For the low, low, price of your monthly rent payment, you too can become a police officer and social worker! It doesn’t matter if you’ve got own shitty life to attend to.
If you don’t want to swoop down and get intimately involved in the lives of seriously troubled people, it means you’re a sociopath.
If someone pounds on my door at 3 o’clock at night and begs me to call 911, I will. If someone stumbles into my doorway battered and beaten, I’ll prop them up on my couch and try to ease their pain as much as I can until the ambulance comes. But if shit like this keeps happening night after night, then I’m calling the police and complaining to the landlord, with the expectation that SOMEONE is going to be leaving. Doing otherwise makes me a victim to a relationship I didn’t sign up for and that I’m not benefiting from.
The really fun part is when they start screaming for someone to call the police, so you do, and then when the police come, they tell them everything is fine and they don’t want to press charges or have the other person removed from the building for the night. Good times.
FWIW, I have tried to help victims of domestic violence both a family member and when I was younger a few times neighbors when I was renting apartments. It never worked out for me, ever. That doesn’t mean if I see someone beating the crap out of a woman I won’t try to stop it, but it does mean I have a pretty good idea of where an outside person’s ability to help stops.
If I was renting a place and someone kept having knock-down, drag-out fights every single night I’d want everyone involved gone, period.
Don’t treat victims calling for help as the problem.
Well, that’s an onus the law in question puts on landlords, at least the police part (the whole point is to cut down on police work, right?).
You and others have made it clear that responsible landlording sometimes necessarily overlaps these territories anyway, though. Sometimes landlords have to address a situation.
So the questions really are, what is the right way for landlords to get involved? And, what are the appropriate legal terms, if any, for forcing irresponsible landlords to get involved?
Of course. Unless I missed something, I don’t think anyone in the thread would disagree with this.
Again, this is why it’s not a choice left to them in some jurisdictions. Once anyone calls the police about a domestic violence incident in progress, someone will be leaving with the officers.
So maybe the corollary law to lay on the landlord would be, once the police have removed a particular tenant from a particular address on such calls, X times, that individual must be evicted and barred from the property.
If there is no “victim” - and it sounds like you are close enough to hear what’s going on and thus could accurately make this determination - then as far as I’m concerned, it’s basically just another noise disturbance and should be treated accordingly.
If repeated police visits are not resulting in anything more than the officers showing up, shrugging, and leaving, perhaps the problem is that you live in a ghetto and are ill-suited to that environment. Ghetto life is generally unpleasant for people that are sensitive to disturbance. If you truly feel that you have done all you can and if your own quality of life is suffering beyond what you are willing to tolerate, don’t forget that, like the battery victims, you can leave. Is it fair that you should have to? No, but life is typically unfair and it’s generally a big waste of time and energy to insist on the immutability of your own position and try to force others to change to your liking.
Maybe ghetto life would stop being ghetto life if bad people were the ones who are punished, not good people just trying to make it through the day without losing their minds.
FWIW here in Virginia people do get evicted for repeatedly causing too many noise disturbances. Sometimes it’s people who throw lots of parties and such even when it is expressly forbidden in the lease, but eventually land lords can and do evict for such things.
I’m not sure which I’m more offended by: the assertion that I live in the ghetto (I don’t. I *work *in the ghettoes, plural. I live in a comfortably middle class neighborhood of Chicago called Irving Park) or the notion that domestic abuse only happens in the ghetto and therefore the solution is just to move away from it because those people don’t matter. Or something. I lost the line of logic there.
I’m bothered by the idea that I’m not only SOL if the police can’t be bothered to stop a problem, but that I should be penalized for it if I decide enough’s enough (breaking a lease ain’t cheap).
“Your fault! Shouldn’t have moved there in the first place!”
But sometimes you move into a place that’s totally fine and then the Maury Povitch Family moves in. Is that my fault too?
There’s a video making the rounds - sorry, I don’t have a link for it - in which a toddler is hit by a car and person after person walks by or drives around the crumpled body. The version I saw was paired with footage of a dog heroically dodging traffic to drag another dog out of the road after it had been hit. What does it mean when so many people do not stop to try to help an injured child? I don’t think that they could really all be sociopaths, but it’s a sign of a societal pathology. We don’t think it’s our obligation to do anything when we see that something needs to be done, because we have “our own lives” to live. We aren’t “police officers,” or “social workers,” or “paramedics,” or “firefighters,” or “teachers.” Laws are made where the victims of violent crimes are punished with mandatory eviction and we make excuses for why this is okay, but it’s not.
My conclusion that you may live in a ghetto is based on the fact that police repeatedly allow the same situation to continue unchecked, not that domestic abuse is happening. Chicago police typically act like the city is one big ghetto though (this is not a slam of Chicago or Chicago law enforcement officers; I love Chicago, and not being harassed by the police for petty nonsense is not something I will ever complain about).
I don’t know why you think that I think that ANYONE does not matter. If you want to help your neighbors, maybe a local domestic violence shelter can give you some suggestions. But if you just want to be able to relax at home and not be subjected to the noise and you don’t see any way to change the noise level, relocating would be the sensible choice.
Maybe if the world were actually made up of “bad people” and “good people,” we could just get everyone sorted out and the “good people” could skip away to live the golden lives they deserve, while the “bad people” were locked up in a dungeon somewhere. Then we could live happily ever after!
Once again, in your effort to come across as more-valiant-and-compassionate-than-thou, you are forgetting the obvious:
The law addresses multiple domestic incidences in a short period of time.
If you are abused and you ask for my assistance, I will do what I can. Preferably without endangering my own life, but I will try my best. Because I am a human being and I do have some modicum of compassion.
But if every month, you’re sobbing on my doorstep and begging for my help-- interrupting my sleep, disturbing my houseguests, frightening my children–I’m eventually going to have negative emotions towards you. Doesn’t matter if you’re a relative, best friend, or just the lady who lives next door to me. Your problem is becoming mine. That just ain’t right.
So you can have the heart of Mother Theresa (or the saint of your choice) and care for everyone in the world, and yet still not wish to live next to people who are unable to keep their dysfunction quietly within the confines of their own home. If it’s the third time I’m calling the police on your behalf, you better bet that at point, I’m pissed off…and not just because you’re standing in my doorway with another blackeye. It’s because I can’t get any damn peace and quiet. And that’s what “home” is supposed to provide.
I’ve heard of DV shelters that wouldn’t take childless women! That makes no sense to me. What’s she supposed to do, go back to him and have a baby so they’ll help her? :mad:
And if you, and/or the abusing household, own the property, you’re REALLY stuck.
Before I knew her, I had a roommate (we were college students in our late 20s) who had been in an abusive relationship, and because she refused to leave him, all her friends and her family all ended up getting unlisted phone numbers, just because of her, and would not give her the numbers, either. The ones who stuck beside her just plain old got fed up with all the tearful 3am phone calls.
I don’t really care whether you think I am more “valiant and compassionate” than you. The original issue here was the fact that victims of domestic violence are being punished for calling the police for help, since landlords are being fined for not evicting them. One need not be a saint or Mother Theresa to see the injustice of this law.
I don’t know who promised you a life untouched by trouble, but sorry, they lied.
I don’t know who promised you that victims of domestic violence can continue to live somewhere with impunity if, through choosing to stay with an abuser, they continually degrade the quality of life of their neighbors. But sorry, they lied. Again, people are routinely evicted for persistently causing noise disturbances, which DV arguments will almost always cause.