KCDC's no-trespass list and roadchecks are intended to protect residents, but critics say they create a police state for the poor
by Joe Tarr
Before Beth moved her family into an apartment in Christenberry Heights' public-housing project, she gave her son a bit of advice.
"I told my son, 'You have a problem, you go to the police.' I've changed that since I've lived in Christenberry," says Beth, who asked that her name not be used. "They definitely treat people who live in the projects differently."
Beth, of course, has a reason to hold a grudge. Last year, she was evicted from her apartment and placed on KCDC's "no trespassing" list, forbidden from stepping on any KCDC property. She was evicted after police stopped her at a routine ID check in Christenberry Heights.
"My husband was with me. We are separated, but he was visiting his little boy," she says. "He started fidgeting. He always gets nervous around cops."
As they approached the police, she heard her husband fidgeting next to her, but she didn't pay him any attention. "Apparently what he was doing was putting marijuana in my purse," she says.
At the checkpoint, she showed the officer her driver's license and KCDC ID card. The officer then asked what was in a plastic bag he saw jutting out of her purse and she showed it to him. "I was hoping it was something the kids had stuck in my purse, like a half-eaten peanut butter sandwich," she says.
After some incredulous dirty looks at her husband, he soon confessed that the illicit plant was his. But it was in Beth's possession, so the police charged her.
This may not sound like a big deal. The ID checks at Knoxville's public housing developments are common enough. They're designed to try to insulate KCDC's poor—and vulnerable—population from drugs, violence, and bad people who would prey on them.
But critics say the ID checks and no-trespass list force people to live in a police state just because they're poor. The agency's no-trespass list keeps many young people from being able to visit their parents, grandparents, children and spouses.
"I think a lot of the people in there really didn't care for many of the officers patrolling. You didn't feel like they were trying to help you. They had an attitude that they were better than you. Like we were all crack dealers and prostitutes," Beth says. "I admit I had a few crack-dealer neighbors. I even called the cops on them myself once.... There were definitely people in there that shouldn't be there. But I felt like I was living in a jail cell because the police were always out there."
"If We See Nothing Suspicious"
It's an unseasonably warm January Saturday evening, and Sgt. Mark Fortner and two other officers have stationed themselves at the end of a one-way street in Western Heights, the largest public-housing development in the city. Their three police cruisers are parked along the side of the road, and officers stand in the street, holding flashlights. If they recognize the residents, they let them pass. Others they ask for KCDC ID. If they're not residents, the officers ask what they're doing on the property. Many are just visitors, which is fine. The police try to determine if they have a legitimate reason for being there. And police make sure they aren't on the no-trespass list. "We're looking to make sure the folks who are coming through live there or have a legitimate purpose to be on KCDC property," Fortner says.
"You can see how quickly we're done with folks who live here. It's just a small inconvenience for their safety," Fortner says. "If we see nothing suspicious, they're out of here in 30 seconds."
Tonight's checkpoint is not far from a notorious drug-dealing spot. Because of its size, Western Heights accounts for about half the drug arrests on KCDC property, Fortner says. This one-way street is the only way to move away from the dealing spot by automobile.
The ID checkpoints have to take place within the developments, on streets the city rents to KCDC. Police checkpoints on public roads must have court approval and be announced ahead of time.
Despite the warm weather, it's relatively quiet. The officers don't find much suspicious. Earlier, they sniffed the aroma of pot in one car. But they only found a few seeds of the illicit plant. "Somebody had obviously been smoking marijuana in the car earlier in the day," Fortner says. "But there wasn't enough to make an analysis." The driver was cited for an expired registration, however.
The officers stage the checkpoints about every night during the warmer months, in all the various housing projects. They usually don't have them too much after dark. "We don't want to put anybody in danger. And we don't want to inconvenience the residents late at night," he says.
"You get a range of reactions. Some people tell you they appreciate it; others don't like it. We've had people offer us refreshments," he says. "We're trying to keep the bad element out and curb any illegal activity before it occurs."
Officers do notice that some people avoid the checkpoints. "They'll tell folks there's police down the street. That's OK too because you've curbed some activity just by officers' presence."
Some cars will turn around or obviously change their driving route. "If they were going to turn that way and didn't—well, they really haven't committed a crime. It's obvious they didn't want to talk to the police for some reason. But we've prevented them from coming on the property," Fortner says.
Fortner believes the checks have made a difference. "There are nights when I catch a stolen car, drugs and a gun," he says. "Most of the weapons seized [on KCDC property] have been at ID checkpoints."
