When the Police Call Your Landlord
On a February day last year in Kansas City, Missouri, Officer Aaron McKie sat at his desk in the back corner of the Metro Patrol Division, composing a letter to a landlord. “I have been notified by my Metro Patrol District Officers of ongoing issues at your rental property,” he typed on police-department letterhead. The property—a modest house a few doors down from a highway overpass—was home to a 31-year-old woman and her two small children. About a week earlier, according to a police report, officers had visited the house on a welfare check. But when the woman met them, one officer thought she smelled of PCP. Another spotted her boyfriend in a car nearby. In the car, the officers found a large bottle “filled with what appears to be PCP” (the report doesn’t elaborate) and arrested the woman and her boyfriend. “I need your help solving this problem,” McKie wrote to the woman’s landlord, inviting a follow-up phone call.
McKie works in crime-free multi-housing, a department program whose dull name belies an expansive mission: The Kansas City Missouri Police Department’s website lists seven full-time crime-free-multi-housing officers, whose duties include monitoring goings-on in the city’s rental units, then sharing information—about alleged gun violence, burglaries, drug sales, domestic violence, and other offenses—with property owners and managers. The officers (who refer to themselves as “crime-free officers,” for short) sometimes let landlords know even if tenants are accused of crimes far from home. McKie said that in some cases—like if police find drugs in a home, or make multiple arrests of a tenant—he will actively push the landlord to evict. But he stressed that police have no power to force anything, and any decisions are left up to the landlords. (Captain Tim Hernandez of the department’s media unit said that police “are not involved with the eviction process.”)
In the incident involving the 31-year-old mother and her boyfriend, McKie said he received a call from her landlord’s representative in response to his letter. McKie said that when they spoke, he didn’t ask for an eviction, but did explain that repeated calls for police could lead the property to be classified as a chronic nuisance. According to Kansas City law, that classification can result in fees or even boarding up the house. Current state court records do not show any pending charges from the encounter or any convictions resulting from it. (A spokesman for the landlord said that the tenant “remains in good standing,” but declined to provide details, out of respect for her privacy. The tenant could not be reached for comment.)
Police officers who run the Kansas City program used the word displacement to describe what their program accomplishes. While police aren’t the ones doing the actual evicting—that is ultimately up to the landlords—officers provide the information landlords sometimes use to remove people police see as threats or disturbances to neighbors. Displacing such people is a function usually left to the criminal legal system. But sometimes, housing cases can accomplish what criminal cases—with their slow time lines, presumptions of innocence, and exacting standards—cannot.
Lawmakers in Missouri have recently loosened certain sentencing requirements for people who commit nonviolent crimes, a policy that could reduce the prison population in a state that the Vera Institute of Justice reported had the 12th-highest incarceration rate in the nation in 2018. Displacing people through crime-free-housing programs gives officers another tool. “It just seems like it takes so much for them to have to go to prison, and even when they’re in prison they’re not there very long,” McKie’s colleague Kelly Stamm, also a crime-free officer, said. “All we do is we chase these people, and hopefully chase them out of our city.”
Kansas City is one of hundreds of American cities with crime-free-housing programs, which have proliferated over the last 30 years. Police
