For decades, landlords across the country have been empowered to act as a kind of police force in the name of crime prevention. How? Through local nuisance laws and crime-free housing programs that require them to evict tenants for vaguely defined criminal activity.

As of Monday, California became the first state in the country to ban so-called crime-free housing programs. More states should follow suit.

Such laws target evictions of low-income and minority tenants and violate their civil rights. That’s bad enough. But they also fail to reduce crime.

Cities across the country have been implementing these policies for about three decades, building on the Anti-Drug Abuse Act of 1988, which increased evictions in federally subsidized housing. In 2019, approximately 2,000 U.S. cities had a crime-free housing program, and 37 of the 40 largest U.S. cities had nuisance property ordinances.

Even as these strategies spread, there were doubts about their effectiveness. I conducted a recent analysis of California’s crime-free housing policy, which found that it had no effect on crime. Others have found that nuisance property ordinances, by driving people into despair and homelessness, can actually increase property crime.

Crime-free housing policies are counterproductive, in part because they treat 911 calls as an indicator of criminal activity. This creates a perverse incentive: for fear of being evicted, tenants do not call the authorities when they need them.

This particularly harms victims of domestic violence, who hesitate to seek police help lest they lose their homes. These policies can also deter tenants from seeking medical care during drug overdoses or mental health crises. Evictions also hinder crime prevention by disrupting community social networks, making it harder for residents to monitor what’s happening in their neighborhoods, a crucial part of crime prevention.

My research on California found that city blocks with apartments certified as crime-free had 21% more evictions than blocks without such housing. Others, researchers have found that nuisance property ordinances increase eviction filings by 16%. In the six months after the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development implemented a One Strike and Youre Out policy against criminal activity in 1996, evictions from public housing increased by 40%.

Evictions are very harmful in many ways. People who are evicted have difficulty finding housing again, and tenants removed from public housing are not allowed to receive housing assistance. That could lead to more homelessness and despair. Evictions also cause disproportionate housing insecurity for children, increased unemployment, additional use of emergency room resources, and accidental deaths from drugs and alcohol.

Legal experts have convincingly argued that punishing people with deportation rather than criminal proceedings also denies them a fair trial. This policy does not require an arrest or conviction or even an indication of a crime occurring near the property. They don’t even require a crime.

People have been evicted under crime-free housing policies, because children were playing basketball or jumping on a trampoline, and because of complaints about barbecues. Renters may even face serious consequences for the behavior of their guests. One federal lawsuit involves an Illinois town trying to evict a family over a burglary committed by a friend of their teenage son who had been sleeping on their couch.

The policy is generally applied selectively, with low-income multi-family homes suffering the brunt. This has led the Justice Department to take action against cities for violating the Fair Housing Act and other federal laws. In 2022, the city of Hesperia in San Bernardino County signed a consent decree with the federal government regarding the selective application of its crime-free housing program. Lawsuits have been filed against cities in Washington, Illinois, Pennsylvania and Minnesota on similar grounds.

What is the point of these harmful policies if they do not reduce crime? Government officials have suggested that their real goal is segregation.

A Hesperia official acknowledged that the goal of the city’s crime-free housing program was to remove what he described as those types of people and improve our demographics. The mayor of Bedford, Ohio, said the city’s nuisance property ordinance was about taking pride in middle-class values ​​and limiting urban immigration. The analysis I led found that cities with crime-free housing programs had larger black populations and that the affected apartments were in lower-income blocks with larger black and Latino populations.

HUD has provided cities with guidance on how these policies may violate the Fair Housing Act by disproportionately evicting women, crime victims, and people with disabilities. But more needs to be done.

Following California’s lead, other states should limit deportations under this policy without arrest or conviction or based on the behavior of nonresidents. Cities should also be required to report the number of evictions resulting from crime-free housing policies and nuisance ordinances. Similar federal policies should also be reconsidered, including the one-strike policy for public housing and the rules that prevent evicted tenants from receiving housing assistance in the future.

These policies and the evictions they cause are, at best, an ineffective means of preventing crime. At worst, they are a harmful form of discrimination that leads to increased crime and homelessness. Ending it could make all our communities safer.

Max Griswold is a policy researcher at the Rand Corp.