Seattle officials revisit ‘exclusion zones’ to disrupt drug activity, sex trafficking

Seattle City Attorney Ann Davison and members of the City Council are seeking new criminal penalties to ban certain people from zones of drug-related crime and prostitution.

They say the restrictions are needed to disrupt drug-related crime in downtown Seattle and the Chinatown-International District, as well as sex trafficking linked with recent gun violence on Aurora Avenue at North 85th Street and above.

Municipal court judges would have discretion to issue these no-go orders for people charged with or convicted of related offenses. Violating the order would be a gross misdemeanor.

Davison said Thursday her office supports creation of two new SODA (Stay Out of Drug Area) zones in the downtown core and the Chinatown-International District. These locations “are strategically created,” in that they are meant to allow people to still access addiction treatment and social services, she said.

Councilmember Bob Kettle, who chairs the council’s public safety committee, said Belltown was not chosen to become one of the exclusion zones, because of those priorities.

“Second and Bell, it’s a problematic area, but the Catholic Community Service providers are just outside of it,” he said.

Judges could issue the SODA orders for any cases "in which the court finds a nexus between the offense and illegal drug activity." That includes violations of the Controlled Substances Act and crimes ranging from assault to theft and criminal trespass in those zones.

Council President Sara Nelson said when these proposals come before the council in coming weeks, she’ll reiterate the argument she made when Seattle increased criminal penalties for public drug use last September — that keeping people charged with or convicted of drug-related crimes out of specific neighborhoods is not analogous to the “war on drugs.”

“We’re talking about misdemeanor, gross misdemeanor,” Nelson said. “The war on drugs threw people in jail on trumped-up felonies for years and years and years.”

Councilmember Cathy Moore’s proposal to address prostitution and related gun violence on Aurora Avenue aims to pass a suite of ordinances to target buyers of commercial sex, sex traffickers, and to create exclusion zones for “anyone arrested or convicted of a prostitution-related crime.”

But King County Public Defender Anita Khandelwal said these exclusion zones have been tried and discarded before — 20 years ago Seattle police enforced them through misdemeanor trespass charges. Laws prohibiting loitering related to drugs or prostitution were overturned by the Seattle City Council in 2020, based on recommendations from the Seattle Reentry Workgroup due to the "disastrous racialized impacts of these policies on Black and Indigenous communities and the growth of mass incarceration."

“We all want a safer city and we should really spend time thinking about what’s going to be an effective, evidence-based, and humane way of achieving that shared goal," Khandelwal said. "And this is not it.”

In a statement, Seattle Police Chief Sue Rahr said the exclusion zones are being used by other cities in the region and could be “important tools” if used as part of a holistic approach.

"The ordinances being discussed today related to prostitution are modeled after Everett’s, which was recently upheld by Division I, Court of Appeals, and is consistent with provisions in the municipal codes of Auburn, Kent, Des Moines, and Burien," Rahr said. "The ordinance related to 'staying out of areas of drug trafficking' are consistent with Auburn, Bellevue, Pierce County, Tacoma, and Everett.”

Rahr said although Seattle couldn't "arrest our way out" of the problem, arresting and booking people were important tools and part of the solution.

She said the "interruption in activity" offers police and support services an opportunity to offer respite to people, such as women trafficked along Aurora Avenue "away from their handlers."

But Khandelwal said for people arrested on misdemeanors such as violation of these exclusion orders, “most people are released in zero to three days. And so to provide that ‘respite’ we are spending an incredible number of taxpayer dollars.”

The proposed ordinance for the drug zones says the Seattle Police Department must track and report the number of orders for each SODA zone, the number of arrests made for violating those orders, demographic information on those receiving orders and/or violating orders, and analysis of illegal drug trafficking and drug use in SODA zones, including 10 year-over-year statistics of drug-related crimes and whether dispersion of illegal drug trafficking and public use occurred in surrounding areas.

Downtown Seattle Association CEO Jon Scholes said he knows there will be opponents of the drug zone legislation. “They’re going to say it’s not nice or fair to the folks that are going to be impacted, to the people being arrested," he said. "They’ll say very little about what is nice and fair to the barista that just quit her job at First and Pike because it’s too unsafe to work there.”

Starbucks announced the closure of its store at First Avenue and Pike Street on the same day.

The proposals will be heard in the council’s public safety committee on Tuesday, Aug. 13.