The “Tip of the Spear”: Sheriffs and Evictions
Posse Comitatus, August 31, 2021
Photo via East Bay DSA
In January of 2020, the Alameda County Sheriff’s Office evicted the members of Moms 4 Housing in a pre-dawn, military-style raid, using a battering ram to break down the (unlocked) front door. There were 30 deputies, at least 6 tactical team members, and a BearCat, people whom would later be described by their boss as “superstars.” Four people were arrested (2 moms, 2 protestors); they were bailed out by the afternoon. The families’ belongings were tossed into the street without letting anyone know. Oakland’s mayor condemned the show of force.
“They came in like an army for mothers and babies,” one of the women said. The Sheriff’s Public Information Officer called the supporters of Moms 4 Housing, who were gathered outside the house, “anarchist and criminal elements.” (Fred Hampton, Jr. was there that day and may have been a target, according to one activist.)
Moms 4 Housing emerged as a collective solution to a basic need: Black mothers needed homes for themselves and their children. When Dominique Walker decided to move into the Magnolia Street house – which had been abandoned for two years – she was protesting the increased number of rental homes owned by profit-gouging private equity firms, whose effect was to squeeze out all affordable housing and make homeownership all but impossible.
Even though this particular eviction inspired more activists and political support for Moms 4 Housing than praise of the sheriff, it seems that the sheriff’s office coordinated their strategy at the behest of the corporate property owner, Wedgewood L.L.C. E. Tammy Kim describes emails between Sheriff Gregory Ahems’s office and Wedgewood which indicate that the sheriff had been treating Wedgewood as a client, taking their attorney’s calls and never one talking to Moms 4 Housing in an attempt to resolve the dispute. (At one point, a sheriff’s office representative said the eviction had cost over 10K and was billed to Wedgewood L.L.C. Kim reports that no such bill exists.)
Since that winter, the situation has only gotten more precarious for millions of families.
Now that the federal eviction moratorium is no more, hundreds of thousands of people across the country are facing imminent, forcible removal from their homes. Some of those people will be forced out by their landlord, informally evicted or locked out of their homes, harassed into leaving, or otherwise will move before an actual eviction order is entered into the court and gets to the sheriff’s office (or elsewhere) for execution. And some will be evicted by law enforcement, often at gunpoint, after other legal options have failed.
Sheriffs are the “tip of the spear” for evictions; the last person standing between tenants and near-certain houselessness.
Impact of evictions
Scholars and advocates have been warning since the pandemic began that an eviction crisis will have dramatic public health consequences. Experts predict that, without eviction moratoriums, some 30 million people are at risk of losing their homes. (I urge you to look at the work of Emily Benfer and Princeton’s Eviction Lab for the details about the eviction process.)
There are so many reasons why evictions are especially bad in the current climate, ranging from increased racial inequities (both in the impact of COVID and of evictions), public health risks of alternate housing (like shelters), and the combination of rising housing costs and depressed wages, which have resulted in gross inequality. Evictions are also bad because they are a major stressor in peoples’ lives, disrupting medical care, employment, and education, in addition to having a significant impact on long-term health.
Finally, I would like to emphasize that allowing armed officers to effectuate evictions causes additional trauma that impacts not just with the tenants being evicted, but the entire community who witnesses these violent ejections from a person’s home. Simply put, the same people who will experience evictions and the over-policing that comes with them are statistically more likely to experience other police violence in their lives, from school, to the ER, to public transit, to the street. The same police who have a reputation for over-policing and racial profiling are now executing a court order that has a profound, often devastating, impact on the individual.
While sheriffs will often cast evictions as “simply following orders” – which is technically true; they are executing court orders – this does not erase the responsibility of politicians to reduce the use of law enforcement in evictions to ensure that people are not unduly traumatized in a moment of great stress. Certainly, there are multiple levels of responsibility in the eviction process, including housing court judges who issue the eviction orders and side most of the time with landlords, but none of this diminishes the need to think about the role of law enforcement at the point of greatest stress – when someone comes to physically eject people from their home.
There’s been a great deal of talk about reducing the use of armed officers for traffic and school safety, yet little about the role of the same violent forces in eviction. I think the time has come to confront this problem, especially as communities across the country will see a dramatic rise in evictions, creating catastrophic consequences.
