Sheriffs, “Crime-Free” Housing, and the Politics of Segregation
Sheriffs, “Crime-Free” Housing, and the Politics of Segregation
September 7, 2021
Sheriffs, “Crime-Free” Housing, and the Politics of Segregation
The Antelope Valley towns of Lancaster – the “Confederacy of California” – and Palmdale are two of many “contract cities” that contract with the Los Angeles Sheriff’s Department for policing services. The region is well-known as a cradle of white supremacy, and, in the summer of 2020, as evidence of that continued legacy, a Black man was found dead from hanging. (As recently as 1997, white youths murdered a Black man in Palmdale for a “white supremacy tattoo;” in 2010 a Black church was firebombed.) Although the LASD labeled Robert Fuller’s death as by suicide, the case was reopened and remains unsolved, to my knowledge. (A similar horrific death by hanging occurred in nearby Victorville that same summer.)
The history of white supremacy in the region is tied to the history of the LASD, a topic that comes up in the history of contract cities in Southern California, which were themselves rooted in a sense of white flight and a desire to police the suburbs to keep them “Anglo-Saxon.”
In the 2000s, the city of Lancaster, worried about changing demographics, adopted policies that targeted Black residents, increasing the surveillance and policing of those enrolled in the Section 8 housing voucher program. Special “fraud inspectors” — ex-LASD deputies — were hired and given office space in the LASD Lancaster and Palmdale stations; their sole job was to search apartments to look for housing violations. In 2008, the city passed an additional “crime-free” housing program to ensure the compliance of landlords, who were now required to evict tenants or face criminal charges.
Deputies were tasked with “checking on” Section 8 renters, and used the opportunity to harass and target Black renters — breaking down doors, decked out in SWAT-style gear, to search homes for forbidden products or items that might support any claims of criminal activity. Black residents were stopped on the street and told they would lose their housing unless they complied with deputies’ orders. Nuisance and “crime-free-style” housing ordinances meant that landlords were also responsible for ensuring that their properties were free of even the specter of crime – penalties were levied for loitering or domestic violence calls. People were evicted, even if they were the victims who had called for police help.
The entity tasked with enforcing these ordinances? The LASD, which, incidentally, was under the thrall of local deputy gangs, particularly the Rattlesnakes, who seem to have been particularly involved in these shakedowns.
According to official reports, Black residents were pulled over under pretextual stops and harassed, violated, and injured by LASD deputies, who would threaten eviction as well as jail. People were harassed during housing compliance checks and cuffed in the back of patrol cars for no legitimate reason. The racism extended to all levels of the Lancaster and Palmdale stations. A supervisor, according to the report, told his deputies that every Black family was a member of a gang. There were Facebook groups dedicated to racist slurs and insults hurled at Section 8 housing residents. Not to be forgotten, the politicians and leaders of Lancaster and Palmdale expressed similar attitudes, perpetuating racist ideas that Section 8 recipients were criminals or otherwise threatening their community.
The situation was so bad that the Department of Justice intervened and ordered then-LASD Sheriff Lee Baca to pay out $12.5 million to compensate victims.
Last week, I wrote about the role of sheriffs in evictions. Yet, sheriffs are not just involved in the physical evictions themselves; they are often a core component to the policing that exacerbates inequality, segregation, and houselessness. Social scientists and legal scholars have pointed out the ways in which policing – especially third-party and civil-criminal policing – creates exclusion zones, reinforcing housing segregation and criminalizing poverty. I would add to this, sheriffs more specifically.
There are a few reasons to consider sheriffs in particular and not just as part of policing generally. For one thing, sheriffs are elected officials and politicians. Because they are elected on the county level, sheriffs have every good reason to pander to white, suburban and rural voters, the very people who are likely to enact crime-free ordinances in the first place. Additionally, sheriffs are particularly interested in issues of high political value that get a lot of press. Housing – or the lack thereof – is a critical issue in almost every county in America, not just the densely populated; it’s always been a reliable issue of interest in California. And, finally, sheriffs are the chief law enforcement officers deployed in most of these regions where they can operate with a great deal of impunity and a lack of accountability. While most states have, or are working on, more robust accountability measures for urban policing agencies, sheriffs are among the least accountable and generally excluded from most state-wide reform systems implemented to date. It is, therefore, relatively easy for a sheriff’s office to run rampant in a suburban community, especially in a place like Southern California, where there are very large sheriff departments awash in political power and a long history of segregation and exclusion.
History of policing as segregation
Most housing regulations find their roots in vagrancy laws, which criminalized the act of being in public. Courts began to strike down these types of laws in the 1960s, so law enforcement and politicians seized on new tools – namely, the criminalization of domestic violence and the “drug war” – to criminalize people inside their own homes. The new laws which codified domestic violence as a crime enabled law enforcement to enter the home and criminalize its inhabitants. But, rather than protect the people inside the home from violence, the laws were used to punish and control more people, usually those already excluded from society because of poverty (even though they were encouraged – and, in some cases, forced – to do so). Neighbors could call in family violence complaints, putting families on the radar of the police and stifling attempts by victims to reach out for help. Rather than helping victims of violence, domestic violence criminal laws made it easier to exclude and punish people for their own distress, which was often rooted in poverty. The “drug war” laws that proliferated in the 1980s allowed the criminalization of Black people and justified their exclusion from certain areas.
Researchers who study segregation in housing agree that such criminal laws and the consequential policing created more segregation by driving people to substandard housing and discouraging interaction with public authorities for fear of being targeted. This is one of the undocumented ways in which policing operates – people change their behavior, including where they live and work, in response to police intervention and fears of being targeted.
