Seattle Residents Battle Violent Pimps with No Help from the Mayor

Aurora Avenue in North Seattle is well-known as a place where prostitutes can be found. This has been going on for a decade if not longer. The prostitutes are transported and controlled by male pimps who frequently get into disagreements over who controls which parts of the public street. In the past year the number of shootings connected to the pimps has gone up. This report is from July of 2024. At the time, the city had set up concrete barriers on some streets to prevent the pimps from spreading the violence into residential neighborhoods.

That was nearly two years ago and since then nothing has changed. The pimp turf war continues along Aurora Avenue on a nightly basis. Multiple residents have had bullets come through walls and windows. One even had a bullet crash into a wall above his infant daughter. The gunfights take place almost every night and the residents in these neighborhoods have had enough.

Last weekend residents put up their own street barricades to keep the predators out. The steel barricades appeared overnight and in theory it’s illegal to put these up without permission from the city, but at this point residents don’t care. If the city won’t do something to keep them safe, they’ll do it themselves.

In recent days, neighbors near North 97th, 98th, and 102nd streets hauled in large metal planter boxes, dirt, and gravel to partially block residential roads feeding into Aurora Avenue North, one of Seattle’s busiest corridors…

The barriers are intended to stop gunmen from speeding through side streets during shootings connected to turf disputes among people involved in prostitution and human trafficking activity along Aurora. The rationale is spelled out on a sign posted on one of the barriers on N 97th Street.

Over the weekend, another round of violence erupted near Aurora Avenue N and N 98th Street, where Seattle police said officers recovered roughly 40 shell casings after a shootout. Surveillance footage captured about 15 seconds of sustained gunfire as groups fired from behind vehicles across the street.

Police said bullets struck nearby buildings and vehicles. One round entered the fourth-floor apartment. Another recent shooting sent bullets into a nearby home, stopping near the bassinet of a 6-week-old baby, according to the family living there.

Here’s the KOMO News report which notes that there have been 95 separate shootings in this neighborhood in the past two years. Obviously no one should have to live under these conditions. 

Where is Seattle’s socialist mayor in all of this? She’s nowhere according to locals who met with her public safety official. 

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.

Another problem is the City Attorney who has given the pimps a green light to ply their trade.

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.

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.

The residents of Seattle voted for this and now they’re getting what they wanted. But the people who are on the front lines of the pimp turf wars seem well aware that the progressive solutions don’t work. They’ve given up on the city. They are just trying to save themselves.

Editor’s Note: The American people overwhelmingly support President Trump’s law and order agenda.

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