I’m not talking about people with a lease that don’t pay rent. I mean cases where there is no lease or any contact with the owner. It’s an “abandoned” house and people just move in. People can live like that for months or even years and you hear about jurisdictions where the sheriff basically says, “What do you want me to do about it?” How come in those cases the law can’t arrest or at the very least forcibly remove the squatters?
Why should the police care? They can’t get in touch with the owners of the property, they don’t really know the people are there illegally.
Except when the owner goes to the police saying I have squatters in my house.
Can you cite an article or something so that we can discuss a real case, rather than a possibly-imaginary abstract or invented case?
I don’t mean to offend or to accuse you of anything, but it is difficult to answer without more specifics.
In many places, if you squat long enough, you actually become the legal owner. At which point the police don’t do anything for the same reason they don’t do anything about any other legal property owner.
IIRC, only if the owner has done nothing to assert their property rights.
Some of these cases are like the one I read about in Texas(?) that was big in the news back here. A Canadian couple were trying to sell their winter mobile home. They had arranged for a nearby friend to show the property. Supposedly this one couple took the key to “look at” the property. In fact, they moved in. When the owners complained to the police, the police went there and asked. The squatters had a key and claimed they had an arrangement with the owners.
Now it became a “civil dispute” according to the police. One side says they have a legal reason to be there, the other says they don’t. Who’s right? If the “tenants” have even a hint of a legitimate lease, then they have rights and the police can’t just toss them out. It’s a he-said-he-said situation, two contradictory stories. Local landlord-tenant laws apply if there is a lease even if rent is seriously overdue or never paid. The owner can’t rely on the fact of ownership, because the occupier could be a valid tenant. So the question is - is there a valid lease? Are the people there legitimately?
When the question comes down to this, the police defer to a judge - who could take a while to get around to this sort of case. It’s not the job of police to decide between two stories.
(This case was particularly difficult because the initial entry appeared to be with permission. That eliminates any easy chance of unlawful entry.)
That’s a rather simplistic view.
I just attended a class on title matters this morning, and the subject came up. First of all, I must say that I Am Not A Lawyer, and what I am going to say may apply only to my state (Wisconsin).
But our speaker was a lawyer, and she explained it thusly. Let’s say I occupy your land for a while, innocently or not. I must fulfill these minimum requirements: (bolding mine)
Now just because I think I am entitled to the land doesn’t automatically give me title. First, you (the true landowner) must file suit accusing me of trespassing. Unless I wish to concede your claim, my defense will be “adverse possession.”
I still don’t own your land. The court will have to agree with me first, then I must sue to obtain title.
So you see that adverse possession isn’t as simple as many think.
I think the majority of the time this happens is when the property has been foreclosed by a bank or the city condemns the property or the owner loses the property for nonpayment of taxes… And sending people out to look at these houses cost money so they are neglected instead.
It’s an imperfect balance between rights. It’s imperfect because it takes pragmatic effects into account. In this case, it’s a slight tilt in favour of not making someone homeless at the expense of depriving someone of the economic benefit of their property. Nuances and variations abound, of course, and there are plenty of outliers that turn it on its head, but that’s it in a nutshell: society, in general, decided it’s better to give the benefit of the doubt to someone who faces loss of a dwelling over someone who faces an economic loss.
In md2000’s example, the police don’t take action because the squatters claimed to have an arrangement with the owners (among other reasons). Though they collect evidence, it’s not the police’s job to determine fact or to determine equitable outcomes. That the judicial process is slow is a weak rationale for granting them those powers. Becaue of what’s at stake, they will, in general, leave the physical possessor in the property as the case moves through the courts and due process is granted to both parties.
If the police arrive and ask “what are you doing here?” and the person says “I live heer”, then the police cannot prove this is not the case… especially if their "stuff’ is there. OTOH, if someone is standing on the lawn saying “we went to the store and when we cam back this guy was in our house and has our stuff”, then they might have a case for break and enter.
As Rythmdvl says, it’s a tradeoff between “make you homeless” and “gimme my property”. I better be able to provide an airtight case to trump homeless. Otherwise, tell it to the judge.
If I recall, a bunch of neighbours persuaded the occupants that leaving was a good idea. they were apparently all around undesireable neighbours.
