Fairfield Municipal Code Art. VII Nuisance Response

The city council finds and declares that:

A. Police officers are often required to respond to complaints regarding loud, disruptive, or violent parties, social gatherings, or events in order to disperse participants.

B. These disruptive parties, social gatherings, and events may become violent, resulting in assaults, batteries, and the perpetration of violent crimes on the property, threatening the peace, health, safety and general welfare of the public.

C. The necessity of sending police officers to break up noisy, disruptive, or violent parties, social gatherings, and events drains police resources from other areas requiring police protection and unfairly imposes the cost of certain citizens’ inappropriate or unlawful behavior on the entire community.

D. The conditions described in this article create a significant hazard to the safety of the police officers and to the public in general and are hereby declared to be a public nuisance.

For the purposes of this article, unless otherwise apparent from the context, the words and phrases used herein shall have the following meanings:

Nuisance response

shall mean a service response to a social gathering where the responding police officer has determined that there exists a public nuisance, as defined in this article, which poses an immediate threat to the public peace, health, safety, or general welfare.

Public nuisance

means behavior constituting a violation of California Penal Code sections 407, 409, 416, and 603, or other noise, explosions, destruction of property or audible conduct that is unreasonably loud, raucous, excessive, or jarring to persons within the area of audibility in any zone of the City which disturbs the peace or quiet of any neighborhood.

Responsible person

means the person(s) who owns or has effective control of the subject premises where a social gathering takes place, the person(s) in charge of the premises, or the person(s) who organized the social gathering.

Social gathering

means an event or assemblage of more than five persons for a social occasion or activity on private residential, industrial, institutional, or commercial property including but not limited to, single or multi-family homes, motels, hotels, other rental units, saloons, bars, nightclubs, pool halls, restaurants, theaters, social clubs, social halls, religious facilities, auditoriums or amphitheaters. "Social gathering" includes social occasions and activities where admission is charged or the event is offered gratuitously. "Social gathering" will not include concerted labor activities protected by general law or activities related to the exercise of First Amendment rights protected by the United States or California Constitution including, but not limited to, the right of political assembly, the right to petition the government for redress of grievances, and the free exercise of religion or speech.

When police personnel respond to a complaint involving a nuisance disturbance caused by a social gathering, the responding officer shall issue a written notice to the responsible person except as otherwise provided by Section 12.704.

This notice shall state that if police department personnel are required to return to the residential location within the following forty-eight (48) hour period or to a non-residential location within a five-day period because of further disturbances, and responding officers determine there is a disruption of the public peace, health, safety, or general welfare, the responsible person shall be liable for the cost of providing such services in accordance with this article. The notice shall be signed by the responsible person, acknowledging receipt of the notice, and a signed copy shall be left with the responsible person.

The responsible person or the parents or guardian of the responsible person, if that person is a minor, will be held jointly and severally liable for the costs of providing police personnel on repeat nuisance disturbance responses. The police personnel utilized during a second or subsequent response within a forty-eight hour period after the first response shall be deemed to be on a repeat response.

For non-residential locations, a repeat response shall include responses to similar occurrences within a five-day period following the first response.

Where the responding police officer determines that there has been an assault, battery, homicide, rape, robbery, or other violent crime or attempted or threatened violent crime, at a party or social gathering, the responsible person or persons, or the parents or guardian of the responsible person if that person is a minor, will be held jointly and severally liable for the costs of providing police personnel for the initial response and all subsequent nuisance responses.

The costs for nuisance responses shall include all reasonable costs incurred by the City in responding to a particular incident and arising directly because of the response to the particular incident. Costs may include damages to City property, injuries to City personnel, and the compensation of personnel responding to the incident. The Chief of Police shall promulgate notice and billing procedures for this purpose. A bill for nuisance response may be appealed to the Chief of Police or his or her designee. Determinations of the Chief or his or her designee may be appealed to the City Council.

The City does not waive its right to seek reimbursement for actual costs through other legal remedies or procedures. Any person owing money shall be liable in an action brought in the name of the city for recovery of such amount, including reasonable attorneys’ fees.

(Ord. No. 95-11, § 1; Ord. 2006-31, § 1)