Two months into Seattle Police Department Interim Chief Sue Rahr’s tenure, the Seattle City Council and Republican City Attorney Ann Davison have proposed a handful of new laws to give the cops more “tools” to clear the streets.
As we’ve reported over the last couple weeks, these elected officials want to reinstate the City’s old drug and prostitution loitering laws, and they also want to create new Stay Out of Drug Area (SODA) and Stay Out of Area Prostitution (SOAP) zones. Those zones would allow judges to banish anyone accused of drug-related or prostitution-related crimes from these respective areas as part of pre-trial or sentencing conditions.
The former city council overturned the drug and prostitution loitering laws in 2020 because they disproportionately affected people of color. The prostitution loitering law in particular had an outsized impact on low-income, trans, and cis women of color.
Though officials frame these new old proposals as “tools,” they really only provide new ways to use the same tool: jail. As research shows, jailing people for low-level offenses can actually increase recidivism rates, increase overdose rates, and trouble access to housing and jobs. And yet, when city officials talk about these bills–especially when Council Member Cathy Moore talks about her prostitution loitering bill–they frame them as ways to help the people they arrest.
Interim Chief Rahr told The Stranger she aims only to stay on the job until January, but if the council manages to pass these bills, she will likely be the one to implement them. We sat down with her to ask about how she expects these laws to work on the ground.
This conversation was edited and condensed for clarity.
City council members and the City Attorney argue that the laws targeting sex workers are not intended to prosecute them. They’re meant to get them “off the streets” and away from their pimps. But are sex workers still going to jail after their arrest?
To be honest, I don't know how we're going to manage that yet. And I've talked about this before. We have jail and we have the emergency room. We need a third place. We need a place where we can hold people securely where they can have access to treatment. So for a person who is going through drug withdrawal, for a person who is going through trauma and maybe drug withdrawal on top of that, we need to have a place to take people that's secure to get them directly connected with treatment. We don't have that yet. So right now they may go to jail.
We're trying to find a way to directly connect them to service providers. And there are a number of organizations—I can't name them off the top of my head—but there are a number of community organizations that will intervene and meet with the young women that we've taken into custody.
But I also want to be clear: I don't want to say we don't want to prosecute them. What I want to be really clear on is our goal is not prosecution. Our goal is rescue.
But the process of being arrested itself can be traumatizing. It’s hard to say, ‘We don’t have this third place, we’re going to put them in this really terrible place as a form of rescue.’
It sounds really cruel, doesn't it? I agree with you. We need to have a better way to do this. I wish I could give you more clarity about what we want to do. But our goal is to get the young women away from their pimps, out of danger, and get connected with treatment or support—whatever it is they need.
So many of these young women have extremely complex issues. Some, if not many, are survivors of sexual assault. They might be current victims. Many have developed addiction issues, mental health issues. So, I can't think of a population with more complex needs. Unfortunately, a lot of services are set up for specific treatment needs, and a lot of these young women need three or four different things at the same time.
I am not well-versed on the different organizations that are currently available in the community.
So why support these laws if they can’t help people get the services they need?
My strategy on Aurora is: I know that I'm not curing or eliminating the risk to the individual women who are victims of sex trafficking, but I can reduce the level of gunfire that's happening as an added consequence of sex trafficking. But again, given the choice of leaving somebody on the street in danger and putting them in jail, I would rather put them in jail than leave them on the street to die. So while I'm doing that, I am also working toward finding a way for our community, our local government to create a third place.
When it comes to SODA and SOAP zones, have you had conversations with the mayor's office or City Attorney Davison about how you want to approach policing them?
I don't know what the system will be for identifying those people that are on a list of that zone.
I'm looking at it as another tool for officers to use. We've got these situations in areas of the city—the Pike/Pine Corridor, 12th and Jackson, North Aurora, Belltown—it’s bubbling up, and we have large numbers of people that are congregating, and there's many different things going on. Some people are in housing and they're using the sidewalk as their front porch. They don't want to be isolated all day in their apartment, so they come out. Chances are that person has some other issues, so they may look, you know, disheveled and so forth. And then you have other people that come to that area because they know they can buy drugs there, [or] they know they can sell and buy stolen property.
And so trying to sort out who's a victim, who's a predator, who's just there to watch the show can be really complicated. So we're trying to give officers as many different tools as we can to say, “All right, this is not ok to have 50 people congregating on the sidewalk.” And because it's intimidating to people who are just trying to walk from point A to point B.
The counter argument to that is—
They have a right to be there.
No, actually, [one counter argument is that] it's not really a different tool. It's just jail. It's a new law as a way to jail people.
