The long shadow of the repressive state: Militarized policing and the eviction crisis

Re-constituting police and executive power: A heavily armored and militarized police meets the eviction crisis and protest

Few critical observers would contest today that the role of domestic security agencies and the dominant model of policing have undergone dramatic shifts over the last decades, reflecting the neoliberal project’s increasingly authoritarian and deeply racialized structures in their local complexities (Bruff, 2014; Mayer, 2010; Phinney, 2020). Spain and the US offer paradigmatic examples of such trends that bear crucially on the eviction crisis and those primarily affected by such state sanctioned violence. After brief periods where legal control limited police authority somewhat following the Franco regime and the 1960s Black urban uprisings, police powers were strategically reconstituted in both countries as neoliberal policymakers started instituting draconian reforms to the labor market and social safety nets (Aramendi, 2009; Beckett and Herbert, 2010; Caceres and Oberndorfer, 2013; Mayer, 2013). What has indeed been expanded instead by political elites wedded to social austerity are prison and law enforcement infrastructures, critical research in both countries shows (González-Sánchez and Maroto-Calatayud, 2018; Wacquant, 2002). In other words, repressive state agencies have been purposefully turned into one of the major actors containing and repressing the many social crises and contestations which these reforms have both created and exacerbated, most notably since the last global financial crisis of 2008 and the neoliberal turn to extreme austerity urbanism (Davidson and Ward, 2013; Smith, 1996; Wood, 2014).

Public order laws – from municipal ‘gang injunctions’, loitering ordinances in the US to vaguely defined ‘nuisance’ codes – have significantly broadened police officers’ purviews to control the socially marginalized and those potentially disturbing neoliberal growth politics on both sides of the Atlantic (Beckett and Herbert, 2010; García, 2013; Gowan, 2002; Maroto Calatayud, 2016; Mitchell, 1997). In Spain, overhauls of national security and penal laws culminating recently in the ley mordaza (gag law) are often mentioned in this respect. Yet, many “more subtle coercive measures, such as municipal by-laws, and administrative sanctions” (García, 2013: 304) have been widely passed and aggressively enforced across Spain, building on previous erosions of civil rights increasing police authority (Busch, 1991; Medina, 2020).

Local law enforcement budgets and officer counts have ballooned, too, coupled with a systematic upgrading and ‘militarization’ of police repertoires (García, 2013; Platt, 2019) substantially altering everyday encounters with the police for those historically the target of their operations. Ever greater aspects of their lives have become circumscribed by police forces, which have coalesced with a booming commercial security sector, driving the reach of punitive socio-spatial control mechanisms deeper into urban centers (Briken and Eick, 2017). Officers today treat the growing ranks of poor urban dwellers and protesters increasingly as counterinsurgents, threats to be ‘neutralized’ and intimidated with riot garb and excessive use of violence. According to Kraska (2007) and others (Simckes et al., 2019), ‘militarization’ designates after all not only the modeling of police infrastructure on military standards and tactics, but also an ideological shift in the occupational culture and dominant policing models. Specifically the conviction that the threat and use of violence is the most appropriate solution for social problems. Several studies confirm increased uses of force by the police following access to such armaments in both countries, diffusing into other areas of policing including protest policing (ACLU, 2014; Amnesty International, 2012; Kraska, 2007; Lawson, 2018; Wood, 2014).

The paradigmatic example: US police politics

Police agencies in the US stand out in this respect, not least because of the deep interconnections here between a highly profitable military-industrial complex and racial capitalism (Eick, 2018; Hadden, 2018; Wacquant, 2002). The sheer vastness of military equipment obtained via a $5 billion federal program since the 1990s and provided at no cost to local police stations is by now common knowledge (Eick, 2018; Platt, 2019). Progressive regions like the Bay Area are no exception to such national trends. Governor Reagan used the “‘welfare-warfare state” (O’Connor, 2000) as a testing ground for his law and order policies (Gilmore, 2007). Between 2015 to 2019 alone, over 40% of Oakland’s general fund went towards its primary police agency, the Oakland Police Department (City of Oakland, 2017: G35). The OPD’s budget has grown by 200% over the last 20 years, while social spending and city staff levels have plummeted (Anti-Police Terror Project, 2017-2020). The Alameda Sheriff’s budget has likewise increased by over $220 million in a decade, sitting at over $520 million in 2021 despite a substantial part of its spending having been eliminated (Alameda County, 2021: 299; County of Alameda, 2012: 417). A state wide ballot measure halved jail populations in California (Pohl, 2019). The eviction roll-out evoked at the beginning not only puts the vast military paraphernalia under the Sheriffs’ control on display, but also the routine use of SWAT and the pervasiveness of the ‘warrior mindset’ in US everyday policing (Eick, 2018; Platt, 2019).

