Online Reporter
SEATTLE. — It’s been called sex industry’s Wild West and Aurora Avenue cuts through the heart of it all.
This is where you find what locals call The Blade — an area known for prostitution where it’s normal to see half-naked women waving at cars.
This is where you find all the rooms at motels being reserved for the entire summer by those who are part of its sex industry.
The motels charge, on average, US$200 per room per night in cash and it means the sex workers, who can afford to book in advance and in block, are making good money for them to afford the rooms.
The pimps typically set daily quotas of US$500 to US$2,000 for each of the prostituted women working for them.
This is where you have an open-air sex market which attracts droves of sex buyers and contributes to increased lawlessness — shootings, homicides, robberies, drug dealing and other crimes — in the surrounding neighbourhood, according to police.
Seattle, which repealed its drug traffic and prostitution loitering laws in 2020, has gained a reputation as a city where demand remains high, there’s little risk of arrest for sex buyers and pimps and traffickers can make lots of money from the lucrative sex trade.
Aurora Avenue has for decades been the city’s epicentre of prostitution and it remains a destination for both local pimps and traffickers, as well as those who shuttle women and girls along the West Coast “circuit.”
They peddle sex in Sacramento as well as cities like Portland, Las Vegas, Los Angeles and Phoenix.
At the same time, social-service providers who offer women and girls a path out of prostitution are stretched to capacity and say the men who pay for sex have become increasingly aggressive and violent.
After prostitution activity plummeted at the start of the COVID-19 pandemic, Seattle police and King County prosecutors say the Aurora “track” saw a resurgence in women walking the streets, congregating in parking lots and flagging down motorists — while also waiting for men to respond to online ads, and meeting them back in their motel rooms.
It was a hybrid system meant to maximise profits.
When a pimp was arrested in Seattle, federal prosecutors sought forfeiture of nearly US$73,000 in cash, a diamond-encrusted Audemars Piguet watch, other diamond jewellery and two handguns allegedly purchased with prostitution proceeds, court records show.
Aurora has long been known as a “pimp-controlled track” where aggressive recruiting tactics make it extremely dangerous for women who work independently and retain the proceeds from their prostitution.
“It’s always made me so angry that these guys are buying expensive cars and jewellery and things like that — and are playing video games all day — while screaming at you while you’re the one out on the street, in the cold,” a police detective, who chose not to be identified, said.
The Seattle City Council unanimously voted in June 2020 to drop drug traffic and prostitution loitering laws from the books because of their disproportionate impacts on people of colour.
While that decision was made to address long-standing inequities in who police stop, question and detain, SPD leaders say it has limited officers’ abilities to engage with women who are being prostituted, hampering their ability to get to the root of the problems plaguing Aurora.
Though Seattle police can still contact women and girls they suspect are involved in prostitution, officers can’t ask for their identification or do anything that makes them feel that they can’t walk away, Aagard said.
Because police can no longer question most of the women directly, they shifted focus to businesses facilitating prostitution, with the goal of disrupting pimps’ operations by cutting off access to motel rooms and, by extension, creating conditions that discourage other criminal conduct.
Seeing women and girls prostituted on Aurora is sad and ugly, “but what’s more unsavoury is seeing all the pimps — they’re kind of scary,” said Dan Oberloh, whose shop, Oberloh Woodwind and Brass Works, sits just north of Lowe’s on North 127th Street.
“They’re up here trying to recruit. That’s what makes them so hideous — they’re basically slavers.”
The Seattle City Council spent US$3.3 million to expand diversion and other services for sex workers last year and will be adding another US$2 million this year.
“I think it’s toned down just a little bit,” said Paddy Walls, who lives near Aurora Ave N.
“I used to see women walking up and down the street with virtually nothing on, and the school is right there, which makes it just disgusting, but it seems like it’s cleaned up a little.” — The Seattle Times/The Sun
