The following is an article by Ashley Nerbovig, published by The Stranger on August 21, 2024, about proposed solutions to the public safety issues along Aurora Ave N.
Aurora Residents Deserve Better Than Seattle’s Old Ideas
Some Aurora Residents Want Creative Solutions to Gun Violence, Not More Arrests of Sex Workers
Last week, Seattle City Council Member Cathy Moore introduced a bill to reinstate the City’s prostitution loitering laws and to create a seven-mile prostitution banishment zone along Aurora Avenue North, also known as a Stay Out of Area Prostitution (SOAP) zone.
While Moore rallied a contingent of supporters for her bill at a public hearing last week, many anti-violence organizations, sex workers, and groups aligned with sex workers also turned out to speak. Those groups argued the bill would make sex work more dangerous on Aurora, do nothing to combat gun violence, and actually make it harder for people to leave the sex trade. That testimony changed the minds of some initial supporters, who now want to see Moore make amendments to the legislation.
In her newsletter last Friday, Moore promised to propose amendments to the bill, including one to exclude sex workers from court-ordered banishment from the SOAP zones. So far, she has not promised any amendments to eliminate the prostitution loitering law portion of the bill, which, she argues, the police need to separate sex workers from their supposed pimps and traffickers. That would mean police could still arrest a sex worker for prostitution loitering, release them, and then arrest them again if they return to work on Aurora. Some neighbors disagree with that approach, especially after Tuesday’s meeting.
A Change of Mind
For some neighbors, last week’s testimony helped them see those deep flaws in Moore’s bill.
A little less than two years ago, Mikel Mcdaniel moved into a house about a block from Aurora Avenue North, within the proposed SOAP zone. He had some reservations about the bill, but he showed up to testify in support last Tuesday. He said his motivation to support the bill came from hearing gunshots and dealing with aggressive people hanging around the neighborhood.
According to Seattle Police Department (SPD) data, reported gunshots increased in the last year along Aurora Avenue. During the council meeting, SPD Assistant Chief Tom Mahaffey said the two police beats that cover Aurora dealt with 46 reports of shots fired so far this year, compared to 23 incidents total in 2023. Citywide, the number of shots reported has reached about 476 so far in 2024, according to SPD. In 2023, shots reported reached 456.
As residents grew increasingly concerned about the possibility of a stray bullet barreling through a wall and killing someone, Mcdaniel said he and a loose group of a dozen or so neighbors banded together to try to build community and increase safety in the area. In an interview with The Stranger, he acknowledged that the group didn’t really care about the specific policy to address this issue, they just wanted something to curb the gun violence. Moore’s bill appeared to be something.
“This is not our top choice, but it seems like it's between this and nothing,” Mcdaniel said.
Despite his initial support, Mcdaniel never wanted the bill to hurt sex workers, especially those who work independently, or those who do the work by choice. His mother entered the sex trade for a little while when he was in high school, and Mcdaniel, who is now in his early 30s, called her work not ideal but “a hell of a lot better than being put out on the street.”
He viewed Moore’s bill as a way to help both neighbors and sex workers, thinking that cops could intervene and rescue women who traffickers had forced to enter the sex trade. But after hearing from multiple advocates and directly from sex workers, he changed his mind about the bill and now wants to see amendments. Until he had heard directly from sex workers, he hadn’t understood how much harm the law could cause them, he said.
Mcdaniel would prefer a bill that included funding for services and that excluded arrests for sex workers–even arrests with promises of diversion. He believes other neighbors in his group agree about the need for changes.
Aurora Sex Workers and Allies Speak Out
One of the sex workers who spoke at last Tuesday’s meeting included Ramona Collins, another person living within the SOAP zone. (The Stranger agreed to allow Collins to use a pseudonym, as she performs sex work and does some street-based work on Aurora from time to time.) Collins highly doubts the council wants to create a SOAP zone and prostitution loitering laws to help her, she said. If the council wanted to help her and keep her safe, they’d make sure that a full-time job paid her enough to afford a place to live in Seattle. She wouldn’t perform sex work if she made enough money to survive; it’s the need to pay rent, to eat, or to buy dog food that often prompts her decisions to try to “turn a trick,” she said.
Though survival keeps Collins in the profession, she stressed that sex workers aren’t a monolith, and they all have their own reasons for doing the work. Some prefer the flexibility it offers, and others struggle to find a legal 9-to-5 job because they can’t put “sex worker” under work history on a resume. Plus, people who exit sex work need mental health care and treatment for PTSD in a lot of cases. Even Collins, who has a master’s degree and some office work experience, said she’d struggle to work in an office after years of sex work.