Consequently, protest policing too has turned towards maximum repression. If negotiated management has been the predominant tool for repressing dissent until the 1990s, this attitude gradually gave way to overt and preemptive crushing of contestations by such riot squads resorting to so-called ‘less lethal’ and military tested weapons (King, 2017; Vitale, 2017; Wood, 2014). Recently, lawmakers across various states have passed a flurry of so called police-protection laws and anti-protest legislation in the wake of the Black Lives Matter protests and riots of recent years, curtailing the right to protest and further bolstering police powers (Suh and Tarrow, 2021).

The Spanish counterpart

While certainly less starkly militarized in state of the arts warfare, the Catalan and Spanish’ police politics are not lagging far behind in terms of repression and repertoire. Far from dismantling police agencies and power in post-Franco times, the national government built on its personnel and information systems to crush dissent, and systematically boosted their infrastructures (Aramendi, 2009; Busch, 1991; Hudson, 1988). Under the Rajoy government’s austerity politics, spending on anti-riot gear shot up by 1780% in 2013, armoring forces to violently crush rising popular dissent, while instituting draconian social cuts and labor reforms (García, 2013; Maroto Calatayud, 2016). Even though the national police lacks jurisdiction in Catalonia, the Catalan interior ministry and its autonomous police force, the mossos d’esquadra (MD), have opted for the same political priorities and repressive paradigm to maintain social order in post-recession times. The ministry has incrementally expanded the number of police operatives, while continuing to raise their salaries and increase the MDS’s budget for material equipment by 128%, allocating a total of 950 million Euros in 2017 for public security (Liñán, 2017). That has turned the MD into the best paid and staffed police force in Spain, counting 17,000 officers in 2017 and 950 anti-riot agents, primarily deployed in Barcelona (Liñán, 2017; Medina, 2020; Pérez, 2017).

With their signature police batons aggressively beating on protesters at demonstrations, if not resorting to sound canons, tasers and illegal rubber bullets, the MD have also of late become routinely deployed to evictions in the city. (Caceres and Oberndorfer, 2013; Maroto Calatayud, 2021; Medina, 2020). If their anti-riot units were rarely present during the first years of the 2008 economic crisis, the body armored force has become a staple since rents have been rising again in 2015, data on the use of the riot unit disclosed in a public information request to the author shows (Generalitat de Catalunya Departament d’Interior, 2020). Following such information, the nexus of aggressive policing and property protection is most notable in neighborhoods with a large working class and immigrant presence, where corporate capital could acquire foreclosed properties at highly devalued prices. Fines for eviction defenses under the ley mordaza have likewise surged. Rare in Barcelona for many years, housing activists have started reporting spikes since 2020. In this year 30 members of the local tenant union were fined 18,000 Euros for attempting to stall one eviction (Sindicat del Llogateres i Llogaters, 2020).

Data and methodology

The ensuing analysis is based on two main data sources prising open the black box around policing and evictions. In Oakland, it consists of 48 police files logged between 2015-2016 by the Oakland Housing Authority police. They were obtained through a public information act request, published in the context of a lawsuit against the city of Oakland and its Housing Authority in 2018 and examined for patterns. In Barcelona, the data is drawn primarily from social media channels maintained by over twenty housing groups in the city. By 2019, they had spread across various neighborhoods and regularly relied on such networks to sound the alarm and collectively organize eviction defenses. Messages posted also included alerts to evictions executed extra-legally by the MD and Barcelona’s commercial eviction companies. Tracking their occurrence between July 2019 and December 2020, at least 41 could be extracted for analysis, alongside video and photographic material documenting how the police aided, attempted to or succeeded in forcibly removing residents from their homes. Such data was subsequently supplemented by a local media analysis. Journalists covered 14 of the 41 incidents, adding further proof and insight into police officers’ extralegal actions. Interviews conducted with eviction defense activists further corroborate what was unfolding at the time and constitute a third source. What sounds like a small incidence more than likely downplays the social reality of extralegal evictions by the police, given that many residents facing evictions do not have contact to housing groups or such social media networks. Barcelona’s Black mantero, Romani and scrap metal workers are relevant here. Living predominantly in informal housing on the city’s outskirts (Burón, 2019; Delclos, 2017), the little we know tells us they face multiple forced removals by police daily (Vrabiescu, 2016; Pérez, 2017). The number quoted here thus serves as a mere indicator to gauge an otherwise underreported phenomenon that by nature seeks obfuscation and secrecy: extralegal evictions by police.

