Gee & Ursula: Seattle ‘Stay Out’ zones won’t make prostitution, homelessness go away

The Seattle City Council approved controversial measures to create ‘Stay Out’ zones that prohibit individuals with drug and prostitution-related arrests from certain parts of the city. The ordinances passed by an 8-1 majority. Known as SOAP and SODA zones, the measures now go to Mayor Bruce Harrell, who said he supports the plan.

“We are trying to help make sure that we have recovery of public spaces so that they are safer, accessible and available for everybody to go through them, to get to where they need to go, and to enhance safety in the process,” Seattle City Attorney Ann Davidson said on “The Gee and Ursula Show” on KIRO Newsradio.

Background story: Seattle City Council passes legislation creating SODA, SOAP zones

These zones will affect the International District, downtown and Aurora neighborhoods.

“I was a vice detective for many, many, many years down in the south and along Pacific Highway South,” former King County Sheriff John Urquhart told KIRO Newsradio. “So I enforced their SOAP ordinance down there for years, and I found it extremely effective, as did the City of SeaTac.”

Gee and Ursula Co-host Gee Scott had a different take.

“This all depends on numerous factors,” he said. “I don’t think anybody can disagree with that. That includes community engagement resources allocated and other specific things that need to be done. Seattle is already low on police officers so there’s no extra officers to really enforce these things. They admit there’s no extra funding for this project. There’s no extra outreach or resources in place, and there’s a possibility of people being profiled that are in that area.”

Urquhart echoed Gee’s thoughts.

“You’ve got to have enough police officers for any type of crime in any city anywhere in the country,” Urquhart explained. “And Seattle doesn’t have it, but you can’t use the ‘not enough police officers’ excuse not to pass ordinances that are needed and not to enforce crimes when you can.”

Co-host Ursula Reutin said that the zones were never going to be “magic pills” that make all the problems go away.

“The SODA or SOAP laws are one tool, but I think that they could be helpful in conjunction with other strategies, including more drug addiction and mental health treatment, more officers, which the Seattle Police Department is desperately trying to hire, more officers not having that great result right now, and a reduction in poverty,” she said.

Davidson said that law enforcement wanted more legal tools to stop the open-air drug market activity and prostitution in the city.

Ursula explained that she talked to a police officer who worked the beat in North Aurora.

“He said they see 12-year-olds, barely wearing anything, getting into trucks with three dudes who all look like the Green River Killer,” she said. “They have makeup covering all of their physical bruises, their cuts and their scars, not even talking about mentally, what this does for someone so young to be having sex with dozens of men every day.”

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Urquhart thinks the sex workers should have been included in the new rules.

“My only criticism of of the city council ordinances, they left the sex workers off the soap ordinance,” Urquhart said. “They should have had those, the sex workers on there as well, so they could be excluded, rather than just the Johns or the pimps. But at least it’s a step in the right direction, and the same with the SODA ordinances, but specifically the SOAP on Aurora that you know, if you drive out there, it’s just, it’s just terrible what’s going on, and it’s hard real out there.”

“If I worked in SeaTac, or those officers that work on Aurora, their job is to clean up that area for their constituents,” Urquart explained. “And their constituents aren’t in Bothell or Shoreline looking north or even somewhere else in the city, their constituents, the people they work for, the people that pay their salary, are the people around that prostitution area. So if they move those sex workers to the Central District or to Shoreline, they’ve done their job.”

Gee used the analogy of a homeowner raking leaves into his neighbor’s yard. This doesn’t solve the problem, he said, it just moves it.

“What does not work is to do nothing, which is essentially what is happening right now,” Ursula explained.

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“If they want to address the problem, address the problem,” Gee said. “And the reason why I am taking a knife to this topic, is because this is a topic that I think gets overlooked, because sometimes when I talk about profiling, there’s a lot of people who don’t really understand the profiling part. They don’t understand that up until 2022 there was still a problem with Seattle policing and the disproportionate to those being stopped.”

Data from 2022 revealed that Black individuals in Seattle were stopped and arrested at rates significantly higher than white counterparts, while Black residents make up approximately 7% of the city’s population. They accounted for nearly 30% of the police stops and arrests.

Gee called the move towards ‘Stay Out’ zones, “performative.”

“I’m going to predict right now that we are going to see no difference, but it reminds me of homeless sweeps, right?” he said. “Like, ‘Hey, we swept that area.’ We’re letting everybody know the homelessness crisis is better. Are you doing the work? That’s not about the work.”

Ursula said more needs to be done.

“I think where we find agreement is that it cannot be the only thing,” she said. “It cannot only be performative. There has to be other efforts to address the root causes of why this is happening over and over again.”

Bill Kaczaraba is a content editor at MyNorthwest. You can read his stories here. Follow Bill on X, formerly known as Twitter, here and email him here.