'Crime Free Lease Addendums' intended to make apartment complexes safer. Is it working?

Lots of Arizonans rent apartments and lots of those leases include something called a “Crime Free Lease Addendum.” They’re intended to make apartment complexes safer and prevent crime from happening there.

But a new investigation from the Arizona Republic finds they’re not really having the desired effect, and in some cases, are actually doing the opposite of what they’re supposed to.

Hannah Dreyfus, an investigative reporter at the Republic, wrote the stories on this and joined The Show to discuss what these crime free addendums actually say.

Amber Victoria Singer/KJZZ

Full conversation

HANNAH DREYFUS: Sure. So the crime-free addendum is a document that is actually in most rental agreements in Arizona. And if you were just to breeze through your lease agreement, you might see it. It looks like something that most people would say that has nothing to do with me because it describes crimes as people would think of crimes, drug-related crimes, sex crimes, assaults, gun-related crimes, and most people would go through that and say, well, I have no plans on shooting anyone in my apartment or assaulting anyone in my apartment or dealing drugs from this apartment. And so, let me sign on the dotted line. This is not a problem for me.

What people don't realize is that if you read the fine print, you'll see that what the crime addendum actually does is give landlords a much broader ability to define what is crime and things that you wouldn't necessarily think as crime can all of a sudden fall under that umbrella. So, for example, making a lot of noise could be considered criminal activity, lighting up a joint could be considered criminal activity, not registering your guests properly could be considered criminal activity.

MARK BRODIE: And as you found during your reporting for this series, there have been people in Arizona who have been evicted from their apartments over things that I think a lot of folks wouldn't necessarily consider criminal activity.

DREYFUS: Sure, so I looked at incidents where folks were evicted from their apartments for activities that didn't receive a criminal charge, definitely didn't receive a criminal conviction and, in some cases, didn't even involve police or law enforcement at all, meaning a landlord on their own independently made the decision that something was a crime. And issued a 24-hour eviction notice to the tenant based on that independent determination.

BRODIE: How often did you find that was happening?

DREYFUS: So it's interesting. We were able to get eviction data from Maricopa County which looked at Immediate evictions. Now, not every single immediate eviction is a criminal eviction, but any criminal eviction is an immediate eviction. And of overall evictions, that's a very small amount. But what we realized is that for people who are facing these evictions, the downhill consequences are really disastrous. So even though we're not seeing that many people kicked out of their apartment because of accusations that they're connected with the crime, the amount of harm for the person who does is extremely high.

BRODIE: What did you find in terms of whether or not having these kinds of provisions and leases actually reduces crime in those communities?

DREYFUS: That's a fundamental question that we wanted to look at because the concept, the underlying concept, for the crime-free lease addendum was that we don't want criminals renting apartments.

BRODIE: Or you don't want crime happening in an apartment.

DREYFUS: Exactly, which is something that anyone can get behind and anyone can understand. The question is do these crime-free addendums actually reduce crime? And it's a fundamental question to understanding whether the justification for the adoption of this addendum, not just in Arizona, but in cities across the country actually makes sense.

So in Arizona, we decided to tackle that with data. And what we did is I systemically went through the cities in Arizona to see which ones had crime-free multihousing programs, which means that they do use the lease addendum, and I looked at when they were implemented. And then what we did is we used data from the FBI to look at crimes in those areas.

\And what we found and I worked with Rand Corporation, which is a public policy think tank, is that places that have implemented these crime-free policies do not see a reduction in crime. In fact, interestingly, we even saw a slight elevation in the numbers of robberies, assaults, and overall crime that were taking place in places that had adopted these crime-free policies.

BRODIE: Any sense as to why that might be that places that had adopted these crime-free addendums might actually have more crime?

DREYFUS: So that that finding, because we were able to track that to only four cities, we weren't able to make a systemic guess as to the cause behind it. What we were able to say, and sort of the overall statistically significant finding was that it didn't affect crime.

We didn't want to make the jump, even though in the specific cities that we looked at, crime did increase. With the crime-free addendum, we didn't want to make the jump, the analytic jump to saying it systemically increases crime, but what we can say is that it systemically does not reduce crime. It definitely doesn't affect crime in the way that it was supposed to, if that makes sense.

BRODIE: Yeah, well, so I guess that kind of raises the question that if a provision that is aiming to reduce crime is not in fact reducing crime, what's the point?

DREYFUS: Well, that's exactly the question that I think police departments that have continued to put a lot of funds into these programs, which have several stages of implementation, need to start asking themselves, why are we continuing to use these programs. We understand why they came into being in the ‘90s. We understand why we adopted them. Now, decades later, we have to reanalyze, is that working? And if not, why are we continuing to invest our time, our officers' time, the time of our building managers into these programs.

BRODIE: Did anybody with whom you spoke for these stories talk about maybe trying to more clearly define what is a crime or maybe change the standard for somebody to be evicted that there would have to be, you know, a citation or that have to be a law enforcement contact or something as opposed to, as you described, sort of letting a landlord kind of on their own decide, OK, I think this is a crime, so you're out.

DREYFUS: So, in certain versions of the crime free addendum, The standard of evidence that's supposed to be required for a landlord to say a crime happened here is a preponderance of evidence standard. Now that's a lower standard than in criminal court. In criminal court, you have a beyond a reasonable doubt standard. But in these cases, in theory, the landlord is supposed to have a preponderance of evidence that a crime took place.

The problem is that when I spoke with lawyers who are helping specifically low income Arizonans defend themselves against these allegations, that standard is not being met. And what you're seeing is landlords weaponizing this addendum to kick out people who don't who they don't like and to threaten people with eviction whose behavior irks them in a certain way, as opposed to Individuals where there's a preponderance of evidence that a crime took place.

BRODIE: Did the data show anything about who is being affected by this? Like, are there particular demographic groups or other groups of people that are finding themselves on the wrong side of this more often than others?

DREYFUS: Yes, so we looked at the demographic breakdowns of who these policies affect and what we found is that crime-free housing policies are more likely to affect renters who are Black and non-white. In the case of Black individuals, it's two times more likely that the places that they live will be subjected to these crime-free housing policies.

Now that could possibly be because in certain groups with lower socioeconomic groups might be depending more on rental properties than others who might be able to own homes. Either way, what we saw was a definite likelihood that these policies target Black and non-white households as opposed to white households.