Dealing with Drug
Dealers
While perhaps the
city can fool the general public into believing they are dealing with
crime by simply forcing the criminals to move (and in the process make
the owner of the property appear to be a criminal as well) the truth appears
to be that this policy has actually caused larger areas of the community
to be affected by drugs, gangs and prostitution.
Consider this: A small
time dealer is evicted, but not incarcerated. He moves ten blocks away.
His old "customers" are not suddenly going to become clean because
he moved. These are by all accounts powerful addictions. The users will
continue to buy from him or find someone else who sells the junk. So the
drug activity continues in the old location. And the evicted dealer? He
has an entire new potential customer base to peddle his poison to in this
new location as well .
I spoke to a long-time
nuisance abatement officer about this a few months ago. He laughed while
admitting that he sees the same bad actors time and time again, always
at a different address.
Drug Dealers Are
Dangerous
Below is the Journal
account of a very sad story where an evicted drug dealer's retaliation
against the landlord resulted in his wife's murder in her own kitchen.
We had expressed our fears of this type of thing occurring when we fought
the Milwaukee's property recording ordinance provision that required public
disclosure of the owner's physical address.
A few safety tips.
- An owner with
an office should use that address only for all tenant and municipal
disclosures.
- If you don't have
an office you can use an agent for service and use that address to fulfill
the disclosure requirements. Attorneys, onsite managers and property
managers all often are used for this purpose.
- Thoroughly screen
your tenants. Drug dealers are both dangerous and don't pay their rent.
Prevention is the best medicine.
- Even with good
screening practices you will still have the occasional problem tenant
due to fronting*, cotenants who are not listed on the application, bad
people who have previously avoided detection and good people or their
children who turn bad later. When you get a problem tenant, don't be
confrontational.
* Fronting: As more and more owners use thorough screening methods
more
And more bad tenants are having someone else with a clean criminal and
rental history apply for the apartment. Fronting undermines the entire
screening process. One of the most prevalent forms we have seen recently
are parents fronting for their children who can't find a place to live
due to evictions and convictions. While fronting is difficult to detect
at the front end you can reduce the impact by checking a couple of weeks
after the new tenant moves in to see who is actually living there. Pre-acceptance
in home visits are a good way of finding potential cases of unlisted co-tenants.
Drug dealers are one
of the most despicable criminals, who prey on the weak and ruin many lives.
But should you have to evict, or even reject an applicant, due to drug
dealing don't do it in a judgmental or disrespectful manner. Rather than
'Get outa my house ya dirt bag scum!', blame it on authority. 'The police
called me and said you were selling drugs and they are going to take the
house away from me if you don't move.' Blame it on the police even when
it is another tenant, a neighbor or even your own observation that is
leading to the eviction. When rejecting an applicant with a drug history
either (best) don't give them a reason or use a similar 'Sorry I can't
rent to you because you have a drug record and the city will take my house
if I rent to you'
From the Journal
Sentinel
Man guilty of killing woman, 69
A Milwaukee County
jury found Jermaine Smith guilty Friday night in the killing of 69-year-old
Dorothy Roberts in her north side kitchen last November.
Detectives testified
that Smith and Cornelius Blair, 21, invaded the Roberts home around
2:30 p.m. because Michael Davis, the leader of the Black Mob street
gang, ordered them to. Roberts had evicted Davis from his
N. 22nd St. house because the police had raided it for drugs.
"Mike told
me and (Blair) to handle this," Smith said in a statement read
in court Thursday by Detective Mark Peterson. "If we didn't, he
would handle us. . . . It was about respect."
Full
Story:
Last year we took
over a property and about 10 days later received a call from the City
of Milwaukee "nuisance abatement team". We met the team, consisting
of a senior building inspector and two police detectives, at the property.
It seems that one of the tenants that came with the building was involved
in drugs and gangs. The nuisance team wanted to placard the building arguing
that 'this is the quickest way to get these people out of the neighborhood.'
Cool, get them out of the neighborhood. No one wants them here, least
of all me.
Well, yesterday we
spoke to the same officers and inspector. And the occupant that the city
expended all these resources on (read: your tax dollars) in an attempt
to get them to leave the neighborhood? They moved "just around the
block"
A while ago I spoke
to a different officer who has been involved in the drug abatement and
nuisance actions against property owners since the beginning of these
programs. He was laughing when he told us that he sees the same tenants
time and time again. Always at a different address but still doing the
same bad things. I was already aware of this, as I had watched a tenant
I evicted based on a "drug house letter" move in to the house
next door.
While the City often
argues that problem tenants are the fault of owners that don't screen
the truth is the City fails to provide owners with information they have
on who the problem people are. Let's face it; the police often don't make
arrest and even when they do they usually don't arrest everyone in the
home. So when an owner checks a prospective tenant, the tenant doesn't
have a criminal record. Although the police collect the names of everyone
in homes when they are investigating drug activity, they don't provide
the list of these people to us property owners to use for screening purposes.
Until the city provides
owners with the names of everyone found residing in a house where there
is drug activity these people will remain free to more just around the
block while the taxpayers pick up the tab for three high-paid City employees
who simply expedite the bad actors moving a few hundred feet away, spreading
a swath of destruction. Urban locust.
In the mean time the
best screening tool we have found is to visit the applicant's current
residence.
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