Dozens of US cities threaten to evict domestic violence victims if the

[Marxist ßastard]

Domestic Violence Survivors Who Call the Cops Risk Eviction in Some Places – The Atlantic Cities

 

 

"Nuisance property ordinances" in dozens of US cities, from Los Angeles to East Rochester, threaten tenants with eviction and homelessness – and property owners with loss of their licenses – if police are forced to respond to a domestic violence complaint. Tenants who call 911 on their abusive partners are told that they must either suffer their abuse in silence, or be forcibly removed from their homes. The ACLU has fought against this with some minor success, but municipalities are now pushing back, perhaps emboldened by our 81%-male Congress, which treats domestic violence as such an afterthought that they allowed the Violence Against Women Act to silently expire in 2011, to be grudgingly re-enacted more than a year later.

 

To me, this is an absolutely disgusting situation. It represents the intersection of municipalities' care for maintaining property values above and beyond ensuring residents' welfare, with the deep undercurrents of misogyny and victim-blaming which have always plagued the government's treatment of domestic violence issues.

[juderodney]

Um... what does Congress have to do with city ordinances?

[Tidus44]

I fully intended to post something along the lines of being disgusted as well, but I made the mistake of looking through a bunch of the information that was linked by the OP and then searching out the exact ordinance wording and some related information for the ordinances that identified a property being a nuisance related to the number of police responses.

As a consequence of doing this, I face palmed so many times I have a severe head ache now and can't think straight enough to actually say what I wanted to say about human stupidity, political social engineering and police with a yellow streak up their back so wide they sit on their butt and eat donuts all day to ensure the stripe fits.

 

Not just disgusting, but actually sickening how some municipal authorities treat people. I hope the ACLU sues those municipalities into the stone age or at the very least do something at the mayor's and municipal councilor's homes so the police are called a sufficient number of times to declare them a nuisance and fine them.

[Boaresa]

This is what happens when you wanna involve government in your daily life thinking it will solve your problems. But did anyone complained about the UKs positive arrest policy in domestic violence?

[Marxist ßastard]

WTF are you on about? If a woman's abusive ex breaks into her apartment and starts assaulting her, do you really think that's not a matter for the police?

 

idgi, I honestly just dgi

[greywaste]

It's emblematic of a lot of laws - well intentioned (behave yourselves and don't make your neighbours lives hell if you want to live here - because if we threaten to boot you out you'll all play nice right? Right?) but falls flat on it's face in execution and detail.
I've lived with horrible hell raising neighbours many times, lost the plot and gave one of them a good thumping once after goading him into a fight since the guy and g/f were literally putting my life at risk due to the lack of sleep I was getting.
Now with that said, the situation in the o.p. is absolutely appalling. There should be restraining orders on these a-holes for openers.

I realise it can get complicated when there's free will and second chances being given by the victim in some cases, but jesus where's the aggravated assault, trespassing, breaking and entering etc?...

I think MB is a being a little over cynical in the property values and misogyny thing, sure those maybe well be elements somewhere in the mix, but I think it's mostly to do with my first sentence.

Edited May 1, 2013 by greywaste

[TRoaches]

Boaresa's point is similar to my initial thought when I read the OP, so I'm going to elaborate on it before he has a chance to dumb it down like he did in that other thread.

When the government grants itself the power to intervene in anything it can only do so by reducing someone's legal rights. In this case, goal is to "protect" the rights of the landlord and the neighbors, but it achieves this by removing the power to handle their own business from both the landlord and the "nuisance" tenant. Before these laws were passed there was a system already in place that allowed the landlord to evict a nuisance tenant. There were also protections for a tenant who felt they were being treated unfairly by a landlord. A landlord who evicts a tenant for any reason, valid or invalid, is going to look like a villain to the person being evicted and most observers, but it is their property and they should have the right to manage the property as they see fit. In most cases the landlord is probably more informed about the laws regarding tenant-landlord relationships and will have the upper hand. This invokes the sympathy of people who should have no say in what happens to that property, and laws are passed that make it more difficult to evict. This removes some of the landlord's rights in favor of the tenant. In response, the landlords push back and you get yet another misguided law intended to help the landlord's to evict "nuisance" tenants, but it does so by removing rights from both the tenant AND the landlord to resolve the issue privately.

If I could push a law right now it would be one that prohibits the use of catchy slogans as the titles of laws, because the names of bills often have little to do with their content, or are intended to actively mask the content. Many would argue that the Patriot Act was not very patriotic at all, but the name of the bill makes for a great sound bite as it passes from the lips of a polition to the ear of a voter who has never read the bill.

"My opponent OPPOSED the Patriot act! He is not a patriot!".

In this case, a person reads "Nuisance Property Ordinance" and would assume that it deals with criminal tenants when it actually makes no distinction between a criminal and a victim when defining who is a nuisance. Similarly, the Violence Against Women act sounds like a fine thing. Who would oppose such a heroic law? The ACLU, in fact, opposed it because it considered it a violation of the rights of the accused regarding the collection of DNA samples. The supreme court also overturned part of the law as an unconstitutional violation of the rights of the accused. I know it is a repugnant thing to defend the rights of accused rapists, but it is essential that we do so in a lawful society. Their willingness to take a principled stand in even the most offensive cases is the main reason that I hold the ACLU in very high regard.

