Seattle hires former pimp as 'street czar' for $150,000 after CHOP fiasco

Seattle is paying an ex-pimp $150,000 a year to act as the city's "street czar" and offer "alternatives to policing" after protests morphed into the no-police-allowed Capitol Hill Occupied Protest.

Activist Andre Taylor is open about his past as a pimp (he appeared in the documentary "American Pimp") and is working with the city of Seattle through his nonprofit, Not This Time. Taylor says he started Not This Time after his brother Che Taylor was killed by Seattle police in 2016.

Taylor was a critic of the Capitol Hill Occupied Protest and appeared on "Hannity" to support the father of a 19-year-old Black man who was shot and killed in the CHOP zone in June.

Taylor has previously worked with the city, receiving $100,000 for his nonprofit to host panel discussions called "Conversation with the Streets" in 2019, The Seattle Timesreported.
“Me, as a Black man has the right to be paid for my genius or for whatever my organization can provide,” Taylor told KOMO News. “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's July contract, first reported on by PubliCola, is with the city's Department of Neighborhoods. It designates him as a consultant hired to "act as an adviser to the City of Seattle and 'street czar' 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.