When the late 1960s/early 1970s lyrical group The Last Poets said “New York, New York, The Big Apple … rotten to the core,” many outside of the city thought they were being too harsh. Well, perhaps this will give you a glimpse as to why they said that: Police in the city have been using a “nuisance abatement” law to deny people entry into their homes. Some of these people have been accused of crimes, and sometimes criminal activity was alleged to have taken place in (or near) the residences.
The overlapping threads are that a majority of the individuals affected have not been charged with crimes or have had charges dropped—and are people of color. A recent investigation by ProPublica and the New York Daily News looked at a little over 500 “nuisance abatement” court cases in an 18-month period.
Three-quarters of the cases begin with secret court orders that lock residents out until the case is resolved. The police need a judge’s signoff, but residents aren’t notified and thus have no chance to tell their side of the story until they’ve already been locked out for days. And because these are civil actions, residents also have no right to an attorney.
Perhaps most fundamentally, residents can be permanently barred from their homes without being convicted or even charged with a crime.
A man was prohibited from living in his family home and separated from his young daughter over gambling allegations that were dismissed in criminal court. A diabetic man said he was forced to sleep on subways and stoops for a month after being served with a nuisance abatement action over low-level drug charges that also never led to a conviction. Meanwhile, his elderly mother was left with no one to care for her.
Following the cases to their conclusion, the joint investigation revealed some grim statistics.
173 of the people who gave up their leases or were banned from homes were not convicted of a crime, including 44 people who appear to have faced no criminal prosecution whatsoever.
Overall, tenants and homeowners lost or had already left homes in three-quarters of the 337 cases for which the Daily News and ProPublica were able to determine the outcome. The other cases were either withdrawn without explanation, were missing settlements, or are still active.
In at least 74 cases, residents agreed to warrantless searches of their homes, sometimes in perpetuity, as one of the conditions of being allowed back in. Others agreed to automatically forfeit their leases if they were merely accused of wrongdoing in the future.
The toll of nuisance abatement actions falls almost exclusively on minorities, our analysis showed. Over 18 months, nine of 10 homes subjected to such actions were in minority communities. We identified the race of 215 of the 297 people who were barred from homes in nuisance abatement battles. Only five are white.
As a result of the joint investigation, a variety of public officials are calling for change, noting the law is possibly being applied too broadly and needs more safeguards.
You don’t say.