One SUV drives past the police obliviously. "Whoa! Whoa!" the officer yells. The couple stops and the driver, a man, rolls down his window. The woman in the passenger seat says they were visiting her sister, but she wasn't home. He checks the driver's license, and then lets him drive on.
Another man in a white pickup says he's from Kentucky, and he'd been looking for clunkers to race in a smashup derby. "He said he got lost," the officer tells Fortner. "He said, 'How do you get out of here?' I believe that story. It's too strange not to believe."
"A Place Where They're Not Afraid"
No-trespassing lists are not unique to Knoxville, although public housing authorities have discretion in how to enforce them.
"No trespassing came as part of a mandate for HUD to provide some system to make our properties not open range for criminal activities," says Billie Spicuzza, KCDC's vice president of housing. "So many of our clients are vulnerable because they're low-income, and there's a lot of single parents."
Although KCDC is a quasi-public agency, receiving public money, Spicuzza says it has a right to keep its developments secure. "We're acting as a private rental property would anywhere in the city," she says. "If you drive home and you saw two or three people on your street corner, and you didn't know who they were, and your neighbors didn't know who they were, and you couldn't figure out what they were doing there, you'd most likely call the police."
The agency contracts with the Knoxville Police Department to provide additional security. The officers are being paid by KCDC—although they'll answer to calls for life-threatening emergencies outside the housing developments.
There are four officers on weekdays, eight on the weekends working for KCDC. Officers on regular duty will also respond to calls in KCDC properties.
The no-trespass list is an extension of KCDC's—and the nation's— public housing regulations, which forbid people with recent criminal history from being eligible to live on its property. Charges for drugs, violence, weapon possession, or assault in the past three years disqualifies people for housing. A conviction for being a sex offender or operating a meth lab will get people banned from public housing for life. Drug possession or violence will get tenants evicted and put on the no-trespass list. Even if charges are later dropped, they could still be evicted, because evictions are a civil matter and don't require the same burden of proof.
Spicuzza says the no-trespass list makes perfect sense when viewed along with its housing policies. "Why would you refuse to house someone with a criminal record but allow them to stand on our streets and do whatever they want?" she says. "We think people deserve to be housed in a place where they're not afraid," she adds.
There are more than 1,000 people on KCDC's no-trespass list. Police officers who patrol KCDC property have copies of the list. "Very few people whose names are on that list aren't known to the police," Spicuzza says. Officers recommend to her who should be on the list, but KCDC makes the decision, she says.
Doug Blaze, head of the University of Tennessee's law-school clinic, challenged KCDC in federal court in 1997 over its no-trespass list. The court sided with KCDC.
"Public housing administrators have a difficult challenge in trying to protect their clients. Our concern was, how is the decision made, and also the potential to split up families," Blaze says.
"We were concerned about fathers being able to visit their kids and people being able to visit their parents," he adds. "There's a potential to restrict access to families beyond what is needed. We have to be real careful we administer these policies fairly. I understand why they're doing it."
Spicuzza doesn't have much sympathy. "If one truly is there to visit their mother or brother or child, they'd be in that apartment, not out on the street corner," Spicuzza says. "If one does have those on-going problems [with drugs, violence, or crime], I don't see how it benefits people of our developments to let them on our property."
But the lawsuit did lead to some changes. KCDC created an appeal process, providing a way for people to get off the no-trespass list.
"We believe people's lives change. After [the list] was in place for a while, we decided there should be a way to get off," Spicuzza says.
She has the last word on who goes on or off the list, but she gets recommendations from police. "I don't always follow the recommendations," she says.
There have been 134 appeals made to getting off the list in the past five years. Spicuzza says she's granted 37 of those.
"What we're looking for is a change in behavior patterns," she says.
"People Who Look Like You"
Deno McCoy doesn't understand why he's not on KCDC's no-trespass list, but he's thankful he isn't. The three-time convicted felon doesn't live in KCDC housing, but he has several family members and friends who do. His avocation with Tribe One—doing outreach work among Knoxville's gang members and drug dealers, as well as those at risk for becoming such—brings him regularly on KCDC property.
He says most of the people he knows are on the list. And most of them trespass, sneaking on the property or just taking their chances.
"They got kids. They got family," he says. "If you pay child support, you've got a legal right to see your child's living environment. But they can't [legally] go see their kids."
The projects are also just familiar to many of the people on the list. "That's the way some people live. They can't go to West Knoxville and hang out. It's just being there with people who look like them. That's home. It's where we're from. Where we were raised. Now you got someone saying, 'You can't go there.'"
McCoy says he can see the checkpoints doing some good. When he was surviving through criminal means, he would be cautious to avoid the ID checks. "I can see how when I was in the streets, if I had guns in the car with me, I would not take a certain street," he says. "So to a certain extent, it's protecting lives in the community. But it's also imprisoning people in the projects.
