I was searching online today for examples of resistance to housing foreclosures, and am inspired and hopeful after finding this story about an Illinois sheriff who is halting tenant evictions in his county which are the result of the foreclosure crisis. I was talking to a co-worker yesterday about how people will start doing what they need to do to survive, and if that means resisting injustice and potentially breaking unfair laws--the way Martin Luther King, Jr and Gandhi and every other peace activist who fought for justice has done--in order to do so, that's what people will do. The fact that this story is about a sheriff is even more awesome, because we lefties don't think of cops as being our allies most of the time (with reason). But this goes to show that cops are just people, like the rest of us, who have hearts and consciences and who can do what's right when they are so moved.
I applaud Sheriff Dart and hope there are other Sheriffs out there like him who refuse to comply with the unjust evictions of innocent tenants who are victims of Wall Street's greed.
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Sheriff Dart isn't refusing to enforce unfair laws. What he's saying is that the banks/mortgage servicers aren't complying with the tenant notice requirements already on the books. What happens, and it's not only in Illinois, is that the Foreclosures-R-Us services are too lazy to give tenants the required notice. So they claim in their court filing that the owner has been served (irrelevant in a tenant-occupied dwelling), get a judgment and then have the Sheriff enforce the Order. When the Sheriff's office goes to the property, they find tenants who have heard nary a word about the foreclosure.
It's interesting that the one bank to try suing him backed off--I suspect that they checked and discovered that the tenant living in the property had not, in fact, received proper notice and that this would come out at the hearing.
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