The head of Louisville Metro Police Department’s Downtown Area Patrol approached a pregnant woman standing beside a bare mattress beneath an overpass in downtown Louisville at 9 a.m. on a rainy day in late September.
Body camera footage obtained by Kentucky Public Radio shows that as Lt. Caleb Stewart walked closer, the woman yelled, “I might be going into labor, is that okay?”
Her water had broken, she said. “I’m leaking out,” she told him. She grabbed a blanket and a few personal effects as a bright orange city dump truck pulled up to remove the makeshift bed.
The woman had no phone. She said her husband went to call an ambulance, so Stewart called one for her. But as she walked toward the street to wait for help, Stewart yelled at her to stop.
“Am I being detained?” she asked.
“Yes, you’re being detained,” he shouted. “You’re being detained because you’re unlawfully camping.”
Stewart was enforcing a new state law that bans street camping — essentially, a person may not sleep, intend to sleep, or set up camp on undesignated public property like sidewalks or underneath overpasses. He has issued the majority of the citations for unlawful camping in Louisville.
Kentucky Public Radio obtained the body camera footage of the citation through an open records request. The woman declined to speak with KPR through her public defender and asked that we not use her name, but said she supports sharing the footage.
As she stood a little ways into the street, waiting for the ambulance, Stewart shouted at her repeatedly to stand next to him.
“You don’t have to holler and you don’t have to push me,” she told him. “I haven’t done anything to you.”
Stewart walked back to his car to write the citation as city workers finished loading the mattress into the garbage truck.
Once in the police vehicle, Stewart narrated to himself as his body camera recorded his comments.
“So I don’t for a second believe that this woman is going into labor,” he said.
He returned to find the woman sitting on the ground, with legs askew and labored breathing, waiting for the ambulance. Stewart hands her a citation, and she balls it up and tosses it aside as the ambulance arrives to take her to the hospital.
“You’re all horrible people,” she said, as she got to her feet. “I’m glad y’all got this job to f*** with the homeless and not help society.”
Later that day she gave birth to her child, according to her attorney, Public Defender Ryan Dischinger. He said both the woman and her son are healthy three months later, and the family is now in shelter without assistance from LMPD or the court system.
“The reality for her, and for anyone who’s homeless in Kentucky, is that they’re constantly and unavoidably breaking this law,” Dischinger said. “What she needed was help and compassion and instead she was met with violence.”
Now, she’s waiting for a late January trial date on her citation, which could carry a fine and requires the people charged with street camping, who are mostly homeless individuals, to appear before a judge.
Please note, this video shows a woman in distress and contains swearing.
Enforcing Kentucky’s street camping ban
In his police report, Stewart did not reference the pregnancy or her immediate departure in an ambulance. He simply wrote: “Ofc. observed listed subject camping underneath the interstate bridge at listed location by utilizing camping paraphernalia (mattress, blanket, pillow as bedding). Subject has previously been warned about this statue area is not designated as a camping or sleeping area.”
An LMPD spokesperson said members of the Safe and Healthy Street Initiative had twice previously offered the woman “resources for shelter,” and that she declined them. Both of those outreach attempts occurred before the street camping ban went into effect, according to city officials. They said officers take situations “involving vulnerable individuals, including those experiencing a medical emergency, very seriously.”
“Without the officer’s intervention and call for EMS, it is possible the baby would have been born without medical care. We hope she and her baby are able to receive the care and resources they need going forward.”
The LMPD spokesperson said the department supports officers “using discretion” and “understand everyone may not agree with those decisions.”
Kevin Trager, a spokesperson for Mayor Craig Greenberg said, “We are thankful LMPD called an ambulance, and the baby was born in a hospital with medical care. This is why our homeless services staff work hard to offer support and shelter to those in need. Unfortunately, there are people living on our streets who turn down these offers of help even though they desperately need them.”
In the months since the Kentucky General Assembly made street camping a crime — a citation on first offense and misdemeanor on subsequent offenses — dozens of Louisvillians have been charged. Many have had bench warrants issued against them for failing to appear on their court date, which advocates expected and feared would be an outcome.
In January, Stewart received a commendation from the department for responding to “issues related to the houseless population” with “compassion and professionalism toward everyone.” As the Courier Journal first reported, Stewart is facing a 20-day unpaid suspension for helping to cover up a subordinate's use of force against a man likely experiencing homelessness last year — a suspension he is now appealing.
Kentucky Public Radio received two-and-a-half hours of Stewart’s body camera footage in response to the open records request, including Stewart’s decision to cite a woman apparently in labor.