Well, it's a different tool to remove people from that particular place. And so we have these places—you could call them “hot spots”—where we need to remove the bulk of the people there. The primary purpose there is to break the business cycle of the predators that are selling drugs, that are selling stolen property, that are buying stolen property so that people can buy drugs from them. It's a really terrible mix of victims and predators and all kinds of people in-between. And we know that these laws are not the cure by any stretch.
I've had so many people say, “You know, it's scary on the streets. Why can't you clear out the streets?” We have to have a place to take those human beings. Yes, they may look scary. They may be disruptive, but they're humans and they have to be somewhere. We can't just scoop them up and take them to a gymnasium somewhere and say we're gonna keep you out of sight. Honestly, I think there are a lot of people that just want the police to get this scary looking crowd out of sight. I mean, if I'm honest, I understand that if I've got my grandkids with me and I'm walking through downtown Seattle, I don't want to walk through that crowd. I understand that feeling. The problem is what is the solution?
I was talking with Pete Holmes about the prostitution laws, and he made a comment that using cops is like trying to use a chainsaw to cut butter. You are using a very blunt tool to handle some issues that are better handled a little bit more delicately, right?
If we had a butter knife, that would be awesome, but we don't have a butter knife. Around 2020, the political environment was very anti-enforcement, anti-arrests. And I understand why people got to that place.
The dilemma that we have is when we stop doing enforcement—but we don't have an effective treatment system as a substitute—what we get is the lawlessness that we see now.
What we need is the right balance of the two things. We're living in this political environment: it's all one thing or all the other. And I believe that's why we were in this situation.
The city has done an amazing job of building up the CARE team. There's a lot of service providers in the city, but we still don't have enough, and we don't have a really effective coordination system yet. We're working toward that.
So right now I see us as in a time of transition. We're transitioning away from “No enforcement, only treatment.” And I'm exaggerating, I'm being hyperbolic there.
People in the defund movement would say that what “defund” really means is “reallocate.”
But we didn't reallocate. That's the problem. And that's my frustration. I think a lot of people in the defund movement really believed that we were going to move one pot of money over into the other side. What I know through my experience is doing the treatment and the services are ten times more expensive than policing. There's a reason we've gone to policing as a substitute because it's less expensive. Even though the criminal justice system is wildly expensive, good treatment is way more expensive.
I hearken back to the seventies when we had the deinstitutionalization movement. The theory was we need to get people out of these large mental health hospitals and we need to move them out to the community where they will get their services. [But] the money didn't follow, and it's much more expensive to have 100 different community based treatment facilities than one big single hospital.
And I'm exaggerating the comparison a little bit, but that's one of the reasons we're in the mess now, too. We have a huge number of people that are in desperate need of mental health services and we don't have a system that's capable of meeting that.
For many years, I would say like the nineties especially, it was all about just, “Clear the streets!” And a lot of people with mental illness ended up in jail or dead. And it's tragic to me that as a society, we would rather leave a person on the street who's mentally ill to be victimized than to say, “You know what, we need to keep you in a secure hospital.”
I think most members of the public have the opinion that people who are mentally ill are dangerous. A small percentage of them are, but most of them are victimized, and that's what the public doesn't see. They don't see that side of the equation: that as a society, we've made the decision to leave them on the streets. And so, you know, at the end of the day, we have police officers who have five months of training at the academy and whatever additional training they have, and we expect them to come in and solve a problem that all of our institutions have not been able to address.
Why would you expect a 25-year-old cop with five months of training to do something that people with masters and PhDs have not been able to do?
I've probably gone to fifteen to sixteen roll calls and had face-to-face conversations with about 500 cops, and I expected them to be angry and disgruntled. [But] that's not the feedback I'm getting. It’s just, “Tell us what you want us to do.”
One particular officer really, really touched my heart. He said, ‘Chief in my district, I know the people who are severely addicted. I see them living on the street. I know what cycle they're in with their addiction. They won't accept services because they're so terrified of going through withdrawal. And if I try to get them connected with services, they're afraid they're not going to get their hits, so they stay on the street so they can get their next fix.’ And he said, ‘Up until recently, I couldn't arrest them. So the only choice I had was to leave them on the street to die.’ And he said, ‘I came into this profession to protect people, to save them. And now I am being told by society to just leave them on the street to die.’
The assumption in that argument is that, what, they're going to be able to arrest them and get them into treatment, and we just know that—
We don't have a system in place to make that happen.
So then why add the trauma of arresting them?
Well, because that's the choice. To leave them on the street to die or put them in a terrible system that will at least keep them alive. It's two horrible choices.