Everyone Obliged To Fight Drugs

Police who have spent years enforcing narcotics laws say that more than half the people they arrest are repeat customers. But junkies scuttle constantly from place to place, trying to keep a half step ahead of their pursuers. Local crack dealers, for instance, have moved back and forth from motels to apartments to street corners to friends’ or relatives’ homes to girlfriends’ apartments.

All a community can do is make this socially destructive trade difficult to conduct by keeping the vermin on the run.

That’s where landlords come in. They have powerful economic reasons to protect their real estate investment from the filth, negligence and violence that go hand in hand with a drug-dealing tenant. And as responsible members of this community that we all share, landlords or their property managers have the same interest neighbors and the police do in stopping pushers from staking claim to any of the city’s neighborhoods.

But landlords also must comply with tenants’ rights laws, which can require time-consuming, expensive litigation to boot out an undesirable tenant. Eviction’s much easier, though, if landlords can get formal documentation that illegal drugs have been seized or dealing has occurred on the landlords’ property.

Yet, some local landlords and their lawyers say they have trouble getting information when law enforcement has staged a drug raid on rental property. They note a state law requires police to notify landlords on whose property illegal drugs have been seized.

Spokane police, however, say they’re mystified by the landlords’ complaints. They say they do send out the required notices, although it isn’t always easy (typically, the Legislature provided no funding for police to implement its landlord notification mandate). Police say they wish the unhappy lawyers and landlords would contact them so they could work out a better system.

What we have here is a failure to communicate - a failure both sides should be delighted to fix.

Two days after The Spokesman-Review published a story about the landlords’ concerns, police were at work to improve their landlord notification system.

In addition, Spokane’s neighborhood policing tactics include a “safe streets” program which trains neighbors of a drug house how to collect information for a civil suit leading to the dealer’s eviction.

Unfortunately, the drug trade is a given. But no one has to tolerate it. Landlords, who are among the victims, also are essential partners in the effort to combat it.

, DataTimes The following fields overflowed: CREDIT = John Webster/For the editorial board