For most of the footage, Stewart drives between overpasses, waking up homeless individuals sleeping there to escape the rain, starting at 7:30 am. He visits a half-dozen overpasses before 9 a.m., beaming his flashlight and nudging people awake before issuing formal warnings to at least 10 people sleeping or camping outside.
Homelessness in Louisville is increasing, according to a Coalition for the Homeless point-in-time survey conducted in January. 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.
In a WRDB profile of his work two weeks ago, Stewart said that handing out food and tents to the homeless may encourage them to continue their behavior, countering that "it's important we create that bit of friction of people to maybe help inspire them to make other decisions."
The sponsors of the Safer Kentucky Act, which included the street camping ban, say the ban is meant to encourage people without housing to seek out resources instead of sleeping on the streets, especially addiction recovery services.
“Officers always present the options: 1) move on to a shelter or a designated camping location, 2) go to rehab, or 3) get cited,” GOP Rep. John Hodgson of Fisherville previously wrote in a statement. “These clear choices and related consequences are having the desired positive impact on the community, and the unsheltered population.”
According to the body camera footage, while the woman was offered and accepted alternate services in the form of an ambulance ride, it did not keep her from getting cited.
The dangers of being homeless and pregnant
Sen. Whitney Westerfield, a Republican from Fruit Hill who chaired the Senate Judiciary Committee, was one of the bill’s more vocal opponents. When he learned of the citation against a woman in labor, he called it “deplorable.”
“Where's the humanity in that response? Where is the compassion for human life? Where is the pro-life compassion for the unborn child in that response?” Westerfield said.
Westerfield fought to add an amendment to the bill that would require services be offered to an individual before a citation be offered. He said he was initially imagining homelessness services, but he said it would also have required emergency medical care in lieu of a citation. He eventually withdrew the amendment, saying he didn’t have the support for it in his caucus.
“It's brutal and unnecessarily so,” Westerfield said. “If they need to cite her or if she's done this and been unlawfully in a public place this way many times or multiple times, then that should condemn society’s failure to provide help for her before it should result in a criminal process against her.”
Jesse Rabinowitz, with the National Homelessness Law Center, said the footage is an extreme example of the harm anti-camping laws can have. Several other states and cities — including Florida, Oklahoma, Texas and Georgia — have enacted sweeping anti-camping laws.
“This shows that the police have no place in responding to homelessness, and that these laws do nothing to help people who are experiencing homelessness,” Rabinowitz said. “They only kick people when they're down and make homelessness worse.”
According to Dr. Margot Kushel, a professor of medicine and director of the Benioff Homelessness and Housing Initiative at the University of California San Francisco, the dangers for homeless pregnant women are many, even if one doesn’t take into account laws that criminalize unsheltered homelessness.
“If you’ve ever been pregnant or had a loved one who was pregnant, think about the advice you get. Get lots of sleep, get support. Don't walk too much if you are not feeling well,” Kushel said. “All of these things are nearly impossible to do when you're experiencing homelessness, and they're worsened by the threat that, if you lay down and close your eyes, you do so under the threat of arrest.”
The woman in the body camera footage tells Stewart she isn’t due to give birth for just over a month. Some research shows that homelessness is associated with preterm birth, Kushel said. Giving birth prematurely has been linked with a number of poor health outcomes for both the mother and child — from higher rates of learning disabilities to poor lung development. And it's also incredibly dangerous in the postpartum period.
“You add the stresses of homelessness, the sleep deprivation, the fear, the shame, the stigma, the lack of access to health care and you really are escalating the risk for the mom,” Kushel said. “And you can imagine the stress it places on an infant. It's hard to imagine a worse place for a newborn than to be in a crowded homeless shelter or to be outdoors.”
The California Statewide Study of People Experiencing Homelessness, which Kushel co-authored, found that more than a quarter of women ages 18 to 44 had experienced a pregnancy during their current episode of homelessness.
In the body camera footage, as Stewart drove away from the scene, he narrates the encounter, justifying his choice to cite her to himself. He says that, if he had let her go without citing her, it would “set the precedent” that people could claim a medical emergency to get out of a ticket.
“As much as, like the casual observer who, you know, believes everything that lady said, would think that it maybe wasn't the most appropriate way to handle it, I'm very confident that was the appropriate way to handle it,” Stewart says, “with the exception of perhaps that maybe I yelled at her a little too quickly when she was in the street.”
This story has been updated to include additional details.
Reporters Joe Sonka and Roberto Roldan contributed to this reporting.
State government and politics reporting is supported in part by the Corporation for Public Broadcasting.
