> The active-duty officer was told by police they could not evict Simon and that the issue is considered a “civil matter.”<p>I don't understand. If I person takes over your home while you're there, it's an invasion that the police will respond to. If someone breaks into your home and steals stuff from it, that's robbery that the police will respond to. But if someone simply starts living in your home when you're not there, that's suddenly a "civil matter" that the police can't do anything about?
Having been a squatter, in a different economy, different time, long ago (London, 1980s) I have mixed feelings about this. It would suck to own property you have intent for, and finding its been occupied. At an individual level I can totally relate how crap that would be. I did the "crime" and I'm not in denial about its downside risk for property owners.<p>Most squatted property in the time I was doing it, was owned by large organisations and left empty for a mixture of reasons, despite the severe housing shortage. Nobody I knew was looking to dispossess individual home owners, absentee or not. We broke into housing owned by corporates which was unavailable for ordinary use, had been cut off from power, we got power reconnected and we lived there briefly, until the law courts evicted us. Some friends uplifted their squat into social housing inside the system. Other people did it as a political act, There have been long standing socialised squats in Amsterdam, in Copenhagen. And yes, drug dealing and prostitution is a problem in illegal housing. Also in legal housing.<p>But I can't pretend there aren't issues in squatting.<p>It is surprising sometimes (at least to some people) how quickly "taking the law into your own hands" can become a crime. The whole "stand your ground" thing is really complex because "I acted in self defence" can very quickly turn out to have gone to another place.
> “They told the police that I was a home invader and that it was their home. And so I ended up being arrested and detained,” Arko said.<p>The arrest itself was because police believed the squatters at first. The homeowner never actually did anything illegal in this case.
Squatters rights are completely insane and irrational in some places. in a large upstate NY city that rhymes with smahchester, an acquaintance of mine's mother died early in the era of covid. his crackhead brother traded this information for a fix and the dealer moved in uninvited. because of the eviction moratorium there was nothing he could do legally to remove the guy. attempts to brute force the eviction were met with potentially deadly force. after time it was no longer worth it to pay the property taxes and as such the house went into foreclosure and eventually was auctioned off. the real slap in the face was that the squatter won the auction. mind you this was in a not so nice area but still it illustrates how strange the law is around squatting can be. stealing a man's house is on the level of destroying his career. there should be laws protecting property owners, not the other way around. I suppose there is a bit of nuance to squatting that should be considered and may be valid, but those times are not the ones you hear about
Wouldn't you just SWAT these clowns out of your property?<p>The cops show up investigating the anonymous call, discover the drugs, prostitute, guns, who knows what else. Arrests are made, home reclaimed.
> “I didn’t walk in on a family eating dinner. I walked in on weapons, a prostitute, a bunch of dogs in the back, my fence broken down,” he told a reporter.<p>How did he know that there was a prostitute?
The law benefits squatters in otherwise empty homes because evicting them means making them homeless.<p>As much as it sucks to lose access to your property the other side is losing access to a home which is way worse.
Oh good -- a lot of comments where HN armchair lawyers and civil rights experts get to argue how the world <i>should</i> work in their opinion versus how the world <i>actually</i> works and debate the imperfections and injustices. Bonus for posting an issue that will give commenters a chance to air their libertarian <i>bona fides</i>.<p>If we only had all property ownership and rental records "on the blockchain" by now the police could just consult that and know for sure who owned a property or had a legitimate lease. If everyone had to carry and produce identification for the police they could check that against the title or lease agreement... well maybe we need biometrics and so on to protect against fake documents or false names, but I'm sure all of this is solvable with the right technology. Why don't we have an API that can tell the police who owns or rents what properties? What kind of world do we live in where human beings get to mess everything up like this?