Back in 2011 (wow, we have been blogging here for a long time!), I posted about the Cook County Sheriff’s eviction procedure page and how a landlord can know if an eviction is coming up. Back then (and until recently), the Sheriff used to post a Sheriff Number and a District Number. That has changed on the Sheriff’s website, so I thought it was worth providing a small update to that information. Let’s take a look at the Cook County Sheriff’s eviction schedule website.
So the Sheriff first reminds us about the general order prohibiting evictions from being processed when the temperature is below 15 degrees. Then the Sheriff indicates that the list we are about to see is “tentative”. It is true that if evictions get backed up, sometimes the Sheriff’s officers cannot get to everyone. So, what happens when you click for the eviction schedule?
Well, up pops a pdf file listing the eviction schedule for the next few days. One thing that is glaringly missing? The district number. No longer do you know the district number and sheriff number. Instead, you only get one number. This change is not substantive other than that you can no longer see that you’ve been “skipped” when your district is evicted. Under the old system, if you had a district 16 eviction and saw other district 16 evictions show up but yours was not on the list, you could assume that those were in front of you and that your turn in line had not yet come and you would have to wait until the next time district 16 evictions took place. This was not a scientific process of knowing when your eviction would go, but it did give a bit of a rule of thumb. Those days are no more. Why? Maybe landlords would get mad when they were skipped over? Maybe tenants had an idea of when their district was going to be evicted? I don’t really know, but it is an interesting change to note.