 |
Valeria Hoover says two of her four sons, including Delano Buckley, right, have been trespassed from her apartment. When he got a trespass order from his own home, Buckley says he replied, "You're going to have to arrest me, because I'm not going to move away from my kids."
Photo by Cydney Gillis |
Valeria Baber is not an advocate of gangs — far from it. But the Rainier Beach mother says she sees why one of her four grown sons joined a gang called the Hoovers.
It’s for protection, she says — to have someone who’ll watch his back. And someone does, she says, almost day and night: a bicycle officer who dogs her son Delano using a little-known city law that allows him to “trespass” the 26-year-old vocational student and father of five from the street and even places where he’s lived.
Delano Buckley isn’t alone. Officers have trespassed all of his brothers and many of his African-American friends, including a whole houseful of parents and children who were once at a friend’s Seahawks party. Another family in the Central District with two teen boys who aren’t in gangs reports a similar pattern of officers trespassing the boys from the neighborhood store.
The Seattle Police Department says the trespass law is a useful way to combat illegal activity. But the other side of the story, parents like Valeria Baber say, is that the police are using yearlong trespass orders to harass Black youth and determine who can and cannot visit her home or anyone else’s.
Buckley has a misdemeanor record, but he says he and his Hoover friends are not criminals — they are just buddies who hang out. He’s currently taking carpentry classes at Renton Voc-Tech and hopes to apprentice as a union carpenter. But the more trespass orders he gets, the more chances he has to be arrested for breaking them, which gets tricky, he says, when you’ve been trespassed from where you live.
Buckley says that’s happened to him three times, the last time from a home he was sharing last fall with the mother of his children. He was standing on the street waiting for a bus, he says, when the bicycle officer approached, asked him where he was living and then wrote out a trespass order for the address he gave.
“I said, ‘Man, this is corny,’” Buckley recalls telling the officer. “You’re going to have to arrest me because I’m not going to move away from my kids because their mother works and I stay with them.”
Last August, Baber says, Buckley and another son who were staying at a unit she had at the Lake Washington Apartments were both trespassed after the same officers saw some boys smoking weed outside one of the buildings and chased them to her stoop.
As a result of that incident, which Baber says the officer blamed on her because the boys were friends of her sons, she was asked to leave the apartment complex and had to move.
Police spokesperson Renee Witt says that officers can trespass anyone who isn’t named on a rental lease — if the property owner has previously signed a trespass agreement authorizing the police to remove suspect visitors on their own, as the troubled Lake Washington Apartments has done.
Officers write the orders on a five-by-seven card that the person being trespassed is asked to sign without receiving a copy. But, “Before they go in and trespass someone, they will check with the manager [and] ask if the person has a legal right to be here.”
“If the management says they don’t want him to be here, there’s nothing we can do about that,” Witt says.
Baber calls that bunk — the police trespass people at will, she says, without signed agreements or regard for anyone’s rights: hers or her sons’. “Just because they’re standing on the corner doesn’t mean they’re doing something illegal,” she says. |
