For five years, Thelma Jones shared a five-bedroom home in Faribault, Minnesota with her children and grandchildren. They had family barbecues. Birthday parties. The grandkids played in the backyard. Jones’ white neighbors called the cops on her family’s joy at least 82 times. None resulted in criminal convictions. But because of crime-free housing ordinances, Jones was evicted.
In the 1990s, the International Crime Free Association developed the idea of crime-free housing ordinances to enforce “safety” by deputizing landlords to evict non-assimilating tenants. The message? “Criminals” are a “two-legged urban breed of predator,” like neighborhood “weeds.” These ordinances spread to 2,000 cities across 48 states.
After residents complained about Somali immigrants joining their communities, Faribault, Minnesota, passed a law in 2014. Its police chief argued that it aimed to eliminate “problem tenants” who “drain” police resources with frequent calls.
Police charged Jones’ landlord with a misdemeanor for not evicting her earlier, and Jones was given a two-week notice in 2016. Her family scattered across the state. Then, Jones became a plaintiff in a winning ACLU settlement that struck down Faribault’s ordinance and, hopefully, reduced housing discrimination nationwide.
Crime-free ordinances came after a long history of Black residents being pushed out of their communities or kept out of new ones. But police don’t get to decide who’s “safe” to live in our communities. We do that.