Extralegal evictions by the mossos d’esquadra in Barcelona

The data extracted showcases how such de facto police power and its armored materiality also weighs heavily on the eviction process and its counter protests in both cities today. We can build concrete evidence documenting that the police variously coerce people to abandon their homes before the judicial fact, acting as de facto judge and evictor. In Barcelona, all cases of extralegal police evictions compiled here suggest that the MD – and the Catalan interior office as its head – increasingly rely on excessive interpretations of the law and autonomously pursue political aims, inserting themselves into the city’s housing politics and facilitating new rounds of capital accumulation. Surveying the different cases, we begin to see how the institution variously experiments with police protocols breaching into legal grey zones to incapacitate popular defenses and speed up eviction processes through extrajudicial violence, facilitating new rounds of capital accumulation in the process.

Analysis of social movement data and journalistic coverage shows they do so in three ways. In a first and less frequent scenario the MD attempt to actuate the eviction before the bailiff and other members of the comitiva have arrived at the court-scheduled time and date. The presence of the court’s designated entourage and their consent is a legal prerequisite in Spain before the police can enforce evictions. Final authorization is only given on the day of the eviction, at the scheduled time and location in question and, importantly, after hearing and negotiating for one last time with the involved parties, weighing their respective arguments (Ruiz, 2020). In several cases, the MD have tried to gain access to people’s homes by force prior to this procedure, using equipment to break open doors and topple popular defenses. At times, landlords even oversaw such evictions and pointed police to back entrances where they could surreptitiously circumvent popular support for the to be evicted party (Congostrina, 2019; Obra Social BCN, 2020; Sindicat d'Habitatga de Vallcarca, 2020; Xarxa d’Habitatge del Baix Maresme, 2020). Thus, they would pre-empt the comitiva’s decision or, as it has occurred in one occupied block, they would return after the comitiva had officially postponed the eviction and left, charging with batons at those defending the door and superseding the judiciary’s decision (Sanchez Rois, 2019; Vanguardia, 2019).

The second group of de facto extra-judicial evictions encompasses 21 cases where the MD showed up alone at people’s doors without a scheduled date or court order, trying to enter by force to evict them. In July 2019 four riot police agents ousted 20 residents of an occupied block this way, among them poor seniors and refugee minors (Ericsson, 2019). At times showing up after dark, they charged at occupants with batons, using special forces drawn from their BRIMO or ARRO riot units (e.g. Garcia, 2020a, 2020b; Raval Rebels, 2020; Resistim al Gòtic, 2020; Rodríguez, 2020b; Sindicat d'Habitatge de Sant Andreu, 2020). In none of these instances were the lawyers of the residents present or informed, nor was an officially scheduled eviction date or time frame given. Neither was the comitiva consulted for that matter – thus, all basic administrative and legal requirements for a lawful eviction were absent (Ericsson, 2019).

Characterizing the lion’s share of profiled cases are thirdly instances where the MD collaborated with other private actors pursuing such extra-judicial evictions. Two scenarios prevail here: Either the police forces would present themselves with the property owners at people’s doors, attempting to enter into homes, claiming that they had been alerted by the landlords and were acting on their behalf (e.g. DesnonamentsBCN, 2019; DesnonamentsBCN, 2020; Garcia, 2020b; Xarxa d'Habitatge Horta Guinardó, 2020). Or they would openly collaborate with the landlords’ contracted proxies (Cobo, 2019, 2020; Rodríguez, 2019): the burgeoning sector of Barcelona’s commercial eviction companies – going by the name of Desokupa [de-squat] – which have been servicing landlords with for-profit evictions on the fast track since 2016 (Todó, 2018). Their business model circumvents the judiciary’s long eviction process by exploiting grey zones in the law afforded to commercial security providers, allowing them to provide access control in buildings and to ‘mediate’ with their clients’ tenants (Todó, 2018). Rather than dominating the field of eviction enforcement alone and requisitioning such extrajudicial intrusions into their remit, police forces on numerous occasions have entered into what appears as a pact of conviviality. Videos published in the media put such public-private ‘security’ partnerships – typical for neoliberal policing today – on display (Briken and Eick, 2017). They show both police and Desokupa working in tandem to violently coerce residents’ out of their apartments, rather than simply reporting them and processing the incident through the courts. On other occasions, police officers have curtailed access to buildings during Desokupa-operations, thus protecting the forced removal by their private counterparts. “So the police was blocking the street and was blocking all of the people to stop the eviction, but the ones actually going there and taking people out of the flats were the people from Desokupa. And we have seen this happening in other cases, like in Bloc Llavors” according to Javier Sanchez Rois (2019) from the tenant union Sindicat de Llogaters, echoing others observing such explicit pacts between both parties (Cobo, 2019; Palomera, 2019).

