City Of Dallas Shuts Down Business Of Man Who Called Cops Over 100 Times In 20 Months To Deal With Criminals Near His Car Wash

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Let's talk about nuisance abatement laws. These are laws cities can use to shut down businesses that appear to draw more than their fair share of the criminal element.If you're a fan of asset forfeiture, you'll love nuisance laws. By abdicating their law enforcement responsibilities, cities can have their lower cost cake and eat your property too. It's win-win for cities, who love to use laws like this to effectively seize property from citizens who have the misfortune to operate legitimate businesses in high crime areas.Here's how it works in Dallas, Texas. The city says business owners must pay for their own security devices and personnel to keep their businesses free of criminals. No business will be compensated for these additional costs. All cops need to do is throw a couple of placards at the business and the city takes it from there. Criminal activity in the area is now the responsibility of businesses in the area. Can't get criminals to get off your property? Too bad. It's the city's property now.

The Dallas police chief has a new tool in her arsenal to force home and business owners to address crime on or near their properties: shame.On Wednesday, the Dallas City Council passed a "nuisance abatement" ordinance allowing Police Chief U. Renee Hall to identify properties that tolerate criminal activity and try to get the owners to address it.The new ordinance allows city officials to slap a sign on properties identified as sites of "habitual criminal activity."

After a two-year tooth-and-nail battle with the city, Davenport’s lawyer, Warren Norred, recently forced City Hall to cough up the official record of 911 calls Davenport has been making all along, begging police to come to his place of business.

On and on the 911 reports go for 414 single-spaced pages... And that covers only 20 months from 1/5/18 to 9/25/19. Dale Davenport and his father, Freddy Davenport, have been calling the cops to their property for 27 years.

Sworn testimony before the house committee described specific cases of misuse of the statute by city officials such as: • Targeting of a few, select businesses in high-crime areas, while ignoring more serious crimes occurring on surrounding properties;
• Directing businesses to hire certain security personnel with the clear suggestion that hiring these select individuals would diminish the city's threatened enforcement of nuisance abatement;
• Parking a large number of police cars in the parking lot of a business owner as a retaliatory act toward that owner, who had challenged the city's nuisance action against him and had testified in court on behalf of an individual who was acquitted of charges for resisting arrest while on the business' property;
• Using calls to police requesting assistance by the business as marks against that business in the city's criteria for evidence of nuisance abatement violations;
• Directing a hotel property owner to run criminal history checks on all guests, which is a possible violation of the guests' civil rights and could potentially subject the business to legal liability; and
• Sanctioning a local car wash owner because marihuana was found in the pants pocket of a person working on the property. It was suggested by the city legal department that the owner needed to conduct random pat-down searches of persons working on the property on a regular basis -- an act prohibited by law even for law enforcement officers.

[T]he committees are gravely concerned that the problems stemming from Dallas' use of the nuisance laws are the result of a unique and incorrect interpretation of those laws by city officials -- wrongly taking the laws to mean that fighting crime is no longer the city's responsibility but has instead now become primarily the responsibility of private citizens and businesses; and that private citizens can be held strictly liable for crimes that take place on or near their property even when they are not involved in that crime, have taken affirmative steps to prevent the crime, are themselves victims of that crime, and have reported the crime, requesting the assistance of law enforcement agencies. Furthermore, the body of evidence available to the committees also strongly suggests that the city uses the nuisance laws to intimidate, promote cronyism, and inappropriately use law enforcement personnel, specifically uniformed police and code enforcement officers, to deliver not-too-subtle messages of coercion and retaliation to legitimate businesses and property owners who refuse to submit to such tactics.

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This Week In Techdirt History: January 12th - 18th

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Five Years AgoThis week in 2015, New York's top prosecutor was jumping into the war on smartphone encryption alongside UK Prime Minister David Cameron who appeared to express a desire to undermine all encryption, while President Obama announced a broad plan for "securing cyberpsace" that looked an awful lot like a law enforcement wish-list — all despite the fact that a leaked internal intelligence community document revealed recommendations for stronger and more encryption. And the NSA was apologizing for backdooring encryption, but in a "sorry we got caught" kind of way.Ten Years AgoThis week in 2010, we highlighted an excellent open letter to rock stars telling them to stop pretending they are fighting for up-and-coming artists with their copyright demands and anti-internet rhetoric. Marvel was trying to downplay Josh Kirby's work as part of the copyright termination fight, one school was trying to claim copyright over lesson plans while another was considering an anti-piracy campaign inspired by anti-drug campaigns, Grooveshark was sued yet again so negotiation-by-lawsuit could continue, and France's three strikes agency was caught pirating a font. But one big surprise was that the administrator of the OiNK torrent tracker, after explaining why he believed his system was legal, was found not guilty by the jury in a rare win sensible copyright.Fifteen Years AgoThis week in 2005, in a similar nice surprise, a file sharing network in South Korea was left alone by the courts. And who would think it was the head of Blockbuster Video in the UK who would be getting the right idea about how Hollywood needs to innovate if it wants to fight piracy. A new spam tactic was causing problems for the DNS system, company IT departments were struggling with what to do about personal devices, and paid search keywords were becoming a major public relations battleground. This was also the week that Apple released the first Mac Mini and the iPod Shuffle.

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