Thomas Dart, sheriff of Cook County, has banned evictions, saying he was outraged at banks evicting renters because the owner was in foreclosure.
“These mortgage companies … don’t care who’s in the building,” Dart said Wednesday. “They simply want their money and don’t care who gets hurt along the way.
“On top of it all, they want taxpayers to fund their investigative work for them. We’re not going to do their jobs for them anymore. We’re just not going to evict innocent tenants. It stops today.”
Predictably a bankers association was horrified by this scurrilous and unwarranted intrusion of ethics into their sick practice of tossing the blameless into the streets. The sheriff responded, bring me the proper and legal paperwork for evictions, and I’ll do it. Otherwise, no.
“When you’re blindly sending me out to houses where I’m coming across innocent tenant after innocent tenant, I can’t keep doing this and have a good conscience about it.”