Tenants issued many trespass notices in error

Yawu Miller

Boston Housing Authority officials last week acknowledged that they erred in issuing no trespassing orders to tenants of public housing developments and pledged to rewrite their guidelines on the orders.

Meeting with tenants at Bromley Hall last Wednesday, BHA deputy administrator Bill McGonagle pledged to draft a policy that would give people issued the no trespass orders a means of appealing them.

“We’re going to review the policy so that folks who have received no trespass orders and feel they are unfair have a way to appeal,” he said.

McGonagle said the BHA would also propose a five-year limit on the orders, which currently have no time limit.

Mildred Hailey, executive director of Bromley Heath Tenant Management Corporation, said the meeting was called in response to complaints from tenants who said the trespassing orders were being issued too frequently.

Many at the meeting complained that children, relatives and friends had been issued orders that result in lifetime banishment from the development.

McGonagle noted that visitors who are issued no trespass orders cannot be arrested while they are en route to the homes of friends or relatives in the development.

But residents of Bromley Heath and other public housing developments interviewed in March say police frequently arrest visitors with no trespassing orders as soon as they enter the development.

As one Bromley Heath tenant at last week’s meeting pointed out, whether or not the arrests result in conviction, they remain on a person’s criminal record indefinitely.

“My son was arrested while he was coming to visit me,” said a resident who declined to give her name. “Now he has a CORI record.”

While acknowledging that some tenants of the development had been issued no trespassing orders, McGonagle said those orders were not in keeping with BHA policy.

According to Hailey, the meeting — one of a series the Tenant Management Corporation has held with law enforcement — was prompted by complaints from tenants of the development who say the BHA police have issued the no trespassing orders indiscriminately.

“We knew that there were a lot of issues about trespassing that have been preventing us from having the kind of police/community relations we want,” she said. “People have complained about harassment as it pertains to trespassing.”

The policy of issuing the orders was established to enable the police to keep outsiders from perpetrating crimes in the development.

“The majority of the arrests we make here are people who don’t live here,” McGonagle noted. “The intention of the BHA’s no trespassing policy is to protect the vast majority of our public housing developments from outsiders.”

Wrapping up the meeting, Hailey told McGonagle the tenants would be expecting to see the BHA’s proposed changes soon.

“What we can expect is a draft trespassing policy that we’ll have 45 days to respond to,” she said.