Seattle is paying a former pimp $150,000 a year to play the role of the city’s “street czar” and offer “alternatives to policing” after protests transformed into the anti-police Capitol Hill Occupied Protest (known as CHOP) zone.
Activist Andre Taylor is open about his past as a pimp, admittedly an escort hustler known as “Gorgeous Dre,” he was sentenced in 2000 in Las Vegas to more than five years in prison where he served a little more than one.
He has also appeared in the 2000 documentary “American Pimp” and is working with the city of Seattle through his nonprofit, Not This Time. Taylor says he started the nonprofit after his brother Che Taylor was killed by Seattle police in 2016.
Taylor was a staunch critic of “CHOP” and supported the father of a 19-year-old who was shot and killed in the CHOP zone in June.
Taylor has worked with the city before where he was brought in to host panel discussions called “Conversation with the Streets” in 2019, as reported by The Seattle Times.
“Me, as a Black man has the right to be paid for my genius or for whatever my organization can provide,” Taylor said. “Black people as a whole have not been in a place to be compensated for their genius or their work for a very, very long time.”
Taylor is working with the city’s Department of Neighborhoods, where it designates him as a consultant hired to “act as an adviser to the City of Seattle and community liaison.”
“Mayor Durkan believes that we have to make deep investments in community – one of the key demands of the Black Lives Matter protests,” Durkan spokesperson Kelsey Nyland told The Seattle Times in a statement.
“In early June, she committed in her 2021 budget a $100 million investment in community,” Durkan’s spokesperson continued. “Andrè spoke with organizers about how to turn activism and organizing into action at the state, local and federal level, and urged individuals to leave Capitol Hill.”