Sheriffs’ Role in Evictions
In most places, sheriffs are the law enforcement officers who carry out evictions. (As a note: no state has evictions written directly into their state constitution as a power of the sheriff. In general, the power to execute evictions falls under the power to execute court orders or service of process, and eviction orders by a housing court are considered court orders) This can vary county-to-county, and some places, in lieu of sheriffs, use private security officers, constables (locally-elected law enforcement figures) or other armed law enforcement to enforce evictions. As I mention above, sheriffs will say their office “simply complies with its legal responsibilities to follow the judge’s order,” as one sheriff said. (This is a good primer on the eviction process.)
The actual history shows how sheriffs are more similar to private contractors than one might think. Because sheriffs operated as work-for-hire, they used to get paid per eviction, often by the landlord themself; this is still largely true. In some places, evictions don’t happen until the landlord who won the eviction order calls to ask the sheriff’s office for enforcement. (In some places, it appear to be automatic — but I have not seen any data on this issue.) The Philadelphia Sheriff’s Office charges $226 to serve the writ of possession – an order that eviction is impending required in that city before eviction.
The original goal behind involving law enforcement in such a purely personal interaction was intended to reduce violence; authorities worried that allowing landlords to evict tenants on their own would result in heated personal arguments. Law enforcement officers would be better neutral arbitrators, they thought. (It seems pretty obvious that the people who saw police as reducing violence in personal interactions had specific ideas about who was being evicted and whose side the police would take.) In at least one case, after WWII, a sheriff was accused of using people incarcerated in the county jail to help move a tenant’s belonging to the street.
From the Knoxville News Sentinel, March 29, 1933
Like most law enforcement matters, sheriffs have a great deal of discretion in how they execute evictions. There is generally some kind of lag time between the court-ordered eviction and the service of process, but this can vary widely. (Most jurisdictions have around 10-12 days between entry of judgment and physical eviction, during which time tenants are supposed to receive notice that they have been evicted. But, most of the time, tenants are not aware a judgment has been entered against them, and notice requirements vary widely. Some offices say they are on a 9-week delay.)
At the point of eviction, sheriffs and their deputies can choose to wear SWAT gear and even use so-called non-lethal force, like pepper spray. There is no data on how often sheriffs and other law enforcement use these paramilitary tactics. Aside from being dangerous for the tenants, the use of aggressive tactics can hurt law enforcement and lead to needless violence in a tense situation. In June, a Wake County, NC, deputy was shot executing an eviction notice. (While I don’t have a lot of details about this incident, it looks like the tenant the officers were trying to evict thought that he had until the end of the month; he fired shots as three officers entered his apartment with a key. The tenant called 911 after firing his gun and reported the shooting.) A South Carolina deputy was shot in 2020 similarly serving an eviction notice. In many cases, these incidents involve people who are severely traumatized and could be better handled by someone skilled in negotiations, rather than armed personnel.
Sheriffs also have varying policies when it comes to possessions. Some departments have a policy of storing items and charging a fee; others will toss them out onto the curb. And, there are some departments with a policy of offering services first. Sheriffs can enact their own processes to help tenants. In Cook County, for example, the sheriff’s office requires that landlords sign an affidavit swearing they have not received financial assistance for unpaid rent before agreeing to execute an eviction. Other jurisdictions are offering various services for tenants who are facing eviction. A Massachusetts sheriff says that he tries to place people who are evicted so they don’t sleep in their cars or on the street. (He’s also up for election in 2022 and says “evictions are not popular.”)
Death of the Eviction Moratorium
Initially, most jurisdictions had eviction moratoriums, but those moratoriums did not include anyone being evicted “for cause,” like violations of the lease agreements, nuisance claims, or violations of restrictive covenants, like drug-free or crime-free housing laws. While most moratoriums were at the state and federal level, some were local at the county and city level and some were led by sheriffs who stopped enforcing court orders. It’s important to note that, even during the moratorium, evictions did continue (constructive and otherwise) and judges did continue to order evictions, which caused, as some sheriffs said, a “backlog.” In some places, sheriffs are planning to hire more officers in order to evict more people because of the number of pending eviction orders.
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There are other ways in which sheriffs (along with other law enforcement officers) perpetuate housing inequality and segregation, including disparate policing practices, especially in contract cities, over-policing and violence towards unhoused people, using their policing powers as a collections agency, and their role in so-called “crime-free” housing ordinances.