Collins added that she imagined it would become even harder for her to leave the work if she had an arrest on her record.
If the council proposed a bill that funded housing, a universal basic income, and mental health treatment for anyone in sex work who wants to leave, then Collins would think the City wanted to help her. Instead, she sees the proposed law as a way to actually increase the chances of sex workers taking riskier, possibly more dangerous clients. Street-based sex workers have a limited amount of time to vet someone before they agree to drive off with them. If they’re afraid of catching a loitering charge, then they’re going to have to make that decision even faster, she said.
The way the bill could endanger these workers has pushed some neighbors to oppose Moore’s bill from the start, such as Denise Diskin. Diskin has lived within 50 to 100 feet of Aurora Avenue North since 2016, and her residence lies within the proposed SOAP zone. She doesn’t think that the neighborhood should be satisfied with a proposed solution that harms other people in order to keep residents such as her safe. She also doubts the bill can make the neighborhood safer. She imagines the SOAP zone may actually push sex work deeper into the residential neighborhoods because people don’t just disappear, Diskin said. The City has tried prosecuting and pushing sex workers around for years, and it doesn’t fundamentally change anything about Aurora, she said. She acknowledged that no one likes to live in a place where they constantly hear gunfire, but she called Moore’s proposal very ‘inside-the-box thinking.”
“I really respect my neighbors. I am raising a child in this neighborhood too … What we have to ask our legislators for are higher levels of creativity and more connections and services for the people who are at risk,” Diskin said.
Build the Wall
One of those more creative ideas to disrupt gun violence takes less of a punitive carceral approach and relies more on urban design. The proposal comes from Aurora Reimagined, a local coalition that outlined an idea to help stop drive-by shootings and cars driving fast through the neighborhoods.
The group wants the City to install eco-blocks to wall off access to most residential roads off of Aurora. The plan would essentially allow drivers to turn onto any block off of Aurora but not drive more than a block without hitting a wall.
Neighbors point to one precedent for this idea. The mayor’s office directed the Seattle Department of Transportation (SDOT) to install an eco-block barricade on 101st Street west of Aurora Ave North after multiple nearby shooting suspects used that intersection as an exit route. Since the barricade went up, the number of 911 calls coming from that block dropped from sometimes multiple in one night to just one in the last month, said Carlo Alcantara, a member of Aurora Reimagined, who lives near Licton Springs along Aurora.
Tom Lang, another member of Aurora Reimagined, who lived in the neighborhood for several years before recently moving, likes the idea because he doubts SPD has enough officers to patrol Aurora and make the loitering law and SOAP zone effective. He also thinks it’s a cheap and nimble way to try to disrupt the violence, as the City could remove the blocks if problems start to emerge.
The group has faced some resistance to the idea, though. Lang said the City raised concerns about emergency vehicles and work crew access. In an email, a spokesperson for the mayor acknowledged putting the eco-blocks on 101st Street to help reduce the gun violence and racing cars, but she did not immediately answer a question about why this wouldn’t work on other streets. A spokesperson for SDOT said they also could not immediately identify who might be working on a project regarding eco blocks but did point to some of the traffic calming measures the city plans to install along Aurora residential streets, including more speed humps, a healthy street along Fremont Avenue from 100th Street to 105th Street, and along 100th Street from Fremont Avenue to Linden Avenue.
The anti-violence and anti-trafficking groups have yet to take a strong position about the eco-blocks, though they’re still trying to determine if any downsides exist for sex workers in the area.
Accountable Communities Consortium (ACC) is an anti domestic and sexual violence organization that has opposed Moore’s loitering bill alongside dozens of other organizations. ACC Co-founder Shannon Perez-Darby said her group was open to exploring the benefits of the eco-blocks in the neighborhood. Some groups said they’d be open to supporting the blocks after a little more research. Other groups raised concerns about sex workers driving farther from Aurora with their customers; they said they wanted to hear some more input from sex workers before they voiced any opposition.
Immovably Anti-Sex Work
Of course, some neighbors want to see sex work on Aurora ended completely with little interest in how that harms the workers or where they go, and these neighbors seem unlikely to change their minds. During the public comment period of Tuesday’s meeting, more than 140 people signed up to deliver testimony, with about an even split between proponents and opponents of the bill. While some supporters talked about the need to save the women facing exploitation on Aurora Avenue and a desire to use the law to curb gun and other kinds of violence in the neighborhood, others talked about the visible sex work and their disgust for it.
