One person grappling with these questions is Nicholas Cocchi, the sheriff of Hampden County in western Massachusetts.
Sheriff Cocchi presides over Springfield, a city where nearly 27 percent of the population lives below the poverty line. His predecessor was a former social worker, and Sheriff Cocchi has carried on that progressive tradition, branching out into services to reintegrate former inmates and treat addiction. Last year, his department carried out 724 evictions, two or three a day.
Sheriff Cocchi has worried for weeks about resuming evictions, searching for ways to make them “respectful and humane.”
“As a human, not a sheriff — not as an elected official but as a human being — if it is part of the ecosystem, I get it, but that doesn’t mean we let people decay and rot,” Sheriff Cocchi said.
His main idea is to work intensively with tenants his department is preparing to evict, offering a last big push to find them alternative housing. If worse comes to worst, he said, he would provide them with short-term shelter.
“You’re not going to sleep in your car tonight,” he said. “I can give you a place that night. So you’re not outside in the cold, in the rain, in your car or a park bench. I can do that. It’s my job. I believe I owe that to you.”
Source : Nytimes
