A shocking video shown to the Seattle City Council’s Public Safety Committee shows an area rife with prostitution and nightly shootings.
Seattle City Council member Cathy Moore is proposing legislation that would establish guidelines for arrests related to prostitution and loitering, and would create “Stay Me from Areas of Prostitution” (SOAP) zones, failure to comply with which could result in criminal charges.
“This bill is designed to stop the violent criminal activity of commercial sex trafficking by focusing law enforcement efforts specifically on the buyers, the johns, and the organizers, the pimps, while also emphasizing diversion to social services, safe housing and treatment options for the sellers, most often women and girls,” Moore said.
She then presented a video compilation that gave an overview of sex trafficking along Aurora Avenue in North Seattle, followed by several nights of gun violence, all of which had occurred during the previous year.
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An hour-long time-lapse video showed several sex workers being sold and trafficked in North Seattle.
The video begins with a time-lapse of several women being trafficked and sold on a single street corner between midnight and 1 a.m. Several vehicles can be seen driving through the area, picking up women.
The next clip is from March 7 and was taken at the corner of N. 101st St. and Aurora Avenue N. A vehicle is seen driving down N. 101st St. when another vehicle turns the corner and opens fire, firing more than 30 shots.
The video shows a vehicle driving down the same road at the same location on June 10 and speeding away before two men step onto the roadway and begin firing at the vehicle with their pistols.
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The Seattle City Council was shown a video showing several shootings near Aurora Avenue in the north of the city of Washington. (City of Seattle)
On July 6, another shooting occurred on the same corner, this time involving prostitutes standing on the corner trying to lure in a few customers. The shooting began when a man in a black shirt opened fire on five other people, who returned fire.
In the video shown during the committee meeting, Dana Mogillo, owner of Fuzzy Buddy’s Dog Daycare on Aurora Avenue, spoke about the unsafe atmosphere near her business.
“We’ve been there for 20 years… It’s become a very difficult place to run a business,” she said. “It’s unsafe. There are visible signs of crime day and night.”
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The Seattle City Council was shown a video showing several shootings near Aurora Avenue in the north of the city. (City of Seattle)
Mogillo said a few weeks before she was taped for the video, one of her co-workers went to the parking lot and saw a sex worker hiding between two cars. After speaking with the sex worker, Mogillo’s co-worker learned that another pimp had dropped off a girl to fight with the sex worker. The woman didn’t want to fight, so she hid in the parking lot. Ultimately, Mogillo added, her co-worker drove the frightened sex worker to another location on Aurora Avenue.
“In May, another woman showed up at my door, very scared. She was crying. She had been kidnapped from another town,” Mogillo said. “She had been brought to this neighborhood and told to stand on the corner and make money. She was scared. She ended up hiding in my store for four hours until someone from her town could drive here to pick her up. This is what sex trafficking looks like.”
Detective Maurice Washington of the Seattle Police Department said in the clip that one of the biggest challenges currently is that there is a “surge of human trafficking-related incidents” not only locally but across the country.
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Seattle Police Department, SPD (GENNA MARTIN/San Francisco Chronicle via Getty Images)
In Seattle, he said, the number of people being sexually exploited is exploding, leading to pimps and traffickers battling over territory, which leads to gun violence and other crimes such as robberies and rapes.
“All of this flows through the same system. It’s the same ecosystem that fuels crime,” Washington said.
Some of the traffickers and pimps also have ties to gangs, which creates gang problems in the ecosystem, he explained.
“All of these things together create a very adverse and difficult situation, a very dangerous situation for our public, for our residents and citizens who live up there,” Washington said.
Seattle Police did not respond to Fox News Digital’s request for comment on the matter.
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Seattle City Councilwoman Cathy Moore has introduced a bill targeting pimps and sex traffickers. (City of Seattle)
Moore said her proposed legislation should help address public safety for residents of these neighborhoods, struggling businesses and students who must travel home after school buses pass through the area.
“We cannot tolerate the continued existence of so much gun violence in our city, nor can we tolerate the continued existence of so much sexual exploitation of people on our street corners,” Moore said.
Moore told committee members that she spoke with constituents, the YWCA, the police department’s major crimes unit, the human trafficking unit and others to identify the problems in the area before introducing the bill.
She said that this bill would allow police to track down buyers for the first time without using undercover agents. She said that it would be degrading for women sex workers to be forced to take part in undercover operations.
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The Seattle City Council was shown a video showing several shootings near Aurora Avenue in the north of the city. (City of Seattle)
For the first time, the bill also provides for diversion, which means it gives officials the opportunity to approach sex workers and talk to them about help and professional services.
Prostitution is illegal in Seattle and according to Moore, many people do not understand that prostitution is illegal.
Promoting prostitution is a crime and requires the sex worker’s testimony to establish a case. Testifying further increases the risk to the sex worker and makes the case more difficult to prove.
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Moore’s bill also directs the city’s Department of Social Services and the mayor’s office to create an employment program that will provide attorneys to work with people convicted of prostitution, with the goal of expunging the convictions from their records so they aren’t present when applying for jobs or housing.
Moore did not immediately respond to Fox News Digital’s request for comment.
