9. Other landlords responded to nuisance property citations by discouraging tenants from calling 911. Some instructed tenants to call them instead of the police. A landlord running a living facility housing “persons with disabilities” posted the following sign around the building: STOP BEFORE CALLING 911 YOU CAN BE FINED BY THE POLICE FOR NON-EMERGENCY CALLS CALL [414-###-####] / ASK FOR DAWN. Other landlords threatened tenants with eviction or fines if they called 911 again. After receiving a citation, one landlord circulated the following letter to his tenants: “Tenants who place nuisance calls to the Milwaukee Police Department, or abuse the 911 system, will be fined…$50.00 PER OCCURRENCE.”
10. Wisconsin Coalition Against Domestic Violence, Wisconsin Domestic Violence Homicide Report: 2009 (Milwaukee: Wisconsin Coalition Against Domestic Violence, September 2010).
11. Milwaukee amended its ordinance in 2011, shortly after I shared my findings with the Police Department, city attorneys, and housing lawyers. Now, citations explicitly state that “nuisance activity” does not include domestic abuse, sexual assault, or stalking. With this step, Milwaukee has joined a handful of other municipalities—Chicago; Madison, Wisconsin; Phillipsburg, New Jersey; and the Village of East Rochester, New York, among them—whose nuisance property ordinance forbids administering citations for repeated calls due to domestic violence. They are the exception to the rule. Will dropping domestic violence from the list of nuisance activities be enough to protect battered women from the ordinance? It will most likely not, for two reasons.
The first is that domestic-violence incidents often hide behind other police designations, antiseptic and context-barren, such as Property Damage (as when an ex-boyfriend kicks down the door) or Subject with Weapon (as when a husband uses a pair of box cutters on his wife). Domestic violence, sexual assault, and stalking were not struck from Milwaukee’s original list of nuisance activities; they were never included in the list to begin with. Because the ordinance still lists things like battery, harassment, and misuse of emergency telephone numbers among its thirty-two permissible nuisances, these designations can still be applied to crimes of the home.
A second problem with the city’s quick fix is that it relies on landlords, who have been threatened with hefty fines, to reveal if nuisance activities are domestic violence–related. Some will raise this issue with the police, and others will simply evict the tenant, implementing their own quick fix. Roughly 8 in 10 property owners abated nuisance activity, regardless of what it involved, by evicting tenants or by threatening them with eviction if the police were contacted again. One could propose a list of other improvements—more police training could help; cities could aim their ordinances only at drug activity or noise—but maybe this is a case where the hatchet is preferred to the scalpel. Not only can nuisance property ordinances do considerable harm, but they also reveal the extent to which local governments are willing to relax civil rights and circumvent the judiciary process when confronted with a scarcity of resources. “Nuisance tenants” are not prima facie guilty. They are not prima facie anything because questions of guilt and innocence are inconsequential to policies designed to operate beyond the purview of the court. Unless the tenant puts up a serious fuss, the evidence never even sees the inside of a court. Besides these concerns about due process rights, legal scholars have argued that nuisance property ordinances violate constitutional (think Fourth Amendment) and statutory (think Fair Housing Act) protections. Perhaps what Caleb Foote said of US vagrancy laws almost sixty years ago can be said of nuisance property ordinances today: the only reason they are tolerated is because families struggling to make ends meet in the low-income housing market are simply too poor or too vulnerable to assert their obvious rights. See John Blue, “High Noon Revisited: Commands of Assistance by Peace Officers in the Age of the Fourth Amendment,” Yale Law Journal 101 (1992): 1475–90; John Diedrich, “Domestic Violence Victims in Milwaukee Faced Eviction for Calling Police, Study Finds,” Milwaukee Journal Sentinel, August 18, 2013; Caleb Foote, “Vagrancy-Type Law and Its Administration,” University of Pennsylvania Law Review 104 (1954): 603–50; Karen Phillips, Preliminary Statement, Grape v. Town/Village of East Rochester, No. 07 CV 6075 CJS (F) (W.D.N.Y. March 16, 2007).
16. ASHES ON SNOW
1. I began this evening with Sherrena and Quentin at the casino. The scene of Lamar playing cards with Kamala was reconstructed through interviews with Lamar, Luke, Eddy, and some of the neighborhood boys. I also reviewed court records and reports by medical examiners and fire/safety scientists. The rest of the evening’s events were witnessed firsthand.
2. Mothers’ cries were heard over a century ago, when flames ravaged tenements, the fireproofing of which was deemed too costly; and they went up throughout the twentieth century, when ghetto housing in city after city ignited in flame or collapsed in decay. In Chicago alone, between 1947 and 1953 fires claimed the lives of over 180 slum dwellers, 63 of whom were under the age of ten. Conditions that invited fires—overcrowding, slipshod construction—also could prevent families from escaping. Throughout the 1960s and early ’70s, some landlords torched their own buildings to collect insurance money. Sometimes these buildings were vacant; sometimes they were not. Today, children living in substandard housing are more than ten times more likely to die in a fire than those living in decent and safe homes. Said Jacob Riis, a fire at night is “a horror that has few parallels in human experience.” The quote comes from Riis, How the Other Half Lives: Studies Among the Tenements of New York (New York: Penguin Books, 1997 [1890]), 88, but see also 35–36. On fires in the slum, see Jacob Riis, Battle with the Slum (Mineola: Dover Publications, 1998 [1902]), 89; Marcus Anthony Hunter, Black Citymakers: How the Philadelphia Negro Changed Urban America (New York: Oxford University Press, 2013), chapter 3; Arnold Hirsch, Making the Second Ghetto: Race and Housing in Chicago, 1940–1960 (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1983), 25–26; Thomas Sugrue, The Origins of the Urban Crisis: Race and Inequality in Postwar Detroit (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2005), 37; Beryl Satter, Family Properties: How the Struggle over Race and Real Estate Transformed Chicago and Urban America (New York: Metropolitan Books, 2009), 335; Douglas Parker et al., “Fire Fatalities Among New Mexico Children,” Annals of Emergency Medicine 22 (1993): 517–22.
17. THIS IS AMERICA
1. On “going homeless” to receive benefits, see Adrian Nicole LeBlanc, Random Family: Love, Drugs, Trouble, and Coming of Age in the South Bronx (New York: Scribner, 2004).