Cook County Sheriff Tom Dart announced on Wednesday that he would no longer serve eviction notices to apartment renters. On Thursday the Chicago Sun-Times printed his reasoning for taking this rare stand:

Too many times, our deputies arrive at a home to carry out a mortgage foreclosure eviction, only to find a tenant -- dutifully paying their rent each month -- who is unaware their landlord stopped using that rent money to pay the mortgage. They had no fair warning that they were about to be thrown out of their home.

That's because, in many cases, the banks have done nothing to determine, in advance, who's living in the building -- even though it's required by state law. Instead, those banks expect taxpayers to pay for that investigative work for them.

That stops today.

We won't be doing the banks' work for them anymore.

We won't surprise tenants with an eviction order intended for their landlord.

I may be held in contempt of court over this. If that's the case, I'm willing to accept it though I believe most judges in Cook County share my desire to find a solution for this mess.

We're asking either the state courts or Legislature to order the banks to simply conduct very basic work before requesting an eviction.

We all know that the economy sucks, that foreclosures happen more often than we want, and that renters are sometimes caught in the middle. This is happening around the country, but no other sheriff, to my knowledge, has decided to stop doing the bank's dirty work. U.S. Rep. Dennis Kucinich made Addie Polk the latest folk "hero" in this foreclosure crisis when he mentioned her during the debate of the bailout bill.

Is this what we have come to? Shooting ourselves? Hoping that our sheriff has pity on us?

I've heard stories that back in the Great Depression neighbors banded together and fought off the sheriff, sometimes with guns, to save each others' homes. Will that happen again? I think it depends on whether or not one lives in a community or if you're just living next to each other.

Part of me thinks that what Sheriff Dart did yesterday was merely break the silence of what some sheriffs are already doing. Maybe the sheriff of your county knocks during the day when she knows that your neighbor is at work. Maybe they knock gently, as it is rumored in the Addie Polk case.

Whatever the truth is, perhaps the silver lining to this mortgage crisis may be a renewed sense of community as we see neighbor after neighbor lose their home and then an empty building is standing there with overgrown grass. Does that mean we'll take up arms together? Who knows. But I do hope it means that we'll at least check in with each other more.