Republicans Push To Legalize ‘Property Owners’ Killing Homeless People in Kentucky

Republican politicians in Kentucky are rallying behind a new bill that would authorize the use of force—and potentially deadly force—against unhoused people who are found to be camping on private property. The bill would also criminalize unsanctioned homeless encampments and restrict cities and towns from preempting state laws. 

The bill, known as the “Safer Kentucky Act,” or HB5, would target homelessness, drug possession and mental illness by drastically increasing criminal penalties for a range of offenses. Introduced last week by Republican state representative Jared Bauman, it already has 52 sponsors in Kentucky’s House of Representatives. A vote is scheduled for this week.  

Advocates are most alarmed by one aspect of the “Safer Kentucky Act” in particular: an anti-homeless provision that would authorize violence by property owners on people camping on their property. The bill says the use of force is “justifiable” if a defendant believes that criminal trespass, robbery or “unlawful camping” is occurring on their property.   

In addition, it says that “deadly physical force” is justifiable if a defendant believes that someone is trying to “dispossess” them of their property or is attempting a robbery or committing arson, language that could also have ramifications for tenants overstaying their lease.

“We’re going to get people killed, that is just the unfortunate fact,” Lyndon Pryor, CEO of the Louisville Urban League, a nonprofit community service organization, told Motherboard. “We have decided that as a society some people are not worthy of human respect and dignity and we are able to treat them in completely inhumane ways.”

The bill contains many hallmarks of a template produced by the Cicero Institute, a libertarian think tank founded by Palantir co-founder Joe Lonsdale, which has been drafting and lobbying for anti-homeless bills across the country. Cicero’s model legislation criminalizes public camping and restricts funding for evidence-based permanent supportive housing. (An earlier version of the Kentucky bill restricted federal funding to permanent supportive housing if it did not mandate treatment, but that provision was removed after criticism.)

Yet no other bill modeled after Cicero’s template sanctions the use of force against homeless people, as the Kentucky bill does, a provision advocates have called alarming.

“This is teeing up vigilantism against people experiencing homelessness on a scale that we've never seen before,” said Eric Tars, the senior policy director at the nonprofit National Homelessness Law Center. “It's a really concerning escalation.” Tars added that it was unclear how much influence Cicero had on the use of force provision, which may have been added by local lawmakers, but predicted the institute would support the legislation nonetheless.

The “Safer Kentucky Act” would sentence people convicted to three violent felonies to mandatory life without probation or parole. It would also make it illegal to release anyone from prison—whether on parole, probation or for conditional release—for the entirety of their sentence if they were convicted of carrying out a crime using an illegally obtained firearm. 

Additionally, the bill would increase involuntary commitment of people with mental illness; criminalize people who possess even small amounts of fentanyl; and ban bail payments over $5000 by charitable organizations. One section of the bill also makes “public camping” a Class B misdemeanor on the second offense. 

HB5 permits, but does mandate, local governments to set up sanctioned public camping areas, and empowers the attorney general to bring a lawsuit against any local entity that tries to preempt the law by decriminalizing unsanctioned public camping.

But advocates who spoke with Motherboard were most concerned about the anti-homelessness provision, and questioned why a homeless policy ended up in a criminal justice bill at all. 

“We are baffled by why the state legislature would want to include homelessness in this broad-ranging bill, purportedly about public safety,” Catherine McGeeney, director of communication for the Coalition for the Homeless Kentucky, told Motherboard. “We would urge any elected official to propose solutions against the root causes of homelessness.”

McGeeney said that the Coalition had been following the bill in earlier forms specifically because it was based on a template by Cicero Institute, as the think tank opposes the evidence-based “Housing First” approach, which is rooted in the idea that unhoused people need permanent, stable housing before they can address any underlying problems exacerbating homelessness.

Housing First programs in Louisville have had a 97 percent success rate when it comes to moving people from unsheltered homelessness into permanent housing, McGeeney said. But she added that most people don’t recognize the success of these programs because permanent supportive housing—and low-income housing in general—is underfunded.