Police innovations during the COVID pandemic enforcing the priority of capital accumulation over life

Instances of such collaborations occurred particularly during the early stages of the COVID pandemic when shelter at home orders were in place, courts closed and legal eviction proceedings were temporarily suspended by law. Landlords nevertheless continued to pursue evictions, turning to Desokupa companies or the police to take advantage of the lockdown and force residents out of their homes amidst a full blown pandemic. 24 of the total 41 tracked incidences took place within that period, constituting quintessential extralegal acts. Following accounts by journalists and housing groups, officers stood by in several incidents when commercial operators started to mount their access control, cut water and electricity supplies, cracked doors and changed locks, even though judicial orders legalizing such activities were lacking (Cobo, 2020; DesnonamentsBCN, 2020; Garcia, 2020a; Grup d'Habitatge de Grupde Sants, 2020b; Salto, 2020). When residents of a block occupied by single mothers and women came down to deter employees of the company City Lock in the process, the MD’s agents present identified and fined the women for breaking COVID regulations instead of stopping the illegal lock out and exposure of 10 families. Only after continued pressure from the residents, they proceeded to identify the employees of the commercial evictor (Garcia, 2020a; Salto, 2020). According to messages shared on eviction defense channels, police would also leave properties under dispute with such companies and other landlord proxies still present, harrassing residents, turning a blind eye to their existence as if silently clearing the field and handing over the task of evicting to Desokupa:

“The mossos have left and two thugs [Desokupa operators] have been left inside the block, with a lawyer and a representative of the property owner pressuring the neighbors to leave. Neighbors on the block have no legal support or protection due to the state of alarm” (Grup d'Habitatge de Sants, 2020a).

Gauging from the information provided in the messages, the landlords’ targets seem to have primarily been Barcelona’s increasing numbers of squatters and the economically desperate, finding refuge in the city’s vacant apartments built during the construction boom. That women, single mothers and those dependent on their care make up a large part of residents here reveals the gendered dimension of such police violence and of today’s eviction crisis (Obra Social Barcelona, 2018; PAH Barcelona et al., 2020). It serves as an acute reminder of patriarchy’s and capital’s incessant attempts to control the power, sexual freedom and autonomy of women. The neoliberal city is after all “not just about the re-centralisation and accumulation of corporate capital, but also about the re-inscription of patriarchal relations in the urban landscape” (Hubbard, 2004: 666), which in this case is backed up by extrajudicial police power and excessive interpretations of police discretion.

The police in those instances were clearly extending into grey zones structurally and legally afforded to the executive. “These evictions could arguably be described as legal if the police acts during the recuperation [occupation] or just afterwards as a 'flagrant' crime”, tenant lawyer Miguel Ruiz (2020) points out, contravening the fundamental right in Spanish law confirming the inviolability of one’s home. Only under very limited circumstances does law enforcement possess the right to enter a person’s home without a judicial order, a lawyer and court ordained officer at the scene. Such rules could have applied here and they are a matter of interpretation on the part of the police. The law does not set strict deadlines, criminal lawyer Paz Vallés explains, commenting on an extralegal police eviction in 2019. Yet in practice the police tend not to evict if the 24 or 48 h limit has been exceeded:

“If these people have been living there for three days or the Mossos don't know how long they have been there, they can't do that. They have the capacity to act when the crime is being committed or has just been committed. In other cases, it can't be because it constitutes the domicile of someone, even if it is illegal.” (Vallés quoted in: Rodríguez, 2019)

