Seattle Leaders Said “Stay Out” Orders Would Reduce Gun Violence and Sex Trafficking. So Far, They've Issued Five.
The men were all nabbed during Seattle police stings, which can involve as many as 20 officers, including a "decoy" posing as a sex worker.
By Erica C. Barnett
When City Attorney Ann Davison and Councilmember Cathy Moore proposed, and the City Council passed, laws reinstating the crime of "prostitution loitering" and empowering the city to issue "Stay Out of Areas of Prostitution" orders banishing people from Aurora Ave. N, they did so on the pretext of addressing gun violence in North Seattle.
By prosecuting men who patronize sex workers and threatening them with arrest for merely venturing inside the vast SOAP zone, Davison and City Councilmember Cathy Moore insisted, the city would reduce the number of shootings in the area, which, they said, are driven by pimps fighting over territory. The SOAP and prostitution loitering laws would, Moore claimed "address…commercial sexual exploitation in this area, and associated gun violence" by deterring men from patronizing sex workers on Aurora.
More than seven months after the law passed, however, the city has only issued five SOAP orders. All but one are against indigent men who are represented by public defenders. In most cases, to qualify as indigent, a person must make less than 125 percent of the federal poverty level, or just over $24,000 a year, or demonstrate that they have no ability to pay any amount for an attorney. Only one of the SOAP defendants is white, and one required an English interpreter.
Overall, since October, Davison's office has filed charges against a total of nine men for prostitution loitering or "sexual exploitation," the city's term for patronizing a sex worker—a surprisingly low number, given the priority Davison and the city council placed on passing the new laws as quickly as possible last year.
A spokesman for Davison's office, Tim Robinson, said the City Attorney's Office (CAO) had "discovered a problem where Seattle Municipal Court [personal recognizance] screeners were releasing suspects arrested on prostitution-related charges without a hearing date. That delayed the ability of the CAO to request a SOAP order." In the future, he said,"we expect to see an increase in the number of SOAP orders issued in a timely manner," Robinson said.
Court records show five cases in which a man arrested for a prostitution-related offense was released on personal recognizance without a SOAP order; three of those men later got SOAPed and are among the five banned from Aurora.
All five of the SOAP cases are currently pending, meaning that the men are prohibited from entering the SOAP zone even though they haven't admitted to, or been convicted of, any crime. The zone encompasses Aurora Ave. N between N. 85th St. and the city line at N. 145th, plus the equivalent of three city blocks on each side of the street.
Seattle Municipal Court Judge Damon Shadid, who issued two of the five SOAP orders (the others were issued by Judge Faye Chess and Pro Tem Judge Thomas Zilly), said he considers requests for SOAP orders on a case-by-case basis.
"SOAP orders can be an effective tool for judges, but they should not be used arbitrarily or automatically when an individual is charged with a prostitution-related crime," said Shadid, who was speaking for himself as a judge, not the court as a whole. "Relevant factors for a SOAP order might include previous convictions for prostitution-related crimes, previous convictions for domestic violence related crimes, ensuring the defendant is able to shop and work without impediment, and whether the defendant receives services in the area."
Of the five men who received SOAP orders, three had been arrested previously for attempting to pay for sex and had the charge dismissed, according to court records.
Because each police sting on sex buyers involves as many as 20 officers—including multiple decoy officers, teams of arresting officers, and multiple surveillance teams that can serve as backups—the price tag for each of these arrests is significant. (SPD previously declined to estimate the cost of each sting.) Before going undercover, officers have to go through a two-day "decoy school” to learn the “language” of sex work, act out various scenarios, and practice hand signals to let observing officers know if they’re in distress and when it’s time to swoop in for an arrest.
Police reports describe the events leading up to each man's arrest. In one sting, two men approached an undercover officer outside the Jack-In-the-Box on Aurora, saying they had just gotten off work and wanted to "shower before," according to the police report. In another, a man (who required an interpreter in court because he is not fluent in English) drove up and asked the officer—who was dressed in "a leopard print jacket, neon green tank top, hot pink mid-thigh length skirt and thigh high gray suede boots," according to the police report—if she was a cop. When she said she wasn't, he asked if he could touch her breasts, giggled, and told her he was "scared."
Another man, who was arrested in the Lowe's parking lot, later told a judge that he lived inside the SOAP zone, making it hard for him to avoid the area. A fifth man asked how much an undercover officer charged for sex, then "responded by saying 'hum' and something not intelligible,' then drove off before police arrested him.
Whatever you think of sex work (a large majority of Americans think it should be legal), it's hard to see how arresting these men, holding them in jail, prosecuting them for misdemeanors, and banning them from Aurora accomplishes the city's ostensible goal of eliminating sex trafficking and gun violence in the area. It's a bit like going after cartels by arresting people who use drug outdoors because they're homeless—the city is targeting the lowest-level offenders, those financially least able to defend themselves, instead of working with county and state prosecutors to apprehend the people actually committing serious crimes.
“These charges and orders have not—and will not—stop sex trafficking or gun violence. Experience shows that these policies fail to achieve their stated goals and, in fact, exacerbate the very issues they claim to address” said Matt Sanders, Interim Director of the King County Department of Public Defense.
Pointing to UW professor Katherine Beckett's book condemning Seattle's earlier use of of drug and prostitution "stay out" zones, Banished, Sanders said Seattle's earlier experience with SOAP zones has already demonstrated that they don't work and make sex workers more vulnerable to violence and exploitation.
"If the City genuinely seeks solutions to these complex issues, the path forward has already been clearly articulated by academics and service providers who testified before the City Council," Sanders said. "Effective strategies include improving access to emergency shelter paired with supportive services, increasing the availability of affordable housing, and providing economic support programs. These evidence-based approaches, not punitive and counterproductive SOAP orders, offer real hope for meaningful change.”
At a time of mass deportations and crackdowns on even legal immigrants, it's also noteworthy that, according to public defenders, most of the men who get busted for patronizing street sex workers are immigrants. White men have more discreet ways of buying sex, and they're more likely to be represented by private attorneys, rather than overworked public defenders.
Davison's office says SOAP orders and stings are part of a strategy "to try and establish an environment of accountability for human trafficking on Aurora. We want sex traffickers and buyers to believe that there is a reasonable likelihood they will be arrested and face meaningful consequences. SOAP orders are one component of that strategy to reduce human trafficking and the associated gun violence."