Much housing segregation occurs on the edge of suburbs and cities, or the edge of suburbs and the rural leak around it – at least some research indicates that criminal enforcement is more common in integrated neighborhoods because carceral actors are more interested in enforcing the edges of segregation, or those places where segregation is threatened. (For similar reasons, traffic enforcement in the suburbs is often more discriminatory because law enforcement in the suburbs is more interested in enforcing segregation and the perceived whiteness of the suburbs. These demographics are changing, as I understand it, because wealthier people are returning to the cities and more rural areas are becoming poorer. But, I don’t know if the pandemic is changing this again.)
At any rate, because many of these regions are on the fringes of cities, they are often under the purview of the sheriff, who has authority over all county laws, rather than the city police. In addition, sheriffs are often drawn to such civil/ criminal issues because they have the ability to enforce both civil and criminal laws due to the nature of their hybrid office. (I also argue that sheriffs are drawn to wide-reaching, “quality of life” issues because they are politicians and these are often the kinds of generic problems that evoke an emotional response in voters.) Sheriffs, in other words, both enforce the eviction – a civil order – and enforce the criminal laws that govern the lives of people who live inside the dwellings. This is yet another reason why sheriffs should not be involved in evictions; their mere presence blurs the boundaries between civil and criminal law enforcement. It is also another example of mission creep – carceral agents in schools, in your car, in shelters, in domestic violence service centers, in mental health wards, in hospitals, and in your own home. There is nowhere that police cannot intrude.
“Crime-free” housing policies
Crime-free housing policies are a way to harass and exclude individuals who need housing the most. Closely related to nuance ordinances – which require landlords to evict people for actions like calling the police – “crime-free” ordinances make all poor people immediate suspects, often by punishing landlords with criminal charges unless they evict certain tenants or by punishing tenants for engaging in certain behavior that is not criminal, like congregating, having people over, or calling the police for assistance. “Crime-free” policies were basically invented in 1992 by law enforcement. A recent estimate puts the number of such ordinances at around 2000 in 48 states. They are particularly common in California.
Nominally, like all similar housing codes and “drug-free” zones, “crime-free” ordinances are intended to respond to an imaginary resident’s concern about “crime.” But, in reality, there’s no evidence that they do deter any crime, and it’s pretty clear that the harms they cause by violating people’s rights and by creating auxiliary harms – violence, injury, harassment, abuse, trauma, stress, anxiety, houselessness, loss of property, and fear – have an infinite impact on peoples’ lives. I would point out that some of this is hard to measure. While the DOJ can collect reports of violent encounters, what about the impact on individual actions, like where one works, travels, goes to school, or visits family? What about the opportunities left on the table because someone is concerned about police harassment? How do we measure these harms?
One of the important things to know about “crime-free” ordinances is that they do not require proof that any crime has been committed. Some ordinances forbid rental to people (or disallow guests) who have been arrested or accused of a crime, even if they were never convicted or were exonerated. Because these ordinances are not really criminal laws, there’s no requirement for reasonable suspicion, no rights for the individual to, for example, remain silent, and no right to counsel. Additionally, there are documented instances where “crime-free” laws are used to harass and intimidate people — for example, when neighbors repeatedly call the police to complain about a neighbor who makes noise or has parties. It really is very similar to the “Black Codes” enacted post-Reconstruction, which required Black individuals to have written permission to travel or leave their job, with the stated purpose of limiting the ability of Black people to travel or move about freely. In fact, some departments are up-front about the fact that they view crime-free policing as a way to circumvent the criminal legal system and “chase [people] out of the city.”
“Crime-free” housing ordinances give law enforcement entities more power to police and terrorize through evictions and housing, alongside traditional methods like traffic stops, searches, and aggressive interrogation. And, as in Antelope Valley, the reasons behind “crime-free” ordinances are explicitly racist. In Hesperia, which is in San Bernardino County, the town enacted a “crime-free” ordinance specifically to stop the migration of Black and Brown families who were priced out of Los Angeles. The law imposed substantial costs to landlords as well as a draconian plan that would rely solely on the discretion of the San Bernardino Sheriff’s department, which had a nearly $15 million contract with the city to provide policing services. The sheriff’s department even stood up a special unit to enforce the ordinance as well as offering to accompany landlords to court who needed help evicting people, according to a complaint filed by the Department of Justice.
“Crime-free” housing ordinances also legalize segregation because they are disproportionately applied to evict Black and brown people. They also particularly injure people who are subject to domestic violence because calls for help can be labeled as “nuisances.” As discussed above, they tend to occur in places where demographics are changing, basically, in order to perpetuate segregation and exclude people of color from renting.
What is “policing”?
When I think about the impact of these policies and the civil-criminal encroachment, I start to reconsider what we mean by “policing.” What is policing? For some people, policing is solving crimes. But what is “crime”? For others, it’s creating public safety, which I suppose is the feeling that a person can walk or drive down the street without fear. But, this, too, raises questions about what it means to be in the world, what it means to feel fear.
There are a lot of people who have already thought about these issues, and I recommend reading what they write rather than listen to me regurgitate them. I would add one additional question to this: What does it mean to be at home? Home, I think, is a sense of both safety and belonging. It’s both inside and outside, including a yard or a park, or the neighborhood sidewalk. It’s proximate to people, some of whom you know well and some you don’t. It’s also a zone of control: who is in your home and who is not?
I ask this question in particular because it relates to a special interest of mine, which is how the criminalization of domestic violence has made the home, the most intimate of relationships, one of the most contested sites for public officials. We ask people to reach outside of their home when they need protection or help, but very often, that invitation means that someone is risking all of it, their whole home, in a very real way, from which there is no return to safety.