The fact that journalistic coverage suggests in many cases that people inhabited the housing for considerable time before the police’s intervention (e.g. Ericsson, 2019; Rodríguez, 2019; Salto, 2020), thus necessitating a court to determine the state of affairs prior to the forced removal, allows for two instructive conclusions. The legally precarious situation of squatted residences in capitalist orders so centrally founded on private property allows the police considerable discretion to interpret a given situation, while affording those occupying little claim to their homes. Once police evicted the residents, it is unlikely those occupants would have the means to recuperate their home in court, especially if they had no legal contract guaranteeing their right to property. This extends to poor tenants in general in Barcelona today who often end up de facto squatting their apartments as they become unable to pay rent, reflecting on the one hand the idiosyncrasies of evictions and squatting in the city, but also one of the inherent features of the tripartite liberal state. Here the police by structural defect is able to create social realities that the judiciary can only declare to be illegal in the aftermath, when housing and civil rights have already been eroded and lost (Pichl, 2018).

No matter the length of the occupation or the legality of whatever contract may have existed in these instances, the police has evidently used such imminent structural and legal vagaries to side with the owners. Many police agents chose to depart from common practice, opting instead to evict residents precisely at a time when rents in Barcelona started skyrocketing again and eviction defense groups are opposing a renewed cycle of capitalist accumulation based on rent. This is the situation media accounts and the messages from those subject to extralegal police evictions at least allow us to perceive. They describe instances of the police suggesting spurious grounds for entering residents’ homes, citing imminent danger or indications the residents do not reside there “permanently”, even though affected and neighbors would contest such conclusions (Garcia, 2020a; Raval Rebels, 2020; Rodríguez, 2019). They show police officers repeatedly at the side of owners forcing themselves into homes and adopting the latter’s side of the story, namely that no contract or agreement of use had been negotiated and that a case of squatting had occurred (DesnonamentsBCN, 2020; Garcia, 2020b; Xarxa d'Habitatge Horta Guinardó, 2020).

According to the investigative journal La Directa, such eviction policing is an expression of an internal police protocol for legitimating extrajudicial removals that has existed within the repertoire of the MD since 2012 (Garcia, 2020b; Rodríguez, 2020a). Such ‘express evictions’ are completely legal according to police sources and rely on the construction of the necessary evidence including assembling witness statements to allow the police to enter residents’ homes and evict them without a court order. In fact, they do not actually constitute “evictions” according to officers pressed to comment on the cases, as residents “have not effectively taken residence” (Garcia, 2020b). With the interior ministry’s explicit approval, these internal protocols and extralegal eviction strategies had spread all over Spain by 2020, with local police forces following the same procedure (Rodríguez, 2020a).

For the legal criminologist Manuel Maroto Calatayud (2021) such cases ultimately show the police experimenting with procedure, exploiting especially the COVID pandemic “as a window of opportunity to expand practices of eviction” which the conservative party has been attempting to do since 2019. While their proposal for a law permitting fast track evictions of squatters may not have passed, the police and Desokupa-operators have effectively turned it into a social reality. “The pandemic was clearly a time of police innovation,” Calatayud reflects (2021). In the same way police forces started to de facto expand definitions of disobedience to state officers, pushing the already great legal purview afforded to them under the ley mordaza even further, they are re-interpreting what constitutes a domicilio [a place of residence] (Maroto Calatayud, 2021). As long as the police are afforded carte blanche and the judiciary, the legislature or counter movements do not reign in their de facto eviction and protest politics, the current crisis provides another catalyst for the rise of executive and police power. So far, the eviction defense networks have been fairly successful at stalling such breaches. Neighborhood defense systems have been able to stop a large share of such extralegal attempts to evict.

Oakland weaponizing its loitering ordinance

As scholars have already compiled evidence showing that the OPD is the main source of the city’s nuisance eviction cases (Graziani and Reichle, 2021; Silverstein, 2020), the following section focuses on the city’s second force, the Oakland Housing Authority Police Department (OHAPD). Once again, the police emerges as a central actor in unhousing poor and racialized populations by acting behind the veil of a controversial racialized municipal code: Oakland’s loitering law which has substantially expanded OHAPD’s discretion and provides another critical example of how the police concretely shape the eviction crisis beyond enforcing court orders.

