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

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

In Kentucky, politicians are preparing to vote on a law that would authorize the use of force against unhoused people who are found to be camping on private property.

Vice
By Roshan Abraham
January 22, 2024, 9:53am

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.

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