Harger: A pimp war is raging on Seattle’s Aurora Ave. A 5-week-old baby almost died Saturday morning. Where is Mayor Katie Wilson?

I have watched the videos. I have heard the gunshots. I have heard what detectives believe is a Glock switch firing on a Seattle street, fully automatic, a weapon of war, emptying a magazine into a residential neighborhood. I have listened to neighbors describe what their lives look like now, and I am out of patience.

Our elected leaders are allowing a pimp war to rage on the streets of North Seattle. Say that out loud and listen to how insane it sounds. A pimp war, in an American city, in 2026.

At least five drive-by shootings in the last month. Pimps shooting at pimps. A war over corners. Working families in the middle.

Aurora Avenue pimp war: 4 Seattle drive-by shootings in a month, with bullets entering family homes

I have been talking to neighbors up there for more than a year. They send me videos, and they keep getting worse.

Women working the side streets at all hours. Some clearly underage girls. John’s circling past front yards and bus stops. Sex acts in cars parked outside living room windows. Condoms in the grass. Condoms on the sidewalk where kids walk to school. The women are mostly victims here, trafficked, addicted, controlled by men who traffic them. This is sex trafficking.

Every spring, it gets worse. Pimps drive in from out of state. They bring women with them. The weather warms up, the corners fill up, and the shooting starts.

One dad up there calls me a lot. On May 7, around 2:30 in the morning, he heard a shootout on 100th Street between Linden and Aurora. He called the cops. He says he was told it didn’t seem like anything was happening. He has the gunfire on his home security camera. At 6:45 that morning, he walked his kids out to catch the bus and counted 13 shell casings in the street. He recorded that too. Thirteen casings. At a school bus stop. He blames the city and the people who run it.

Early Saturday morning, around 4:24 a.m., a family was asleep in their home off Aurora. A family with nothing to do with any of this. Their baby was in a bassinet right below a window. Five weeks old. Two bullets came through the wall right above that window.

Five weeks old.

Mayor Katie Wilson ran on a different vision of public safety. This is what it looks like in North Seattle.

Mayor Katie Wilson ran on a different vision of public safety. Police focused only on the most serious crimes. Low-level drug use, public disorder, and street-level chaos handled through diversion and treatment instead of enforcement. She paused the expansion of the city’s real-time crime cameras. When SPD’s own diversion email leaked in January and people noticed it looked a lot like decriminalization, she responded that she would announce a policy change when she announced a policy change.

Fine. Here is the policy as it is playing out on Aurora. Pimps shooting at each other. Underage girls on side streets. Thirteen casings at a school bus stop. Two bullets through the wall above a bassinet holding a five-week-old. This is what the philosophy looks like in a working-class neighborhood. Not in theory. Not on a campaign website. On 100th Street at 2:30 in the morning.

She campaigned on this. She won on this. She owns it.

Seattle City Attorney Erika Evans won’t enforce SOAP zones. The pimps know it. The shooters know it.

Prostitution is a misdemeanor. That falls squarely under the Seattle City Attorney’s Office. It is not a felony. It is not a King County problem. It is Erika Evans’s job.

She is not doing it.

Evans campaigned on not enforcing the city’s Stay Out of Areas of Prostitution (SOAP) zones. She called them ineffective. She called them racist. She promised she would not file charges. She has kept that promise. The SOAP zones still exist on paper. She just doesn’t use them. That is a choice. That is her choice. The people who live inside those zones never got a vote on it.

You can draw a straight line from that choice to the shootings. Prostitution attracts pimps. Pimps attract competition. Competition attracts guns. The city tolerates the first link in the chain, then acts surprised when the last link is a magazine emptying into a residential block.

When she was asked on KIRO Newsradio’s “Gee and Ursula Show” how she would measure success, here is what she said: “I think what I want to see and what I want all of us to feel is safe as we walk in areas of downtown.”

That is not a metric; that is a wish. And it carefully describes downtown, not Aurora. Not Bitter Lake. Not Licton Springs. Not the family in the house off Aurora with two bullet holes above a bassinet.

Evans will likely point out, accurately, that the drive-by shootings are felonies and her office does not prosecute felonies. Fine. But she does prosecute the prostitution and soliciting misdemeanors that draw the felons. She is choosing not to.

Councilmember Debora Juarez represents this district. Where is she?

Councilmember Debora Juarez came back to the council five months ago. She said she was focused. She said she was deliberate. She has been on record for years saying Aurora needs more visible patrols. She has criticized politicians who are afraid to talk openly about crime because it is politically inconvenient. Good. So where is she now? This is her district. These are her constituents. The five-week-old in that bassinet Saturday morning lives in her district. The dad counting casings at the bus stop lives in her district. She should be in front of a camera every single day until this stops. Furious. Demanding emergency action. Every day. The silence from the council member for North Seattle is deafening.

Federal prosecutors sentenced Aurora pimp to 20 years. Seattle, King County keep running a revolving door.

The judges keep running the revolving door. It took federal prosecutors, not Seattle, not King County, to put one of these pimps away for any real stretch of time. Andre Henderson got 20 years in federal prison last August for trafficking eight women along Aurora. Twenty years from the feds. From Seattle and King County? A revolving door.

Some of these neighbors are starting to ask each other what they are going to have to do themselves. Whether they will have to protect their own streets.

It cannot come to vigilantism. But every week city hall refuses to act, that conversation gets louder.

Another Aurora Avenue shooting, and the city shrugs

A baby almost died Saturday morning, and the city shrugged. A drive-by happened Sunday, and almost nobody outside Aurora has heard about it. It is just Aurora, after all. Background noise. A few lines on the police blotter, if we are lucky. The same story rewritten week after week with new shell casings and new bullet holes and new families wondering if their kids will make it to the bus stop. Would any of this be tolerated in Laurelhurst? Magnolia? Medina? A pimp war in Madison Park? A bassinet full of bullet holes in Windermere? You know the answer. The families on Aurora know the answer.

A baby almost died in a pimp war this weekend.

If this city refuses to act, every elected official who looked away will own what happens next.

Charlie Harger is the host of “Seattle’s Morning News” on KIRO Newsradio. You can read more of his stories and commentaries here. Follow Charlie on X and email him here. 

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