Militarizing the OHAPD

For many of Oakland’s low income populations the city’s public housing infrastructure and subsidies provide one of the last options for affordable rent in one of the US’s most expensive housing markets. In 2015, African Americans made up the majority of OHA’s public housing residents, residing in 993 of its 1544 public housing units, followed by Asians (412) and Hispanics (48) (City of Oakland, 2015: 68). The latter’s relative absence does not reflect an economic advantage on the part of Oakland’s large Latinx communities, but rather their overwhelming undocumented status, barring them from public housing programs by federal stipulation. The structuring logic of racial capitalism in the US informs not only the demographic characteristics of the typical OHA resident. It also impacts the policing strategy law enforcement employs toward its occupants. To be on welfare and poor has not only historically meant undergoing regular and gendered “rituals of degradation”(Piven and Cloward, 1993: 168), upheld and legitimated by US courts arguing that “people taking public assistance waive certain constitutional rights” (Piven and Cloward, 1993: 166). The US’s structurally enshrined punitive ideology towards poverty and blackness also has meant that public housing residents regularly face the brunt of wanton police operations (Piven and Cloward, 1993: 166).

It is thus no coincidence that the OHA since 1974 has its own police force to specifically control public housing residents. Characteristic of neoliberal politics, OHAPD has been left untouched by the OHA’s austerity cuts over the last decades, while the number of its housing units have drastically dwindled, never recovering from the most recent 50% loss in the wake of the financial crisis (Oakland Housing Authority, 2018: 95). In fact, the department’s police force has been militarized alongside Oakland’s other law enforcement agencies. Its officer count expanded by 50% since 2009, all funded through its own operational revenue (Oakland Housing Authority, 2018: 94). It used several million dollars in 2017 to buy police equipment (Oakland Housing Authority, 2017: 11), diverting additional funding from housing programs to social control purposes. And that despite the number of criminal offenses decreasing and sitting at a historical low following OHAPD’s own data (Oakland Housing Authority, 2018: 98).

Everyday racialized policing meets the eviction crisis and gentrification

At first sight unrelated, OHAPD’s empowerment and policing strategy in the wake of the city’s loitering law provides rare proof of the police’s direct involvement in the eviction crisis. It evidences its officers to actively fuel the eviction crisis, as they seek to clear out public housing residents from their homes and federally assisted housing programs overall. Passed in 1983 by the city council and thus an early pioneer of the urban punitive turn to come (Gowan, 2002; Mitchell, 1997), the Oakland anti-loitering ordinance is integral to the re-constitution of police power and the racialized urban gentrification dynamics that have come to dominate urban development. Rooted in century old vagrancy laws and the Black Codes of Jim Crow America that “helped punish and regulate vice and maintain race, power and property relations,” these laws are part of a canon of local codes that surfaced across US cities in the 1990s after courts declared their original versions illegal for “enabling unjustifiable police discretion” 20 years earlier (Beckett and Herbert, 2010: 13-14). Their immediate aim within urban revitalization and safer city initiatives: to remove the visibly poor concentrating in newly developed urban centers. Coupled with aggressive policing and typically centered on the everyday survival practices of the homeless and mentally ill restricted to living in public spaces, these local laws basically turned “homelessness itself” into “a major policing target” (Gowan, 2002: 501; Mitchell, 1997).

But the visibly destitute are hardly the only group that became subject to such re-vamped “urban revanchism” (Smith, 1996) authorized by city administrations and carried out by the police. In the case of Oakland, the loitering ordinance centered on those living in public housing, i.e. people who are poor and black, subjecting them to police intervention and ‘clean up’ efforts. It thus marks the extension of rising repressive and deeply racialized state architecture from the streets into the realm of poor people’s housing. Oakland’s municipal ordinance OMC § 10,342 (City of Oakland, 1983) specifically authorizes a “peace officer or agent of the Housing Authority of the city” to intervene every time a person “loiters, prowls, wanders or is present without lawful business on the property of the Housing Authority of the city.” Loitering is defined as such everyday behavior, where an individual might be said “to delay, linger, or to idle about” on said property, adding further vaguely sketched activities to the list in which people regularly engage in in their homes. For public housing residents, such activities are now a crime. If caught engaged in such conduct in their homes they can be requested to leave the premises, and upon resistance or returning to their home within 72 h, be made “guilty of an infraction”(City of Oakland, 1983). Non-compliance constitutes a crime and can even result in temporarily being expelled from one’s housing for what amounts to merely existing in space.

