A person would have to be impossibly naive, or just plain stupid, to believe that a law permitting arrest of sex workers is designed to help sex workers

"In offering none of the help these workers actually need, the bill may only push some people off Aurora and into deeper, darker, far riskier shadows. "

It will actually enable customers to more easily patronize the businesses along Aurora and for people to live peacefully in their homes nearby, which is far more helpful to everybody. The riskier shadows are already on the sidewalks.

"At a press conference last Thursday, where Moore announced her bill alongside Davison and Council Member Bob Kettle, Moore justified the legislation as a way to intervene in sex workers’ relationships with their pimps, or traffickers."

Well I'm not a Certified Tough on Crime Seattle Councilmember(TM) but hear me out:

How about doing this by arresting pimps and traffickers?

Somebody needs to explain a model where the sex trade is legal for adults to engage in and regulated to protect workers that doesn't also involve enforcing the law against unlicensed, unregulated operators, particularly those engaged in the trafficking of minors.

3: But how? The pimps are off in their cars driving around talking to their girls but not doing anything to call attention to themselves. SPD probably doesn't have the budget for undercover cops to work with informants to bust pimps.

@5: SPD"s budget is $385M dollars. If they aren't capable of bog standard basic proactive police work what are they even doing, and what in the name of god are we paying for?

5: Good catch. That should be "doesn't have enough officers for undercover work".

@7: SPD has enough officers to handle (2023) 5,453 noise complaints, 13,854 person in crisis calls, 3,280 general hazard calls, 5,000 graffiti calls, 2,500 missing or sick person calls, 2,000 lost or found property calls, and somewhere on the order of 20,000 after the fact property theft report filing calls.

These are tasks that other departments (including those that compete for hiring with us like Denver and San Jose) have been offloading to civilians for years.

Any shortage of officer time to do old fashioned proactive police work is 100% of the department's own making.

Sex workers (and taxpayers) will suffer for it, and SPD is doing the real bad guys a solid by needlessly burning officer time on this stuff by refusing to civilianize.

8: The data totals you listed doesn't negate my point. A lot of that is just data processing.

@9: What? Those are officers dispatched to calls and logged out of service for the duration of each.

@5 if SPD are too busy to catch actual pimps and human traffickers they're way too busy to make BS loitering busts of their victims. Or drive shoplifters to a jail in Des Moines for a 24 hour timeout, or any of the other petty nonsense this Council wants them to do instead of solving serious crimes.

Legalize prostitution at the state level and let the counties or cities decide whether or not to allow it. Require safe, regulated brothels and/or official red-light districts. (Pike/Pine from Broadway to I-5, for example). Or wait for some psycho to start killing prostitutes (again).

That cleans up the streets and gets the cops out of the picture. That is what the "advocates" should be advocating for. And don't tell me it's impossible, it's not 1950.

@5 The tough on crime council has said they don't want female officers doing undercover work. for their own safety. I can't argue with that.

Seattle's libertarian vibes shine through on this, though. There is far more concern over the loss of business/property rights and real estate values than on the people working the streets, whether they are willing or unwilling participants.

How would one go about legalizing this? It's not like Seattle has no history of legalized or at least openly acknowledged prostitution. If sex work is work, how does this city allow it to be performed safely and non-coercively?

https://duckduckgo.com/?q=seattle+history+of+prostitution&t=osx&ia=web is right here if anyone wants to wade down memory lane: protective footwear is recommended.

local curmudgeon dear, Seattle owes its very existence not to our "founding families" (Denny's, Yesler's, Mercer's, etc) but to anonymous prostitutes. They were here when the railroads weren't. They were here to help provide comfort to the Alaska Gold Rush enthusiasts while the rest of the Seattle business community was just there to fleece those suckers.

I say we honor our sex workers by legitimizing the industry.