BALTIMORE — Anyone who's lived in a Baltimore City apartment complex has likely seen eviction notices posted on common doors or in common spaces, for everyone to see.
But now that Sheriff Sam Cogen has taken the reins of the Baltimore City Sheriff's Office, and, as the first new sheriff in decades, one of his first orders of business was to announce that he's making the eviction process more humane.
On Thursday, Cogen instructed deputies how to serve the summons on an individual door, telling them that if there's a locked door, they should contact the landlord and property management company and set up a time to go back and serve it properly.
The issue of posting eviction notices in common areas "was raised as an issue a while ago and the attorney general weighed in on an opinion and said that, barring any extraordinary circumstances, that the deputies should be posting on the individual doors, not on the common door, not on a mailbox, out in the lobby, not by an elevator," Cogen explained today. "And to me, that's a more difficult thing to do, but it's also the more correct thing to do and the more humane thing to do, and we're talking about trying to humanize this process as best as we can because what we need to do is we need to let the tenant know, absolutely and with certainty, give them notice that there's an eviction proceeding."
Cogen noted that he ran on promises of restoring public trust and being transparent, and humanizing the eviction process was a major goal of his.
Evictions in Baltimore City have historically been criticized for being relatively harsh. And groups like Baltimore Renters United note that the overall eviction rate for the city is 5.3 percent, which is 2.3 times higher than the national rate.
Cogen hopes to change that, but acknowledges it won't be simple.
Serving the notices individually "is not a very difficult thing to do. It's going to be more work, though. And so the Sheriff's Office is going to have to take on more work and more responsibility, but we have to do to this right. There's no option about not doing this right. and the last thing anyone wants is someone to get evicted and they weren't given proper notice," he said. "Because we're talking about someone losing their home, and that's about as serious as you can get. I know there can be a debate on whether the attorney general's advice is the law or not the law, but at the end of the day, we're going to do the better service, not the minimum standard service. And if there's any question, there's not going to be a question, because we're going to go above and beyond."
