was complain about how bad things were. It's hard to parse it, because they didn’t think it was working, and they thought that it could work."

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

*Apocryphally.