“Crime -free leasing addendums” to make apartment complexes safer. Does it work?

Many Arizonans rent apartments and many of these rental contracts something that is known as the “crime -free rental contract -Addendum”. They should make apartment complexes safer and prevent crime from taking place there.

However, a new study by the Republic of Arizona shows that they do not really have the desired effect and, in some cases, actually do the opposite of what they should.

Hannah Dreyfus, an investigative reporter in the Republic, wrote the stories about it and joined the show to discuss what these crime -free addendums actually say.

Complete conversation

Hannah Dreyfus: Secure. The criminal addendum is therefore a document that is located in most rental contracts in Arizona. And if you were only leaving your leasing contract, you may see it. It looks like most people say that it has nothing to do with me because it describes crimes because people would think about crimes, drug -related crimes, sex crimes, attacks, weapons crimes, and most people would go through and say that I have no plans to shoot someone in my apartment or anyone in my discussion or in my discussion or in the examination of drugs. So let me sign on the dotted line. This is not a problem for me.

What people do not recognize is that when they read the small print, see that the crime addendum gives the landlords a much broader ability to define what crimes are and what they would not necessarily believe, since crime can suddenly fall under this umbrella. For example, it can be seen as criminal activities as criminal activities if a joint illuminate, illuminate criminal activities and not properly register your guests.

Mark Brodie: And how they found for this series during their reporting, there were people in Arizona who were driven out of their apartments about things that I think they would not necessarily consider criminal activities.

Dreyfus: Certainly, so I looked at incidents in which people were driven out of their apartments for activities that did not receive criminal charges, and in some cases did not receive the police or law enforcement in some cases, which means that a landlord made the decision independently of each other that something was a crime. And gave the tenant a 24-hour clearance notice based on this independent provision.

Brodie: How often did you find that this happened?

Dreyfus: So it is interesting. We were able to receive evacuation data from Maricopa County, who dealt with immediate evacuation. Now not every single immediate evacuation is a criminal evacuation, but every criminal evacuation is an immediate evacuation. And this is a very small amount of overall evacuations. However, we have recognized that for people who are confronted with these evacuation, which are really catastrophic. Although we do not see that many people have thrown out of their apartment due to the allegations that they are connected to the crime, the amount of damage to the person it does is extremely high.

Brodie: What did you find out whether this type of provisions and leasing contracts actually reduce crime in these communities or not?

Dreyfus: This is a fundamental question that we wanted to see because the concept, the underlying concept for the add-free rental contract addendum that we do not want criminal apartments to rent.

Brodie: Or you don't want a crime in an apartment.

Dreyfus: This is exactly what everyone can do and everyone can understand. The question is whether these criminal additions actually reduce crime? And it is a fundamental question of whether the justification for the acceptance of this supplement, not only in Arizona, but in cities across the country actually makes sense.

In Arizona we decided to tackle data. And what we have done is that I have systemically passed through the cities in Arizona to see which criminal multihousing programs had, which means that they use the rent, and I viewed when they were implemented. And then we used data from the FBI to look at crimes in these areas.

And what we found and I worked with the edge of corporation, which is a thinking factory of public order, is that places where these criminal guidelines were implemented do not find a reduction in crime. Interestingly, we even saw a slight height of the number of robberies, attacks and the overall crime that took place in places that had accepted these criminal guidelines.

Brodie: Any sense of why the place could be in which these criminal disadvantages were adopted could actually have more crime?

Dreyfus: So that we were unable to guess this statement because we could only pursue this on four cities to guess a systemic presumption in relation to the cause. What we could say and a kind of statistically significant realization was that it had no effect on crime.

We didn't want to make the jump, although in the specific cities we looked at, crime increased. With the temporal addendum we did not want to make the jump, and the analytical jump to say that it systematically increases crime, but we can say that it does not systemically reduce crime. It definitely does not affect crime as it should if that makes sense.

Brodie: Well, well, I think this species raises the question that if a provision that aims to reduce crime does not reduce crime, what is the point?

Dreyfus: Well, that is exactly the question I think that police authorities have continued to incorporate many funds into these programs that have several implementation stages to ask why we continue to use these programs. We understand why they were created in the 90s. We understand why we adopted them. Now, decades later we have to analyze again, does it work? And if not, why do we continue to invest our time, the time of our officers, the time of our construction manager in these programs.

Brodie: Has someone with whom you spoke to these stories, perhaps talking about trying to define more clearly what a crime is, or to change the standard for someone who is driven out that you know, know a quote or law enforcement authorities, or something.

Dreyfus: In certain versions of the free investigative use behavior, the standard of evidence that should be necessary for a landlord is to say that a crime has happened here, a predominance of standards of evidence. This is a lower standard than before the criminal court. In the criminal court you have doubt -free doubts. In these cases, the landlord should theoretically have to predominate evidence that a crime has taken place.

The problem is that when I spoke to lawyers who help defend arizonans against these accusations, this standard is not fulfilled. And what they see is that landlords are that the weapons of use from the weapons of people who do not like them to threaten people with evacuation whose behavior they are annoyed in a certain way, in contrast to persons in whom there is an overweight of evidence that a crime has taken place.

Brodie: Did the data show something about who is affected? Are there certain demographic groups or other groups of people who are more often on the wrong side than others?

Dreyfus: Yes, so we looked at the demographic collapse that influence these guidelines and what we have found that criminal housing guidelines affect black and not white tenants. In black people, it is twice more likely that the places where they live will be exposed to these criminal housing guidelines.

This could possibly be due to the fact that in certain groups with lower socio -economic groups, more may depend more on rental objects than others who are able to own houses. In both cases, we saw a clear probability that these guidelines will target black and non-white households in contrast to white households.