One man said sex work makes women “a product when in fact, they’re priceless.” Several commenters brought up their children, and one woman mentioned that on their way home from school her kids play a game involving the way the sex workers dress, though she didn’t explain what the game entailed. She made it clear her big problem was seeing the sex workers and dealing with associated litter.
However, the bill does nothing to actually change the conditions that lead to sex work or allow people to leave the profession, according to the Greenlight Project, a peer-led mutual aid group that works with sex workers on Aurora. Project spokesperson Amber said the top three things people ask of the group when they want to leave sex work are: affordable housing, groceries, and domestic violence shelters. People working a minimum wage job in Seattle often cannot afford a two-bedroom apartment, and child care. Food assistance programs aren’t enough to feed families and pay for other household essentials, such as cleaning supplies, toilet paper, and other hygiene products. Most, if not all, domestic violence shelters in King County are at capacity and have a waitlist, Amber said.
If neighbors also want the bill to protect women on Aurora, Amber argued the proposed legislation actually puts them in more danger. For one thing, when this loitering bill went into place in the past, many workers felt they couldn’t walk together in groups because it made them more of a target for law enforcement. But walking in groups can help workers look out for one another and monitor for violent customers. The bill also criminalizes anyone who gives a sex worker a ride, which could create issues for service providers, such as the Greenlight Project, who frequently provide rides to their members, including picking them up to take them home. Also, Amber argued the law puts sex workers in a position where cops can threaten the workers with incarceration if they’re not willing to engage in diversion or testify that they’ve suffered abuse or trafficking, which not all workers deal with. An inherent power imbalance exists between cops and sex workers, which can increase the danger for the workers.
Beyond that, none of this guarantees any end to gun violence. Amber argued that shooting at people, prostitution, human trafficking, and other crimes the neighbors brought up are already illegal. The idea behind the law seems to be that cops will also manage to catch people committing drive-by shootings in the midst of arresting people who may be involved in the sex trade. However, during Tuesday’s council briefing, while discussing Shoreline’s SOAP zone Council Member Rob Saka asked SPD Assistant Chief Mahaffey whether he believed it had led to a decrease in shots-fired incidents on Shoreline’s portion of Aurora. Mahaffey said he didn’t know, but Shoreline Intergovernmental Relations Manager Jim Hammond told KUOW that the City hasn’t enforced its SOAP laws since about 2018, and that the bigger difference between the problems on Aurora south of 145th street has to do with urban design, not criminal penalties.
The “Block” Parties
In the meantime, Mcdaniels and his neighbors have started implementing a version of Aurora Reimagined’s eco-block proposal on their own.
A couple days after the public hearing, their neighborhood group barricaded the road at the entrance to Aurora and then set up some recycling bins and a tent at the end of their block. Fewer than a dozen mostly white residents sat in lawn chairs, drank some sparkling water, and enjoyed the whimsy of a little bubble machine. Mcdaniel said the group sits out there partly to meet other neighbors and partly to discourage people involved in the sex trade from driving through. He acknowledged that a lot of the sex work happens at night, and that their street closure permit ends at 9 pm, but, nevertheless, they want to be out there as a way to show that the neighbors exist and to “humanize” them a bit.
And Mcdaniel’s probably right; the event seemed to have a pretty limited effect, beyond putting out some NIMBY vibes. Over the course of an hour, four or five cars drove through the party. One was a neighbor en route to her driveway. Two men rode along in another, and one neighbor raised their eyebrows at me as if to signal that the two seemed suspicious. Finally, a man drove through with a woman sitting in the passenger seat, and then that same woman drove through in a different car with a different man in the car. As the cars passed through, the neighbors would ask the drivers if they were local. When the car with the woman passed, she appeared to flip off the neighbors after they asked if she lived on the block.
The block party also confused a driver who seemed to be delivering food. When the neighbors stopped him and asked if he was local, he said he was from Colombia. One of the neighbors asked him to go around the block in the future, and he nodded and smiled before driving around the recycling bins. Another neighbor then said they’ll consider writing the sign they used to block the road in Spanish next time.
Mcdaniel likes the idea of trying some creative urban designs. He supports the blockade idea from Aurora Reimagined, especially as a short-term solution to disrupt the gun violence while the City continues to try to create real services and exit ramps for the sex workers on Aurora Avenue North.
“I’ve been talking a lot about us neighbors, and having that self-centered view, because that’s what we’re scared of is more guns, more gun violence, but now that we’re all learning a lot about this situation, I also want to help the women out,” Mcdaniel said.