Andrè Taylor’s first words to Seattle were intended as a rallying cry. But they dropped more like a bomb.

“I’m here to go to war,” he said at a heated news conference two years ago. “I will be unrelenting to get justice for my little brother.”

At the time, it felt like the police shooting of Che Taylor in northeast Seattle might explode into our Ferguson moment. Here was the NAACP accusing police of “coldblooded murder.” And here was the brother, a fierce, dynamic ex-con up from Los Angeles, seemingly vowing to take it to the streets.

But the war Andrè Taylor ended up fighting — the one he says he envisioned all along — turned out to be a tour de force of bridge-building and community organizing.

It culminated this past week in the state Legislature’s surprise agreement to change the police deadly-force law, making it easier to prosecute officers in the case of a bad shooting.

“From breaking laws to making laws!” Taylor wrote on a YouTube video of his testimony in Olympia on Initiative 940, the measure he spearheaded to force the changes.

Wrote one of his friends in the comments: “From pimp to political activist.”

Wait, pimp? Yes, the man who just helped push a compromise solution to one of the more incendiary political issues of our day was once an escort hustler known as “Gorgeous Dre.” He was sentenced in 2000 in Las Vegas to more than five years in prison (he served a little more than one.). He also appeared in the 2000 documentary “American Pimp.”

“Let’s just say that in my previous life I did learn some life skills, such as how to keep my composure,” Taylor said when I asked him about his past.

Taylor, 49 and now a life coach, says he knew that despite the heated beginning in Seattle after his brother’s killing, keeping cool would prove to be crucial.

“I was immediately against any kind of response that involved physical violence,” he says.

Though at times he used sweeping anti-police language, such as calling his brother’s death “an execution,” what he actually spent most of his time doing was brokering meetings with “the system“ — police, prosecutors, lawmakers and countless community groups.

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