In July, Louisville police charged a 67-year-old woman with holding an open alcoholic container in downtown Louisville. Less than a month later, and just a block away, they charged her for sleeping on a blanket on a public sidewalk alongside her belongings, stowed in a shopping cart.
After the woman didn’t make her court date in September, a Jefferson County judge issued a bench warrant calling for her arrest. She has no arrest record in Kentucky, but has faced two evictions, the most recent from a retirement community in 2021.
Now police can detain her on sight, alongside at least a dozen other unhoused Kentuckians for failing to appear at her court date for sleeping outside, on public property.
According to advocates, this is becoming a familiar story in Louisville and across Kentucky. Under the Safer Kentucky Act that went into effect this summer, “unlawful camping” is now a crime in Kentucky. On the first offense, “unlawful camping” is a violation that doesn’t carry any jail time.
But advocates warned before its passage that many people without permanent housing would struggle to show up for a court date. When a person fails to appear before the judge, prosecutors can and have been asking for bench warrants, and judges have been granting them.
Out of the more than 40 people who have been charged with street camping in Louisville, more than half at one point had a bench warrant taken out against them on that charge. Some are also facing other charges too, in separate cases, like drug possession, shoplifting or terroristic threatening.
When a person fails to appear before the court, even on a minor violation like a first offense street camping charge, the county attorney has the option to ask for a bench warrant. It’s basically an order for police to arrest that person. The language of the Safer Kentucky Act also explicitly prohibits local governments from discouraging prosecutors or police from enforcing the street camping ban. It also empowers the state attorney general to sue the local government if they have any such policy.
There’s a feeling among prosecutors and judges that they have no other option but to order a bench warrant because of the inherent difficulties in getting someone without permanent housing to appear before a judge. Relying on cell phones, computers or snail mail isn’t an option for many chronically unhoused people. Transportation to the courthouse itself can be a major barrier.
“When the court issues a bench warrant, or when the county asks for a bench warrant, what it is saying is this person should go to jail. And I think we need to be honest about that,” said public defender Ryan Dischinger, who is representing people charged with unlawful camping.
Homelessness in Louisville is increasing, According to a Coalition for the Homeless point-in-time survey conducted in January. After an enormous increase post-pandemic, this year’s survey showed another 10.5% increase over 2023. That’s 1,728 people who were experiencing homelessness during just that one week in January.
Of those, 595 people were unsheltered. The shelters were 96% full at that time, with the remaining 4% of available beds reserved for special groups, like children and veterans. That means around 600 people likely had nowhere else to go in a given week.
The lead sponsor of the bill that created the ban, GOP Rep. Jared Bauman, described how he believed interactions between police officers and unhoused people would go after the law goes into effect on the House floor in March.
“That law enforcement officer would help that person in any and every way possible to find shelter to the point where law enforcement officers in our state have paid for hotel rooms, for homeless individuals, for families that need support and help,” Bauman said.
There is no requirement that officers provide any resources, whether from their own paycheck or otherwise, in the legislation.
Two of the co-sponsors of the legislation responded to a request for comment, saying the law is working as intended to encourage people toward substance abuse treatment. Louisville GOP Rep. John Hodgson said police are clearing “chronic trouble spots” where homeless people impede traffic or are a hazard and that officers provide options besides a citation.
“These clear choices and related consequences are having the desired positive impact on the community, and the unsheltered population,” Hodgson said in a statement.
GOP Rep. Jason Nemes of Middletown said bench warrants don’t necessarily mean jail time. He also pointed to $22.5 million in state funding that is going toward the construction of the Community Care Campus, which will provide shelter and connect people to resources by the end of 2027.
“If someone has served time, that does not mean it is inappropriate. Making such a claim would require looking at the warrants and charges of those persons to see if they were reasonable,” Nemes wrote in a statement, saying he would need more information on individual cases to comment further.
Louisville’s Coalition for the Homeless has long warned that more bench warrants are a likely outcome of the street camping ban, and advocated against the measure. Spokesperson Catherine McGeeney said it’s hard enough for housed people to navigate the court system, let alone people struggling to survive on the streets.
“Showing up for court as someone who is unhoused is an extraordinarily difficult thing,” McGeeney said. “To put that burden on them and to further penalize them for that, it's adding insult to injury.”
As anti-street camping laws become more pervasive across the country and unhoused people are pulled back into the court system, people who have previously experienced homelessness say it’s an attempt to force people out of view.