Seventeen hundred people moved to supportive housing in Louisville last year, McGeeney said, but 4,000 Louisville residents entered homelessness in the same year. (The Coalition has access to these numbers because they are Louisville’s local continuum of care coordinator.)

Similar to many major cities, Louisville has seen an uptick in homeless encampments in the past few years, as affordable housing has become  scarce and shelter capacity hasn’t been able to keep up. 

“It's not the case here that people just aren't choosing options that are available to them. We don't have enough options,” McGeeney said.

But the inclusion of anti-homeless provisions in a large bill with other sections ostensibly focused on public safety may mean that many in the public do not know what lawmakers will be voting on.

In a hearing in Kentucky’s House of Representatives on Thursday, community supporters of HB5 were mostly families of crime victims who advocated for provisions unrelated to homelessness. Several family members tearfully recounted the story of a woman who died in a car crash that they said was caused by someone released on bail. Another woman said the bill would have prevented the killing of her husband, a police officer, at the hands of someone who possessed a firearm at a traffic stop. None of the community members supporting the bill at Thursday’s hearing mentioned homelessness. 

The Kentucky Fraternal Order of Police (FOP), the state’s largest police union, voiced broad support of the legislation at the hearing.

“I think it’s time that the FOP took a stand and became more vocal,” Ryan Straw, vice president of the union said. He called bail reform an “unmitigated disaster” and said passing the  legislation would signal that Kentucky lawmakers support the police.

Representative John Blanton, a former police officer, said at the hearing that people were “grumbling and griping” about aspects of the bill, but asked people to listen to the “true experts” on safety, by which he meant police officers.

“Quite frankly, I think you don’t go far enough,” Blanton said about the bill. 

Representative Nima Kulkarni, one of 20 Democrats in Kentucky’s 100-person House of Representatives, brought up the provisions on homelessness and use of force during property crimes, saying it could lead to vigilantism by store owners who suspect a customer of stealing.

“What this bill will do is criminalize our homeless people,” as well as mentally ill people and people with drug addictions, Kulkarni said.

Representative Steven Doan, a Republican, did not take issue with criminalization of public camping, but voiced concern at the hearing that the state did not have enough homeless shelters. “If we’re going to criminalize street camping, let’s make sure these people have someplace to go,” Doan said.

George Eklund with the Coalition for the Homeless also testified that “there are entire swaths of our counties that have no shelter system at all,” but was strongly against criminalization of public camping.

Shameeka Parrish-Wright, director of VOCAL Kentucky, a nonprofit organization focusing on mass incarceration and homelessness, , who is  also a newly elected council member, said at the hearing that, “Kentucky is poor, and Kentucky is criminalizing poverty.” Parrish-Wright, who said she had experienced homelessness personally, added, “I understand what that feels like to be out and not have a place to go.”

Democrats at the hearing, including Kulkarni, asked the bill’s authors for data to support the claim that it would increase public safety or that criminalization would reduce homelessness. Bauman, the bill’s author, said he had the data in front of him and could present it after the hearing, but cited no numbers.

With 52 cosponsors and 78 of 100 seats in the House held by Republicans, it is likely that the bill will pass the house in some form, although changes were still being made to the legislation on Thursday. The bill would still need to pass the state senate, a body that is also controlled by Republicans.

Representative Lindsey Burke, a Democrat, introduced an amendment on Thursday that would remove the public camping ban from the bill, but it’s unclear how much support the amendment has. 

Advocates said that the process of writing the legislation was rushed, and that organizations opposed to the bill did not know that the Thursday hearing was happening until the last minute. 

“Things are being hurried along and ramrodded through in the hopes that people aren’t going to be able to read [the legislation],” Pryor, with the Urban League said.

So far, attempts by advocates to change the legislation have not been fruitful, according to Pryor. 

“There hasn’t been much in the way of support and change,” he said. “Those who have voiced concern still either voted for the passage out of committee … or voted present.”