Sheriff Cogen stopped posting eviction notices.
Published 12/4/2022 11:36 a.m. EST, Updated 12/4/2022 12:07 p.m. EST
Baltimore’s new sheriff Sam Cogen has instructed deputies to end the department’s longtime policy of posting eviction notices in common spaces of apartment buildings when deputies are unable to access individual units.
Cogen announced the new policy on Thursday, his first full day in office. It went into effect Friday.
“This is not something that’s difficult for anyone to understand,” he said. “Why wouldn’t we want to give everyone as much notice as we possibly could?”
His predecessor and former boss John Anderson, who held office for more than three decades, did not assist him in the transition, he said. So Cogen studied local laws, read old newspaper clippings and eventually learned he needed to obtain a “sheriff’s bond” and present it to the clerk of court in order to be sworn in.
Anderson’s practice sparked fierce debate at the department’s budget hearings in June, when some city council members argued it violated a 2001 opinion issued by then Attorney General Joseph Curran stating that notices should be delivered to individual apartment units save for “extraordinary circumstances.”
Anderson had requested the opinion be issued. He defended the practice to the council, saying that sometimes deputies are unable to access individual units, particularly if an apartment building is locked beyond its common area.
“If they [deputies] can’t get in to post a particular apartment, then they post in the common area. If they can get in, then they go up to the door of the same apartment in question,” he said in June.
Renter advocates sharply criticized the practice, saying it may cause renters to miss court dates in their eviction proceedings.
The council ultimately cut $500,000 from Mayor Brandon Scott’s proposed budget for the sheriff’s office, saying they wanted to see improvement in the office’s handling of posting eviction notices.
Cogen said his instructions to deputies were simple: “Instead of sticking it the mailroom, you’re going to have to get it to the unit door. And if the door [to the units] is locked, we’re going to have to call the property manager to meet you there to open it. If they can’t meet you then, it needs to be sometime in the very near future.”
He campaigned against his old boss in the Democratic primary, telling voters he would bring needed technology to the sheriff’s office — Anderson did not use a work computer, saying it was unnecessary — and improve the evictions process by connecting evicted tenants to housing resources and checking that all landlords filing an eviction request have registered those properties with Baltimore’s rental license records. Anderson admitted during budget hearings that deputies do not always check that units in eviction requests are legally rented.