Here is one article on a recent Florida case. On the same case the police responce had people outraged. Here is a videoabout them leaving
If it’s a case such as cited above by Reepicheep then there is an eviction process. The police can’t decide by themselves that the squatters have no business being there. States vary in how difficult it is to get rid of someone occupying a house. I didn’t buy one house because there were squatters in it, luckily I stopped by to check it just before going to sign a contract. I was assured it wouldn’t take long to get rid of those people in Rhode Island, but in New York I had seen people stalled for months in eviction proceedings and I didn’t want anything to do with it.
And the police go and the people in the house say they have a lease from the owner. What are the police to do?
That’s what makes it a civil dispute. The police are not judges of the law, nor of civil disputes.
This is basically a civil dispute between two people asserting rights with respect to the same land. Simply being on land without the permission of the owner may in itself not be a crime, though obviously that depends on the laws of the jurisiction concerned. (Though I note that, in English-derived common law, simple tresspass is not a crime.)
So, if you go to the police and say that someone is on your land without your permission, the response may well be that this is not a crime; you can assert your rights as landowner through the civil courts in the ordinary way by getting an eviction notice. Even if there is a statute in place in the jurisdiction concerned that does create a relevant criminal offence, you’d need to look at the terms of the statute to see whether the mere assertion by the registered owner that the occupants of the land have no right to be there is enough to constitute the offence - mostly, it won’t be.
So the law is not powerless. Landowners who decline to exercise the remedies the law provides may be powerless, but that’s by choice.
Once in Puerto Vallarta Mexico, I was shown a building site high above the bay which had not been completed. Squatters had moved in there and I was told that they, also, would own the (very valuable property) if they occupied the site for a period of time (maybe 3 years).
I wonder if it is like that in most places in the world.
Bob
Before centralised registration of land titles - which is, of course, a modern innovation - most legal systems had rules under which long and unchallenged occupation of land was itself evidence of title. This was a practical necessity; many people had no other evidence that they owned land beyond the fact that they and their families had occupied it for a long time, and paid no rent for it to anyone else. If that wasn’t accepted as evidence of ownership, then an awful lot of land didn’t have any identifiable owner at all. (Which, apart from other propblems, made it difficult to collect land taxes.)
When registration systems were introduced, they generally sought to preserve and protect existing land titles, and not to change the rules about how title to land could be acquired or disposed of. Hence, most title registration systems contain provisions which preserve the pre-existing rules about the acquisition of title by long possession.
I think this is why if you own property you wont be living in for a while, you better have someone watching it just so people dont move in. Or, in the event they do, you can deal with them immediately where you probably can have more leeway.
That is much simpler than if to a truly abandoned house. There is a system set up to remove the squatters. It is much more difficult to do anything about squatters when it is a faceless bank involved. The eviction process can either be quick and easy or long and painful depending on your state.
I have seen cases in which the “squatter” is a victim too. The rent the property in good faith. It just so happens that it wasn’t from the owner. That is something for a judge to decide.
In NJ I believe the time period for adverse possession is 30 years.
Police make such judgments all the time, though. If I report my car stolen, when the police find it, I suspect that they are unlikely to defer to a claim by the occupant that I allowed him to borrow it, and direct me to civil court for relief. Similarly, if I report that my baby has been kidnapped, I don’t think the police would be inclined to leave him with the person with whom they found him and point me to family court, even if this person were to claim that he had my permission.
Even in the context of one’s house, if I come home and find that a person unknown to me has unpacked his duffel bag and gone to sleep in my guest room, I think I can rely on the police to eject him and his things, even if he claims I allowed him in. I’m not going to be obliged to take a home invader to civil court for relief.
So I don’t think it’s correct to say that the police lack the capability to make these determinations. Rather, for policy reasons, the law simply restricts them from doing so in a particular class of home-occupancy cases.
My late father in law owned a piece of land in Manzanillo, Mexico, since the dawn of time. He rented it out for a ridiculously low amount of money to a roadside tire repairman. The entire purpose was to prevent paracaistas (a Spanish misspelling that means parachuter, used to refer to squatters) from getting claim to the land. As he lived a long, long way away this was the only way to prevent squatters from taking it away.
He had also lost some mountain land to squatters. Supposedly there was no true, valid claim, but as the property was worthless with no realistic expectation of increasing value, he simply forfeited the title.
The spot in Manzanillo, though, is still the family’s. It’s currently an Elektra store in an area that’s been hugely, hugely developed, and Elektra pays commercial rates rather than a token sum.