“How as people, as human beings, [can we] just be like, ‘Well, you're just like a piece of trash. I'm just gonna throw you away,’” said Pony Morris, an organizer with VOCAL-Kentucky. “To throw somebody away is to throw them in jail and just to be forgotten about. But the problem still is going to exist.”
‘The last thing on my mind’
The National Homelessness Law Center is tracking what they describe as “an alarming uptick” in anti-camping laws across the country, on state and local levels, said spokesperson Jesse Rabinowitz. As of last week, he said he knows of more than100 municipalities that have passed similar laws, and an additional 68 pending. That number has continued to rise since the U.S. Supreme Court ruled in June that anti-camping laws pass constitutional muster.
President-elect Donald Trump has also discussed bans as a solution to “the nightmare of the Homeless, Drug Addicts, and Dangerously Deranged,” advocating for a nationwide ban on urban camping and relocating all homeless individuals to “tent cities” where additional resources would be concentrated.
In practice, Kentucky’s street camping ban has led to about 44 citations in Louisville alone. Morris, who was unhoused for 15 years, said keeping track of citations and court dates is virtually impossible when you’re worried about where to lay your head at night.
“At the end of the day, I'm really not worried about court,” Morris said. “That would have to be the last thing on my mind, because I have to survive out here.”
Holding onto your possessions is difficult enough while homeless, Morris said. With camp clearings a common occurrence in Louisville, he said it's easy enough to imagine a citation with a court date attached being swept away by the city.
ACLU of Kentucky Executive Director Amber Duke said trying to figure out your next meal or worrying about your children often comes before keeping track of court appearances. Many things can stand in a person’s way like mental illness, lack of transportation and child care.
“If the intended outcome is to connect them with services, our criminal legal system is just never going to be the sort of services that helps people get a roof over their heads,” Duke said.
One of the intended effects that lawmakers emphasized is a hope that the ban on street camping would encourage individuals to seek out treatment for drug addiction in order to avoid the citation.
“It's not compassionate to leave somebody sleeping on the sidewalk for the next 10 years as they go down a slow spiral into sickness and death, because they're going to damage not only themselves, but a lot of other innocent people with them along the way,” said Rep. Hodgson, one of the bill’s co-sponsors during the legislative session.
“We as a society need to step into there and say, ‘If you want to live out in the woods somewhere, that's okay. But you can't live here in this public place, and we need to encourage you to get into treatment,” Hodgson said.
Hodgson said he knew of at least one substance abuse treatment center that has seen an increase in admissions compared to last year.
Effects of a bench warrant
Some of the people who now have bench warrants out against them have existing, substantial criminal records, for which they have already served prison sentences. One 31-year-old man has previously served time after pleading guilty to sexual abuse and assault charges. He also has a lengthy history of charges for criminal trespassing, public intoxication, drug possession, and more — some of which have been dismissed.
Now, he’s facing three simultaneous charges for sleeping outside. He’s already been served two bench warrants twice for failing to appear. His arrest citations note he uses blankets for bedding as he slept beneath an interstate bridge.
Every time a bench warrant is issued against a person, it goes into their record, and advocates say that record only builds with time and can be devastating to a later pretrial release decision.
Advocates say they are working with judges to find solutions, but there’s a sense that bench warrants are the only option — if a person won’t or can’t show up to court, what else can the legal system do to compel them?
According to Rabinowitz with the Homelessness Law Center, the longer a person’s record, no matter if it's for something minor like street camping, the more likely they are treated as a lost cause within the legal system.
Rabinowitz said jailing a person for failing to appear in court, even for a short period, can cause further setbacks for people trying to get back on their feet.
“It removes them from their community. It disconnects them from supportive services and often from their belongings, their health care, their mental health care, their employment, all of those things suffer,” Rabinowitz said.
Advocates say they are worried that jails are a dangerous place for the unhoused, especially an overcrowded one like the Jefferson County Detention Center. As of the most recently available data, the Louisville jail incarcerated 91 more people than they had beds for in the week of November 14. Three people have died this year in Louisville’s jail.
Morris, with VOCAL-KY, also doubted that jails would be able to connect a person with housing resources. He noted that, under the current system, it can take months for a person with a housing voucher to get off the waiting list and into approved housing.
“If I go to jail … I'm still homeless. If they send me to [drug-addiction] treatment, and I complete their 30, 60, 90 day program, and I get out, guess what? I'm still homeless,” Morris said.
State government and politics reporting is supported in part by the Corporation for Public Broadcasting.
