Editorials

In September of 2001, the average house in zip code 94703 sold for $375,000. In September of 2005, the average house in 94703 sold for $780,000. 

Is this fact relevant to the current crusade by 94703 homeowners to rid their neighborhood of undesired elements? It’s certainly not the whole story, but it should be kept in mind when trying to analyze what’s going on there, especially when the focus of the unwanted activities is the home of someone who pre-dates the rise in property values. 

It’s a daunting task to try to explain the Constitution of the United States to homeowners with blood in their eyes, but we’ll give it a shot. Parts of a couple of articles in the Bill of Rights are relevant to the situation. 

The stated intent of the complaining 94703 residents is to force the defendant, a neighboring homeowner, to sell her property, whether she wants to or not. The intention appears to be to punish her for allowing persons previously convicted of criminal behavior, who might or might not be related to her, to hang around her house. There are also allegations that such persons are repeating the criminal behavior for which they were previously convicted. 

Even if all the allegations of the complainants are true as charged, is it constitutional or wise to use the small claims court to try them? If anyone, the long-term homeowner defendant herself or one of her associates, has broken a criminal law, shouldn’t they be charged and tried in accordance with the Constitution? The problem is that the small claims court, where the complainants have filed their complaint, does not offer the legal procedure which the Constitution requires for those charged with criminal offenses. 

Article VI spells out how it should be done:  

“In all criminal prosecutions, the accused shall enjoy the right to a speedy and public trial, by an impartial jury … and to be informed of the nature and cause of the accusation; to be confronted with the witnesses against him; to have compulsory process for obtaining witnesses in his favor, and to have the Assistance of Counsel for his defense.”  

Small claims court offers none of the above protections. And then there’s Article V: “… nor shall any person be subject for the same offence to be twice put in jeopardy of life or limb… nor be deprived of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law...” 

The defendant homeowner has been subject, for the same offence, whatever it is or was, to a previous round of small claims prosecutions, but the judgment against her was never collected. Should she have to go through the whole thing again? Is it a good use of the small claims system to accumulate uncollectible judgments against an elderly defendant? Does this attempt to force her to sell her property meet the due process of law requirement? If she loses this round, some attorney will probably raise these constitutional questions at some point in time. 

Not that the complainants don’t have a major point, of course. No one should have to live in a neighborhood where criminal behavior is tolerated. But stopping criminal behavior should be the responsibility of the police, not of the small claims court, which can do nothing to stop real crimes.  

It’s dangerously naïve to think that forcing one elderly homeowner to sell her house by getting another uncollectible small claims judgment against her will stop the drug-dealing in the 94703 area. What will, eventually, change the kind of criminal activity in this neighborhood is the numbers at the top of this piece. It’s only a matter of time before the kind of people whose major means of support is street crime will be forced out of 94703 by economic pressure. But they’ll just move to another neighborhood, inflicting their anti-social behavior on a new group of less-affluent neighbors.  

A West Berkeley renter of my acquaintance told me that she complained about her downstairs neighbor’s drug-dealing, first to the police and then, when nothing happened, to her city-funded “area coordinator.” He told her that her only remedy was to use the organization which is promoting the small claims solution. A homeowner I know in another city finally had to move because her local police didn’t seem interested in stopping prostitutes from doing business in the alley next to her house. Where are the police in these situations?  

On Wednesday night at about 11:30 we dropped friends at a Fourth Street parking lot where they’d left their car. There were two police cars parked side by side in the empty lot. In the 15 minutes it took us to get home (94705) we saw six more parked police cars on the street. We drove by the corner of Oregon and California, the focus of these lawsuits, but there were no police cars in evidence there. If the situation is as described by the complaining neighbors, at least one of those eight parked police cars could have been doing some good on that corner at that time of night. We’d welcome a commentary from someone in authority explaining, in detail, why the police can’t seem to do anything about drug-dealing in South and West Berkeley.  

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One more thing: No matter how just complainants might think their cause is, there are some tactics which are beneath contempt. We have, with some misgivings, printed in this issue yet another letter from one of them, even though we think she’s finally stooped too low. She’s now trying to go after the teaching job of a (perhaps even misguided) civil libertarian who came to the defense in these pages, on humane grounds, of the old lady who’s the defendant in the lawsuit.  

We think the teacher, Andrea Pritchett, is pretty tough, and she can probably defend her job on her own, so we decided to run the letter. If the writer is willing to put these sentiments in a letter, she’s probably also expressing them elsewhere, so it’s better to get them out in the open for public scrutiny.  

But we want to go on record as telling the writer, as strongly as we know how, that we think it’s reprehensible to go after the job of someone with whom you disagree on a matter of principle. Andrea Pritchett doesn’t deserve to be fired for thinking you’re a bigot. We’re old enough to remember Senator McCarthy and the House Un-American Activities Committee, who specialized in this kind of attack. If you’re not, go see Good Night and Good Luck.  

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