Afforded with substantial discretionary leeway given the ordinance’s vague formulation and possessing the manpower to enforce the law, it was the OHAPD that was marshaled as the ‘agent’ monitoring compliance. As its officers aggressively pursued this goal, it became a tool to evict residents from their homes. According to police files obtained through a public information act request and published in a legal complaint against the city of Oakland (Darren Mathieu II, Edward Jackson Jr v. City of Oakland, Oakland Housing Authority Police Department 2018: 6-7, thereafter Darren et al., 2018), the OHAPD used the law regularly to firstly stop, question and search residents. Sighting the 48 police incident reports from 2015 and 2016 attached as exhibits to the legal case, the officers stopped and interrogated people for – in their own words – “taking a break on a bench” (exhibit O); “sitting in a folding chair” (exhibit E) in the outdoor area of a public housing complex, “conversing in the parking lot of the property” (exhibit Q) or “playing dice” (exhibit F) with others. Even “dropping off medication” (exhibit R) for a relative was grounds for officers to interfere on the basis of alleged loitering. A young black man called Darren Mathieu II, one of the plaintiffs in the lawsuit, was subject to such police interactions at least 63 times over the course of 6 years, his lawyers argue (Darren et al., 2018: 13).

The complaint described his experience as a general pattern of OHAPD’s interactions with residents, repeating itself on multiple occasions and characterizing stop & frisk policing models towards racialized groups in Oakland and the US overall (Hetey et al., 2016). The exhibits confirm such claims: Armed officers handcuffed him at points, searched his body, and checked his ID for existing police records (exhibit G, X, F). He, his friends, and visitors were told by police to meet elsewhere (exhibit X, B, I), effectively evicting them from the common area and controlling their movements within the public housing complex. In fact, the whole surrounding area was under subsequent OHAPD control. Individuals were harangued, and told to disperse for ‘loitering’ at nearby stores and parking lots, too (exhibit T, S, U, F). “[N]ot a single one of these 63 stops or interactions describes any criminal behavior by Mathieu or the discovery of anything illegal on Mathieu’s person” (Darren et al., 2018: 13). In all cases, Mathieu was ‘cleared’. So were the large majority of residents and visitors that had been stopped and interrogated. According to the incomplete files obtained so far by the lawyers, only one former resident was actually fined for loitering incurring a total penalty of $750 including $300 in late fees.

Police harassment to build cases to evict

For the purpose of this argument yet another aspect is important: The disclosed files showed that the OHAPD was using the ordinance not only as a pretext to harass and control residents, but to collect proof and grounds for lease violations. In other words, the police compiled evidence for eviction cases. Officers would file incident reports either under “field contact report”, “public summary report” or indeed “lease violations”. In the 48 police files provided, 12 were classified as ‘lease violation’ – despite, it bears repeating, clearing all but one of the accosted individuals from alleged ‘loitering’. After declaring the alleged offense, the files usually ended with the reporting officer stating a variation of the following request: “I believe that Mathieu is endangering the apartment complex for loitering in the parking lot with xxx and xxx [redacted in files] who have prior weapons charges. Please forward this lease violation to Connie Burgin [Property Administrator] for review” (Darren et al., 2018: 104), showing the police to be the agency pressing for lease violations rather than a possible caseworker in the administration process filing through police reports in the aftermath to build a case.

The lawyers representing Darren Mathieu II point out that “these unverified reports can later be used against public housing residents in any unlawful detainer action brought by Oakland Housing Authority” (Darren et al., 2018: 10). In fact, OHA in 2006 served eviction papers to Mathieu and his mother, followed by an unlawful detainer process. Here the OHA used documentation precisely drawn from the incident reports accusing him of ‘loitering’ and inciting others to follow suit. The latter were quoted as warranted grounds to evict not only Mathieu, but his entire family from the unit they shared (Darren et al., 2018: 15). According to OHA’s policy and that of HUD, lease violations or criminal infractions mean the loss of housing for all family members, not just the accused individual. Such criminalization of family members by association only applies to public housing residents and those allegedly having committed offenses under the city’s nuisance eviction ordinance, eroding their fundamental civil rights and unhousing them (Silverstein, 2020). Even though they were able to defeat the unlawful detainer action in court with the help of a non-profit law center, the two occupants live in constant fear that “these Incident Reports for ‘loitering’ will be used in another eviction proceeding” (Darren et al., 2018: 15). This has convinced Mathieu to stay inside his apartment rather than spend time in the recreational area of his home. He thus adjusted his behavior and evicted himself from part of his residence, delivering another example of the indirect complicity of police violence in residents’ housing decisions and everyday movements.