[Marxist ßastard]

You are completely misinterpreting the situation. Nuisance property ordinances aren't designed to make it easier to evict tenants. They're designed so that municipalities can force landlords to evict tenants, using the existing legal framework, if those tenants are a "nuisance" to their neighbors or produce an undue strain on police services. The municipality views domestic violence victims as violators because, apparently, their screams for help bother neighbors as they're trying to watch Night Court.

 

And you know, I'd also like you to look over your post again, and consider that fully half of it is dedicated to complaining about (imagined) infringements of landlords' rights. You give practically no mention of the victims, who are evicted, oftentimes into homelessness (in Norristown, defendant in the ACLU suit, 20% of the homeless are domestic violence victims). I mean, real talk – exactly how much Ayn Rand did you have to read before you started thinking like that?

[TRoaches]

You are misinterpreting my point. I was not arguing in favor of the nuisance law. I was supporting the notion that this is what one should expect when they allow their government to meddle in their private business affairs. The point I was trying to make is that there is often a big difference between the original intent of a law and its end result. The relationship between a landlord and tenant is a civil contract between consenting parties. If one or the other decides that the relationship is no longer beneficial they should have the right to end that contract, but no outside entity should be allowed to FORCE them to do so.

Do you really think the city council dedicated their time to drafting a law with the intent of further victimizing the victims of violence? If so, what is their angle? What does a politician have to gain by forcing the eviction of a criminal victim? I think if far more likely that they thought it looked and sounded good on paper, but are uninformed about the reality of the situation.

The nuisance laws are wrong because they violate the rights of the landlord to exert control over their own property, and this in turn leads to a victim of violence becoming a victim again, this time of a stupid ill-conceived law. You are looking at this from a simplistic viewpoint of "landlord = villain, tenant = victim". Your mention of Rand (super boring, I'm not a fan at all) is funny given that your handle is a reference to another famous political author, one who expressed a view of the world that rested on a similarly simplified villain/victim paradigm. If a landlord has a genuine nuisance tenant, or a tenant who is in a relationship with a nuisance and has refused to utilize the law to their benefit to force that person out of their life, and the situation is driving business away from the landlord's property, is the landlord not a victim of the circumstance as well? To say that both the landlord and the tenant are victims of the situation is not to reduce the victimhood of either. They are both victims of a stupid law, and the central point is that asking the government to regulate evictions (or any other civil matter) by removing all control from the parties involved is to invite this kind of stupid law.

We all have a tendency to view this sort of thing as a binary good vs evil situation, but in real life there are never only two sides to a story that affects thousands of individuals.

[Boaresa]

WTF are you on about? If a woman's abusive ex breaks into her apartment and starts assaulting her, do you really think that's not a matter for the police?

 

You don't know what "positiv arrest policy" means don't you? The Police will arrest the Husband/Man whatsoever and created 10 new government agencies to deal with those cases such as Community Safety Units, Criminal Justice Units, Safer Neighbourhood Teams and so on. (battered woman syndrome)

 

Also, the most likely part of victims who is threatend with homelessness by domestic violence are men. Over 90% of homeless people are men and even of amongs the homeless women there is just a very small percent that is homeles because of domestic violence. If a woman hits her man, it puts him in an impossible situation, because whatever he does the society will support the woman in legal issues and court issues and generaly see him as the violent one. One divorce later, where he was robbed by nearly everything he as by the court, its most likely he will face homelessness.

There are plenty of refuges for women who are victims of domestic violence, but not one for men. Also, Erin Pizzey who opend up the first refuges for women who were victims of domestic violence in the UK said, that over half of the women who came to her were at least as violent as the men who abused them. Meanwhile the greatest group of victims of domestic violence ain't women, but children who get beaten by their mothers.

 

 

But after all we need to look in the root of the problem, why choose people partners who ain't good for them. Why do women choose narcistic men who beat them and stay with them? Mostly even think, that they are the only one that understand him and can safe him. He beats her, and she let him beat her. I don't give a dry stick about the law because this is a highly complexe isue to sensible for any judge or buerocrate. Why do Men beat their wifes when there is clearly no physical threat from a woman against a man? And why in the world do mothers beat their children, the greatest group of abusers? When you look at people like charles manson or joe stalin, they had some serios mother issue. In most violent relationships there isn't a victim or a offender, because most of the times its two seriosly highly pathologic, narcistic, mentaly sick persons who need each other as the sadist needs a masochist and the other way around. They choose partners who treat them like garbage, because their ill mind tells them that this is what they are looking for to still their inferiority complex.

 

There should be more focus on the psychology behind these acts than this "society plumbing" after it already happend.

Edited May 2, 2013 by Boaresa