KUOW73%
Street closures, SOAP laws. Can anything stop sex trafficking, gun violence on Seattle's Aurora Avenue? 19%
By Amy Radil0%
6/5/2026, 11:45:08 AM
Topics: Crime
BS Summary: This article contains 30 faulty reasoning types, including Post Hoc (False Cause), Availability Heuristic, and Negativity Bias, with Appeal to Emotion as the most egregious example at 19.6% saturation with 225 hits. Analysis detected 1,834 faulty-reasoning hits from 1,149 analyzed words, generating a BS Score of 33.5% and a BS Rank of 19% (17,911 of 21,887 articles). This article is better (less manipulative) than 81.80% of the article peer group.
Residents of North Seattle along Aurora Avenue are on edge.
That’s after a recent surge of gun violence on a road that has been a longtime hotspot for human trafficking.
City officials said this week they’ve increased police patrols and are looking at permanent street closures to keep violence from flowing into residential side streets.
A series of rolling gun battles broke out on Aurora in May, allegedly between rival human traffickers.
Resident Jake Wallack said a bullet struck his house just outside his infant’s bedroom.
In response, residents blocked three side streets with homemade barriers but the city cleared two of them, installing staggered barricades that slow but don’t stop traffic.
Within days residents woke up to more shots being fired on one of the reopened streets.
At a community meeting Wednesday night, an incensed Wallack addressed city officials.
“What do you guys have to say about that?”
he demanded.
RELATED: Why is Aurora Avenue crime concentrated in Seattle, not Shoreline?
Many people were dismayed that Mayor Katie Wilson and City Attorney Erika Evans didn’t attend the meeting of the North Precinct Advisory Committee.
The mayor’s representative Alison Holcomb said she heard exhaustion but also resolve in the voices of residents.
“We’re here for the long haul,” Holcomb said.
“I think we need to sprint on a few things right now.
And we all need to realize this is going to be a marathon.”
Holcomb said the city will ultimately close access to some streets off Aurora, it’s a question “not if, but where,” she said.
(The city already closed off two streets in 2024 in response to similar problems.)
Seattle City Councilmember Debora Juarez said she’s pursuing legislation that would allow the police chief to recommend road closures in response to public safety threats.
RELATED: Seattle City Council proposal would use street closures to curb gun violence
Residents around Aurora are trying to keep up the pressure as the discussions continue.
Resident Peter Orr said a march called “Stop the Traffickers, Stop the Bullets” is planned for Saturday, June 6.
“We’re for peace in our neighborhood and justice for victims of the sex trade.
That’s what I’m marching for,” he said.
Meeting attendees asked what police and prosecutors are doing to stem the violence.
Prosecutors responded that human trafficking cases are complicated and hard to prove.
And there’s a vigorous debate about the effectiveness of court orders to banish sex buyers from the neighborhood.
Former City Attorney Ann Davison helped implement so-called “SOAP” orders or “Stay out of Area of Prostitution” as a standalone offense in 2024.
The Seattle Municipal Court issued roughly 30 SOAP orders during her time in office, which banned people from North Aurora.
Davison was in the audience at Wednesday’s meeting.
She said she never charged anyone with violating those orders and she took that as sign they were working.
“I think the neighborhood saw a reduction in the amount of buyers that were circling and as soon as you start to diminish that, you start to diminish the other parts,” she said.
New City Attorney Erika Evans, who replaced Davison, campaigned against SOAP orders, saying they aren’t effective.
Her criminal division chief, Jenna Robert, said the lack of enforcement suggests that the orders don’t do anything to deter sex buyers.
“That was never going to be a tool that was going to work,” Robert said, “and in the 20 months that it’s been there, we’ve seen exactly that.”
Robert said new criminal charges against sex buyers are still a priority.
But they haven’t filed any of those sexual exploitation cases so far this year.
Evans said that’s because successful investigations rely on undercover operations that police are too understaffed to do for these misdemeanor cases.
“It’s extremely resource-intensive for officers that are already limited right now and not something that’s been recently done,” Evans said.
RELATED: Seattle laws targeting drug use, prostitution take center stage in city attorney debate
SPD spokesperson Sgt.
Patrick Michaud confirmed that misdemeanor charges against sex buyers aren’t the main focus of current enforcement.
“While our staffing shortage has been well documented, we do continue to conduct operations, but the focus tends to be on trafficking more than purchasing because the resolution tends to have a lasting impact,” Michaud said.
Trafficking investigations go to the King County Prosecutor’s Office which pursues felony charges related to human trafficking and commercial sexual exploitation of children.
King County has filed dozens of these cases annually and prosecutors say 80 % of them tend to have some connection to the Aurora neighborhood.
Evans said the city attorney’s office is pursuing strategies that don’t rely on hard-to-obtain criminal convictions.
That could include trying to close more nuisance properties on Aurora that are linked to trafficking, continuing an emphasis the city took last year against a motel and strip club.
She’s also seeking funding for a prosecutor to file extreme risk protection orders against sex traffickers, to take away their firearms.
Meanwhile across town Mayor Wilson spoke at a Seattle CityClub event on Wednesday night and said she’s working to get more police presence for people worried about their safety along Aurora.
“We also have emphasis patrols that SPD is doing right now, greater presence, we’re stepping up the gun violence reduction unit in the area, and these are the immediate fixes, right?
No illusion that things like this are solving the longer-term problem," she said, calling the recent gun violence there “unacceptable.”
Then there’s the plight of the women and girls being trafficked in the neighborhood.
Alexandra Voorhees, a senior deputy with the King County Prosecutor’s Office, said her latest case involves a Bellevue man accused of trafficking a 14-year-old girl on Aurora.
“Our detectives are recovering multiple juveniles a week off of Aurora Avenue and quite frequently they have no place to take them,” she said.
Voorhees said the recent gun violence is related to territorial disputes by people engaged in lucrative human trafficking, which she called “a moneymaking machine.”
Voorhees said many traffickers also have links to gang activity and drug dealing.
And they force the women selling sex on Aurora to meet brutal quotas.
“I’ve seen text messages between pimps and girls they have working for them where the girl is saying, ‘I was just raped and I’m bleeding,’ and they’re told to clean themselves up and get back out there,” she said.
Voorhees said it’s very difficult to convict human traffickers because it requires the survivors of their exploitation and abuse to testify against them.
She wants Washington state to focus more on going after sex buyers, who she said currently face lower penalties than for stealing a candy bar from a convenience store.
Her office has lobbied in Olympia to make sexual exploitation a class C felony.
She said those efforts will continue.
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