“A homeless woman in Kentucky was cited by police and had her mattress confiscated and destroyed as she went into labor on the streets of Louisville, local media reported.

The Guardian

The Christmas spirit is alive and well in Kentucky. A homeless pregnant woman whose water had broken, was cited and had her mattress confiscated by one of Louisville’s finest who take an oath to serve and protect.

Kentucky may have a draconian law that bans street camping, but if a police officer encounters a pregnant woman sleeping on a mattress on a sidewalk, the moral imperative should be to minister to her physical and medical needs.

I imagine that if LMPD Lieutenant Caleb Steward, who wrote the ticket, had been an innkeeper in Bethlehem back in the day not only would he have turned away Mary and Joseph, but he would have warned her to have her baby outside the city limits.

According to Wave3.Com “Stewart, who oversees LMPD’s 1st division, wrote more than half of all of the citations written for homeless people in the first three months of the Safer Kentucky Act’s new ‘anti-street camping policy.’”

These merciless and oppressive anti-homeless laws are ineffectual in dealing with the homeless crisis, they only serve to foster unfortunate (for the homeless) interactions with law enforcement.

Shame on Steward for aggressively enforcing the “anti-street camping policy”, he’s an embarrassment to LMPD, and to humanity at large.