Complaint-only enforcement practices were replaced by proactive block enforcement in Baltimore

Evidence

Baltimore’s early approach to housing law enforecement was identical with that employed in virtually every city. Officials charged with the enforcement of housing, health, building and zoning codes, limited enforcement efforts to cases where complaints were filed. No effort was made to ferret out violations of their own volition. There are many who believe this practice is the root of our present slum problem. … In 1945, those engaged in the “Baltimore Plan” broke with this traditional custom and selected a block for complete law enforcement of all city laws and ordinances. As additional help was provided the program moved progressively from a single home operation to a block, then several blocks, and the last effort involved about twenty-seven square blocks. — Henry M. Hart, Jr. and Albert M. Sacks, The Legal Process, 250

Categorization

• XREF: These are the roots of the proactive area-wide inspection shift flagged in book_so_far ch2; here the causal claim is that passive enforcement caused the slum problem. — connects to: Passive prosecutorial readiness to respond does not satisfy enforcement duty — Henry M. Hart, Jr. and Albert M. Sacks, The Legal Process: Basic Problems in…, 47; Complaint-based housing enforcement shifts to proactive area-wide inspections — Henry M. Hart, Jr. and Albert M. Sacks, The Legal Process: Basic Problems in…, 154