A bill that would decriminalize sex work in Washington D.C. will be reintroduced at the D.C. Council on Tuesday, this time with four councilmembers in support.

As drafted, the Community Safety and Health Amendment Act of 2019 would “remove certain criminal penalties for engaging in sex work in order to promote public health and safety.” It does not include any measures that would create red light districts in D.C. or otherwise regulate sex work. Coercing people to engage in sex work against their will would still be illegal, as would human and child trafficking.

At-large Councilmembers David Grosso and Robert White, who co-introduced a similar measure in 2017, are now joined by At-large Councilmember Anita Bonds and Ward 1 Councilmember Brianne Nadeau, as jurisdictions across the country are seeing sex work decriminalization movements gain steam. Last term, the original bill was sent to the Judiciary Committee, where it never got a hearing.

“We have to be making sure we’re looking after our constituents,” says Nadeau. “Those who engage in sex work are our constituents. Let’s make sure that people engaging in sex work are being fully supported,” she says, comparing the harm reduction strategy to the “same reason that we decided as a city that we want to address the root causes of drug use and violence.”

Unlike the “Nordic Model,” which makes it legal to sell sex but increases punishment for those buying it, Grosso modeled the bill after efforts in New Zealand, which became the first country to decriminalize sex work in 2003. He says that the impact of that policy has been positive for that country: “Now people are self-reporting trafficking, or asking for help with housing.” He’s touting those same benefits for D.C.—that if sex workers don’t fear arrest, they’ll be able to access services and healthcare, as well as inform authorities when they see sex trafficking occur.

The legislation comes at a time when sex work-related charges have more than doubled year-over-year from 2017 to 2018, according to data from the Metropolitan Police Department. In 2017, D.C. police charged 228 people with crimes associated with sex work (the bulk of them, 197, were for sexual solicitation). Compare that to 2018, when there were 551 such charges (including 512 for sexual solicitation).

In 2018, the Narcotics and Special Investigations Division of MPD temporarily assigned officers to the Human Trafficking Unit “so that street enforcement could occur. This was in response to an increase of community complaints about prostitution occurring throughout the District,” D.C. police spokesperson Alaina Gertz told DCist in a statement. (MPD declined to participate in an interview.) “There has been an increase in arrests because of the dedicated effort of this unit, not because of an increase in related activity.”

D.C. police has also been working with the FBI since April to target alleged pimps operating what authorities described as organized prostitution in Logan and Thomas circles, per the Washington Post.

While prostitution charges have actually decreased (dropping from 37 in 2016 to just six in 2018), that doesn’t mean sex workers aren’t being prosecuted. Instead, they are being charged with sexual solicitation, which is defined as “inviting, enticing, offering, persuading or agreeing to engage in prostitution.” MPD has made “Johns” the focus of its enforcement efforts, but sex workers are still being targeted “as this is still an illegal activity,” Gertz says over email. She said that police arrested roughly five “Johns” for every one sex worker last year. That would mean more than 80 charges for sex workers in 2018.

Even as D.C. police have ramped up enforcement efforts, Mayor Muriel Bowser has established a four-month working group through the Office of Victim Services and Justice Grants to look into arrest diversion programs for sex work and make recommendations by September about how D.C. could design and launch its own program.

Michelle Garcia, the director of the Office of Victim Services and Justice Grants, says that the idea is to keep people from entering the criminal justice system for engaging in sex work. The approximately 30 people in the working group include a bevy of District agencies, area neighborhood commissions, and community-based organizations, including members of the Sex Worker Advocates Coalition, which formed in 2016 and backs decriminalization.

“I know there are broader conversations about decriminationalization that are happening,” Garcia says, but it’s not the current focus of the working group. “Right now, there are folks in need of supports and services, and the criminal justice system is not the appropriate response.”

Alicia Sanchez Gill, the executive director of Collective Action for Safe Spaces and a member of the Sex Worker Advocates Coalition, is participating in the working group. “We don’t see diversion as the answer because criminal legal systems should not be the first point of entry for support services for people engaged in sex work,” Gill says. “That hurts both adults consensually engaged in sex work and trafficking victims. Getting services shouldn’t come at the expense of going to court.”

While it’s unclear how many people in D.C. are engaged in sex work, Gill says that CASS sees “sex work criminalization and the policing of sex work as a primary center of violence for some of the most marginalized people.”

She says that the federal crackdown on websites like Backpage through anti-trafficking legislation means that “folks are going back to the street.” When people used online sites to sell sex, she says, they “were able to vet clients differently, able to do it in the comfort of their own homes, less likely to experience police profiling.” Gill adds that the “experience of gentrification has huge impact on who is calling the police on who … We know who the people are who are most likely to be criminalized and policed in D.C., and we know that’s the same with sex work.”

Another member of the Sex Worker Advocate Coalition, HIPS development associate Shareese Mone, is in favor of decriminalization. She says that the policy is more beneficial to “the ones that are first-timers or just getting involved in the sex work or survival work. But “for those who have records miles long, it does not do anything for [them.]… If you have a sex offense on your docket, you’re ineligible for housing, jobs—there’s a lot of barriers.”

Unlike Grosso’s recreational marijuana bill, which includes a measure that would automatically expunge criminal records that only involve cannabis, there’s no similar language in this sex work decriminalization bill as drafted. Grosso says that this bill establishes a task force that would study and make recommendations on issues like this one. (There’s also another bill at the D.C. Council that would streamline the process for record sealing and expungement.)

Monae says there’s one measure that would help sex workers more than any other: housing. “Housing gives you stability,” she says. “It’s the top of the totem pole.”

Grosso says he agrees. “But in the meantime, let’s do no harm,” he says. “While we’re figuring out the housing issues in our city, if we decriminalize, it’s going to be easier for the government to have a conversation with a sex worker because they’re not going to be so worried about arrest. We can work with them through case management to help them get what they need—that includes housing, that includes getting their record cleared, furthering their education, or whatever. But you can’t do that if they won’t talk to you.”