KU buildings attracted overnight homeless campers; KU chief implemented building sweeps
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photo by: Shawn Valverde/Special to the Journal-World
The University of Kansas campus is pictured in this aerial photo from September 2023.
From campgrounds to classrooms: That was the unwelcome transition that some of Lawrence’s homeless community made as they were searching for shelter in the last year, University of Kansas officials said Wednesday.
Multiple homeless individuals began setting up overnight accommodations in KU buildings after the City of Lawrence changed some of its policies related to homeless camping in the community, a committee of the Kansas Board of Regents was told on Wednesday.
“There have been some changes in how the City of Lawrence handles that population,” Nelson Mosley, chief of the police force on the Lawrence campus, told a Regents committee. “As such, with those moves, that population started to go elsewhere, and one attempt was the University of Kansas.”
Mosely said his department created a special enforcement team to start doing overnight patrols inside many of the buildings on the Lawrence campus. What the team found in several instances were homeless individuals encamped in the buildings, to the point that they were storing food in building refrigerators and clothing and other items in desk drawers.
“It was just destruction of some of our rooms on campus,” Mosley said. “We wanted to get ahead of it, and there has been a big reduction there.”
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photo by: Submitted
Nelson Mosley
It wasn’t clear from the report Mosley gave to the Regents what criminal charges were brought against the individuals who had been occupying the KU buildings, but Mosley told the Regents that complaints of thefts and criminal damage have declined since the teams began patrolling the buildings.
The City of Lawrence during the past year has closed several homeless camps — one that was operated by the city and others that were unsanctioned camps. They, however, also opened a new 50-bed support housing village for the homeless, and also provided additional funding to expand the number of people who could be served at the Lawrence Community Shelter.
Regents learned about the homeless matter as part of the university’s annual safety report that was presented to the Regents Governance Committee on Wednesday. Mosley and Chief Bradley Deichler of the KU Medical Center highlighted several other issues. They included:
• Mosley is looking for opportunities to add license plate readers and artificial intelligence technology on the Lawrence campus in an effort to get more advance warning of safety issues.
“We have lots of cameras everywhere, and I can tell you what happens after the event,” Mosley said. “But now my focus is to try to get more to the proactive side, something that gives us a heads up, like weapons detection.”
• Another area where KU’s police department created a special enforcement team related to the theft of bicycles and e-scooters on the Lawrence campus.
“We spent a lot of time reviewing camera footages,” Mosley said.
Ultimately, the investigation identified two suspects — one student and one nonstudent — who were arrested and linked to at least 13 different scooter and bike thefts. As part of the investigation, KU police found evidence of people stealing food from restaurants, posing as drivers who there to pick up delivery orders. The department forwarded that information to prosecutors for charges as well, Mosley said.
• The police forces of both the Lawrence campus and the KU Medical Center campus are struggling to fill open officer positions. Mosley said the Lawrence campus has six unfilled officer positions, and the KUMC force has about five unfilled positions. Deichler, chief of the KUMC force, said applications are down and only about 20% of applicants pass a required background check.
“The desire to be in this profession has gone down a lot,” Deichler said.