The police incident files accessible through the complaint case offer a snapshot of OHAP’s enforcement tactics concerning Oakland’s loitering ordinance, built around the main plaintiff in the case. Public information requests inquiring into the OHA’s entire eviction records to establish a wider pattern of the agency’s eviction practices have been left unanswered since March 2020. Nevertheless, two aspects warrant attention and allow for more general conclusions beyond the data accessed in the court case: Although OHA has not increased the amount of public housing units under its management since 2009, the waiting list for units has been decreasing, showing high turnover rates amidst no increase in units according to its annual report of 2018 (OHA, 2018: 96). Tenants seem to move out, even though income levels have not increased for poor populations, and options for the latter to rent in Oakland are basically non-existent. Even the OHA itself confirms that in “FY [fiscal year] 2019, there were zero units that could be affordable for a minimum-wage worker, and the annual income needed to afford median rent in Oakland was $83,040 while the median income for renters in Oakland is $51,663” (OHA, 2020b: 3).

It is safe to say therefore that evictions are a regular occurrence in OHA’s housing units. From 2018 on, when the plaintiffs’ complaint struck the loitering ordinance off the city’s municipal code, OHAPD and the OHA may not pursue evictions under the guise of alleged ‘loitering’ anymore. Their aggressive fining of public housing residents however continues, which points to another potential eviction tool in the hands of OHAPD. From 2009 until 2017 officers collected over $ 700 000 in fines for parking citations (Oakland Housing Authority, 2018: 98). This excessive practice of enforcing parking fines not only represents another example of the plundering of racialized and poor people’s livelihoods. It may also be the reason why residents on tight budgets run into payment issues at the end of the month. Indications can be found in the OHA 2020 fiscal report where the agency speaks of cost savings in relation to issuing late rent notices, mentioning that their typical number averages about 350 per month (OHA, 2020a: 33). How the OHAPD and other public housing police departments continue to shape and enforce the eviction crisis thus demands further critical scrutiny.

Concluding remarks

This article set out to place police agencies squarely on the agenda of critical housing research again, continuing to document what groundbreaking insights in the 1990s and 2000s already observed and extending such critical perspectives to housed populations in two cities today experiencing extreme austerity urbanism: the purposeful encroachment of police agencies into social and housing politics and the lives of those deemed ‘out of place’, dramatically reordering urban locales in the process. Assembling various examples of law enforcement activity in Oakland and Barcelona, the paper showcases how police agencies are indeed directly implicated in the ‘evicting’ of housed populations locked out of the cities’ inflating housing markets stretching far beyond mere enforcement of legal orders. In both countries, officers can be seen to exploit legal grey zones afforded to them by urban lawmakers to harass, terrorize and evict poor and racialized residents in the interest of facilitating capital accumulation and white privilege.

The insights drawn from the housing movement in Barcelona in the context of the COVID pandemic illustrate in the most drastic way the consequences of such a model centered on the commodification of housing and capital accumulation at any cost: as the police enforced landlords’ right to property despite a full blown global pandemic and eviction moratorium in place, the state accepted that the lives of residents and those they care for would be exposed not only to homelessness and impairment of life chances, but also possible contact to a deadly virus. The second case study in Oakland brought to view another example of how racialized policing and housing codes in the US are fused into the eviction crisis in the city, revealing the concrete underpinnings of racial capitalism in today’s housing crisis. Taken together the empirical investigations thus sharpen our understanding of the manufactured nature of the surge in evictions today and their deep and complex meshing with structures of racialized, gendered and state-driven violence.

Given the still nascent state of research on the role of the police in the housing crisis and the resistance of police institutions to inquiries, the reflections presented here are just first sketches to be fleshed out by further empirical investigations into the local complexities of eviction regimes and policing. Barcelona’s boom of commercial eviction services are one such instance, where for-profit security providers have advanced into the eviction market. As the discretion of police agencies and their commercial counterparts continues to expand alongside their symbolic and material ‘upgrading’, they tend to act increasingly autonomously from other state apparatuses. “Unhiding” (Katz, 2001) such authoritarian and coercive advances and their socio-spatial implications must be the task of further critical research.