"You go inside those streets and everybody in the car is subject to a search. It communicates that if you come here we're going to treat everybody in the car like a criminal. Even your grandma. They've got the right to search everybody in the car just because you're in a certain part of Knoxville."
The no-trespass rule adds another burden to people trying to break out of a cycle of poverty and crime. If people who live in West Knoxville end up doing time, when they get out of jail, they'll be able to return to their families as they try to put their lives together, McCoy says. But a poor convict whose family lives in an inner-city housing project doesn't have that luxury. "They're not out in West Knoxville putting people on no-trespass. If you go to jail and get out, they're making it harder for you to get your life back together. They're doing that in the inner city," he says.
Some people end up rebelling against the policies. "You might see a grandma come out and yell 'Roadblock' not because she wants to help a criminal but because she don't want to see a young brother or sister go to jail."
Most of the people interviewed by Metro Pulse had mixed feelings about the no-trespass list, ID checkpoints and police behavior.
"I have no problem with the no-trespassing policy as long as the officers are arresting those who are on the no-trespassing list," says Margaret Lee of the Lonsdale Tenants Association. "A year or two ago, they were getting everybody. They were accosting everybody.
"Don't get me wrong, we need a police presence here. But sometimes they're bothering the wrong people. Some of the older citizens were complaining they couldn't sit on their porch. The officers were coming up telling them they couldn't sit on their porch," she adds. "What I've been told is sometimes they're sitting on their porch. Police pull up and ask to see their ID, which doesn't sound right to me. If the person didn't live there, they wouldn't be sitting on their porch. Sometimes the people get kind of ticked off, words get exchanged, and they get cited. Sometimes the police officers get overzealous."
Lee doesn't mind the road ID checks. "I'm not breaking the law, so I don't mind being stopped. We do have people coming in here buying drugs. Most of the police officers are here every day, so they know who lives here. They should be stopping cars they don't know. Do I have I problem with it? No."
Angel Romero is one of the few people to have gotten off the no-trespass list. She was put on the list in 1995 when she was 18; police searched her apartment and found drugs. She routinely trespassed to see her mother, who lived in a KCDC unit. "I had to sneak to go see her. Sometimes I'd have to park and walk to see her," Romero says.
Romero—who works for Tribe One—asked to be taken off the list two years ago. At first, she was put on probation and was allowed only in the Lonsdale development, where Tribe One's office was located at the time, from 9 a.m. until 5 p.m. during the week. Last August she was taken off the list completely.
"I wanted off of trespass because it was my right. I made some mistakes. The judge told me, you do this. I did it. I wanted my payoff," she says.
Romero says she doesn't have a problem with having a no-trespass list for those who commit crime on KCDC property. But she believes police abuse it. "They put them on [no-]trespassing for anything. It gives them the right to stop them and arrest them next time," she says. "It gives them a right to harass young black men and women. They found a way to abuse that, to harass young black men not doing crime."
Creating a safe environment for public-housing residents requires a lot more than banning certain people, she says. "If they really cared about safety, they'd create programs and places for these young people to go," she says. "It made a lot of sense that someone got killed on a basketball court to get rid of the basketball court," she says ironically. "True enough, no one else got killed on a basketball court."
McCoy says that policies like no-trespassing end up dividing the community more than anything. "You've got your young hip-hop people rebelling, and you've got your senior citizens struggling to survive. People are convinced things are bad because of young people. They found a way to play people off each other. Once you've got them fighting themselves, you sit back and watch them die."
The roadchecks themselves keep people from physically moving through the development—which McCoy sees as an apt metaphor. "The system is designed to be still," he says. "Just be still. Don't move. It's a jail with no bars."
He Was On No-Trespass
Two weeks ago, in the wee hours of a Thursday morning, police responded to a report of gunfire at Austin Homes. Sgt. Tony Willis came up on a man who tried to flee. Willis followed when the man suddenly turned and fired 10 or 11 shots from his Glock handgun. Willis and another officer returned fire and, although all three were nearly at point-blank range, no one was injured.
The suspect, 24-year-old Ahmad Dalb Wells, was charged with attempted murder. Wells had already been awaiting sentencing on an aggravated assault charge.
"He is a known offender with a significant rap sheet," police chief Phil Keith described him at a press conference that morning.
He was also on the no-trespass list. Police point to the incident as justification for the program, and it may well be.
But it also demonstrates something else. Being on the list didn't stop Wells from going into Austin Homes that morning.
January 29, 2003 * Vol. 14, No. 5
© 2004 Metro Pulse
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