Police tell victims: Call 911 and you’ll get evicted under ‘nuisance’ laws | The Raw Story: ....The nuisance laws are growing in popularity around the country. They are ostensibly enacted to enable landlords to weed out drug dealers and other disruptive tenants from rental properties and create “crime-free neighborhoods.” Unfortunately, they often end up placing victims of domestic violence and other crimes at the mercy of their abusers.
Harvard University sociologist Matthew Desmond said to the Times, “These laws threaten citizens’ fundamental right to call on the police for help.”
Desmond authored a report entitled “Unpolicing the Urban Poor: Consequences of Third-Party Policing for Inner-City Women” that examined years of citations issued to landlords in Milwaukee, WI. More than a third of the cases, he found, involved domestic violence.
He also found that the laws disproportionately targeted rental properties located in poor, mostly-African American neighborhoods.
