Learn to protect yourself. If it's legal buy a pistol and learn to use it. Train with it as much as you can -- especially if you're a woman. The cops today don't give a damn about you -- especially if you are unmarried, a single mother, a woman of color, a lesbian, or not someone they would "hit on".
We have become the same mean spirited country we were back in the 1850's. We no longer even PRETEND to worry about the poor, women, minorities, or children. Heck during the last presidential election cycle some Republican candidates suggested we roll back limits on child labor -- as a "reform". We are thoughtless, greedy, nasty, mean spirited, uneducated, near illiterate assholes. Overly entitled, without a clue.
Again, if you are not one of the new chosen few of America -- please learn how to protect yourself.
This from "The New York Times" == follow link to original
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NORRISTOWN, Pa. — The police had warned Lakisha Briggs: one more altercation at her rented row house here, one more call to 911, and they would force her landlord to evict her
NORRISTOWN, Pa. — The police had warned Lakisha Briggs: one more altercation at her rented row house here, one more call to 911, and they would force her landlord to evict her
They could do so under the town’s “nuisance property” ordinance, a law
intended to protect neighborhoods from seriously disruptive households.
Officials can invoke the measure and pressure landlords to act if the
police have been called to a rental home three times within four months.
So she faced a fearful dilemma, Ms. Briggs recalled, when her volatile
boyfriend showed up last summer, fresh out of a jail stint for their
previous fight, and demanded to move in.
“I had no choice but to let him stay,” said Ms. Briggs, 34, a certified
nursing assistant, even though, she said in an interview, she worried
about the safety of her 3-year-old daughter as well as her own.
“If I called the police to get him out of my house, I’d get evicted,”
she said. “If I physically tried to remove him, somebody would call 911
and I’d be evicted.”
Over the last 25 years, in a trend still growing, hundreds of cities and
towns across the country have adopted nuisance property or “crime-free
housing” ordinances. Putting responsibility on landlords to weed out
drug dealers and disruptive tenants, the laws aim to save neighborhoods
from blight as well as ease burdens on the police.
But the laws are sometimes forcing victims, especially women facing
domestic violence, to choose between calling the police and holding on
to their homes, according to legal aid groups and experts on housing and
the poor.
“These laws threaten citizens’ fundamental right to call on the police
for help,” said Matthew Desmond, a sociologist at Harvard.
In a study of citations
issued to landlords in Milwaukee, conducted with Nicol Valdez of
Columbia University, Mr. Desmond found that domestic violence was
involved in nearly one-third of the cases and that rentals in largely
black areas were disproportionately singled out.
Legal experts say the laws can give tenants the lasting stain of an eviction record without due process.
In a federal lawsuit being watched by legal aid groups elsewhere, Ms. Briggs has challenged the Norristown ordinance as unconstitutional.
She did so after her fears were realized.
In June 2012, days after her ex-boyfriend, Wilbert Bennett, moved into
her house in this struggling town northwest of Philadelphia, he started
another drunken, late-night argument. Then came his most violent attack
yet: an assault with a broken ashtray that left a gash on her head and a
four-inch stab wound in her neck.
Before she passed out, Ms. Briggs begged her neighbor not to call 911
because of the eviction threat, according to the suit, which is being
argued by the American Civil Liberties Union.
The neighbor called anyway. Ms. Briggs was taken by helicopter to
Philadelphia for emergency treatment. Mr. Bennett is now serving a
sentence of one to two years for aggravated assault.
And Norristown officials instructed her landlord to evict her within 10 days or lose his rental license.
“I was afraid I’d lose my house, my job and, what’s next, my daughter?” Ms. Briggs recalled.
A legal aid lawyer put her in touch with the A.C.L.U., and the city
backed away from the eviction demand. Ms. Briggs moved anyway, to a
location she hopes Mr. Bennett will not discover when he is released.
Responding to the lawsuit, Norristown officials stressed that they had
policies to protect victims of domestic abuse. They said Ms. Briggs had
failed to comply with an instruction to obtain protection orders against
Mr. Bennett and also against her troubled older daughter, then 19, with
whom she had repeated arguments. The police had been called to her home
10 times in the first five months of 2012 and said they had seen no
evidence of physical injury.
The suit “fails to take into consideration the health, safety and
welfare of all neighbors who live in proximity to a disorderly house,”
the town said.
This kind of ordinance began to spread in the 1980s as communities
sought to banish drug centers. They continued to proliferate as large
cities like Phoenix and Dallas, and suburban towns like Norristown also
sought to halt the flight of residents from crumbling neighborhoods.
Since rental properties account for a large share of 911 calls, more
cities began to license landlords and press them to control disruptive
tenants, said Michael Buerger, professor of criminal justice at Bowling
Green State University in Ohio.
The impetus was understandable, he said, as cities like Minneapolis,
where he did research, saw good people driven out by the uncivil
behavior of a few.
“It’s a form of mission creep, I suspect,” Mr. Buerger said, of the
negative consequences now gaining attention. “I don’t think anyone
believes that landlords should be able to ignore a crack house. But
after three visits for disorderly conduct — it’s less clear.”
Evicting disruptive tenants may help one block but shuffles the problem elsewhere, say advocates for the poor.
“I really doubt this policy ends up saving the city money,” said April A. Hartman, a lawyer with Legal Action of Wisconsin.
“Milwaukee spends a significant amount of money dealing with the
consequences of homelessness and housing instability.”
Potentially unfair consequences are not confined to battered women.
William Zarnoth, 62, a bartender in Milwaukee, said he worked late and
was not involved in disputes between his roommates and a downstairs
neighbor that led to 911 calls.
“I wasn’t named in any of the police reports,” he said. But he was
ejected with the others in June. He is living in an $80-a-week room and
has been turned down for apartments because of the eviction record.
“Now I’m trying to get my name cleared so I can rent a place where I can cook,” Mr. Zarnoth said.
More than 100 municipalities in Illinois have adopted nuisance property
or crime-free property ordinances, said Emily Werth, a lawyer with the
Sargent Shriver National Center on Poverty Law in Chicago and author of a
new report on the effects.
Gwen Kaitis, director of the Illinois Domestic Violence Helpline, said
her group received several calls a month from women facing a choice
between safety and housing. On a recent day, she said, a woman with five
children called to say that her boyfriend had choked her and she was
trying to end their relationship, but that her landlord had told her
that if the police were called one more time, he would evict her.
In Minnesota and, after a recent revision, Milwaukee, laws specify that
domestic violence cannot be grounds for eviction. But counselors for
battered women warn that, as happened with Ms. Briggs, the police do not
always perceive the abusive aspects of conflicts and the victims —
often scared, financially vulnerable and in emotional knots — may not
speak up.
Many critics of the laws call them “fundamentally flawed,” in the words
of Sandra S. Park, a lawyer with the A.C.L.U. who is helping to
represent Ms. Briggs.
The critics, including landlords who say they are caught in the middle,
argue that the police, not landlords, should deal with criminal activity
and severe disorderly behavior.
“The problem with these ordinances is that they turn victims of crime
who are pleading for emergency assistance into ‘nuisances’ in the eyes
of the city,” Ms. Park said. “They limit people’s ability to seek help
from police and punish victims for criminal activity committed against
them.”
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