AURORA | Aurora’s Regional Navigation Campus, serving people who are homeless, opens in a couple weeks, and in the meantime, officials say the city has been cracking down hard on people camping in public and expanding its diversion program for homelessness-related crimes.
Aurora’s Housing Employment Assistance and Recovery Team, also known as HEART Court, a specialty city court designed to divert defendants linked to a variety of crimes associated with homelessness from traditional prosecution, is expanding its reach as the city readies the Navigation Campus.
“It’s a true diversion program, so it’s pre-plea, pre-adjudication,” said Aurora Municipal Court Chief Judge Shawn Day, who oversees the court. “If the person agrees to participate in the program, they’re removed from the traditional criminal justice prosecution process, and they’re put into a diversion program, and if they’re successful with the program, then their case is actually dismissed.”
Essentially, if someone facing a jail sentence for a public camping infraction can avoid jail by joining the program and adhering to its requirements.
Day said the court includes only Aurora municipal cases and has no jurisdiction in other districts or cities.
The Navigation Campus, which is set to open Nov. 17, will centralize housing and recovery services, including HEART court sessions, which will move to the campus when it opens, alongside the city’s network of outreach programs addressing homelessness.
The Navigation Campus is a large converted hotel on the city’s northwest border with Denver, near I-70 and Peña Boulevard.
“We’re hoping people actually show up to court because they’re at the Navigation Campus,” Jessica Prosser, the director of Housing and Community Services for Aurora, said, “versus having that barrier of not appearing for court.”
The idea is that the individual will be at the campus for shelter or housing services and will be more likely to attend their HEART court date inside the same building.
Some of these outreach efforts are also tied to the new Potomac Pavilion on Potomac Street near Sixth Avenue, through Aurora Mental Health and Recovery, which will provide walk-in addiction care, psychiatric care and residential treatment beds when it opens in early 2026.
“What we’re trying to do is help people so that they can get out of the cycle that a lot of people will find themselves in, being justice involved, and they really get to a point of stability, self-sustainability, and get the care that they individually need,” Day said.
The HEART Court launched in February 2025 after it was approved by city council the previous June.
It operates as a diversion program, offering voluntary participation to people cited for low-level offenses such as trespassing, camping or open-container violations. Participants are connected with “navigators,” or their specialized case managers, who will help them secure housing, employment, treatment and identification, according to Day.
“It’s a 12-month program with four steps,” Day said. “Each step has its individual requirements, and it’s really just an engagement program. As long as you stay engaged, work with our navigator or case manager, show up to court, and continue to progress through the program. Upon successful completion of the program, you never have to go back to court.”
Day explained that the Aurora Police Department’s Homelessness Abatement and Relocation Team, known as HART, will issue a specific summons to people they deem eligible for HEART court. This summons will alert the courts that it was issued, and then the HEART court navigator will begin engagement.
“They’re doing outreach to the people the very next day, if we have contact information for them, phone, email, any way that we can get in contact with them. Otherwise, if we don’t have that information, we wait for them to come to court and we engage with them before they see the judge,” Day said. “From that point forward, if they want to participate in the program, they’re completely diverted from the criminal justice process.”
The city budgeted $301,000 for the court’s first year. So far, about 38 people have received summonses from police to be “eligible” for the program, and 13 people have signed up. The program has four tiers or phases, but Day said he could not reveal who was in which phase for privacy reasons. Since the program takes a year, there are no graduates yet.
Day said most of those who have not accepted the program have not been offered it yet because they have not shown up to their court dates.
“The number will greatly increase soon,” Coffman said during an Oct. 3 city council workshop. “We will have our Regional Navigation center operational on Nov. 17, and that will really dramatically increase the need for the HEART court. It’s almost like we’re working out the bugs right now, but it will scale up.”
Jessica Prosser, Aurora’s housing director, said the same thing. Since people are in the Navigation Campus, they should be less likely to be unable to appear in court in the same building.
File Photo by PHILIP B. POSTON/Sentinel Colorado
HEART’s HART
HART, a seven-member police unit created alongside the court, serves as an anti-homelessness enforcement arm that also connects individuals to the program.
This is separate from the Homeless Outreach Team, known as HOT, which consists of case managers who work directly with people experiencing homelessness in the community, offering resources. Unlike HART, HOT does not write summonses or tickets. They will sometimes work with Aurora Police Area Representative, or PAR, officers, but they ultimately focus on support and rehabilitation rather than enforcement, according to Prosser.
HART is composed of one sergeant and six officers tasked with handling encampment abatements, citations and enforcement of the city’s revised camping ordinance.
“Generally, the team works together as a whole team on abatements,” Sgt. Joshua Perrott from HART said in an email. “After abatements are complete, officers will typically split off into pairs to conduct proactive efforts.”
Police Chief Todd Chamberlain said during the October city council meeting that he moved specific officers from PAR to HART to focus solely on homelessness, as it requires a particular skill set, including understanding resources and maintaining repetitive communication.
“You don’t get somebody out of homelessness on the first conversation,” Chamberlain said. “I wanted them to be enforcers, too. So this is not a thing where we’re out there handing out unicorns and rainbows. They are arresting people. They are putting people in jail. They are signing people, and they are doing what they need to do to hopefully change the pattern of that individual’s life and also improve the quality of life in the community of Aurora.”
Since October 2024, there have been 573 people moved from their encampments, which the city calls abatements, according to Chamberlain when he presented Oct. 3 during the Fall Workshop. Of those individuals, approximately 150 summonses were issued, 109 camping bans were issued, 26 probable cause arrests were made and 119 warrant arrests were made, according to Chamberlain during the meeting.
In February 2025, the city removed the 72-hour notice requirement for camp clearings, allowing HART to accelerate abatements. Officers are instructed to use discretion in enforcement, issuing warnings when possible and summonses when individuals refuse to move or have prior violations, according to Perrott.
“HART provides enforcement and security for city personnel during scheduled abatements,” Perrott said in an email. “If no abatements, HART will conduct proactive policing efforts related to unauthorized camping and other criminal violations.”
According to information from the October Public Safety, Courts and Civil Service policy committee, the number of abatements per month doubled and sometimes tripled from February to July compared to the same months in 2024. The numbers list only the months from January to September. In 2024, 295 people were moved or “abated,” and in 2025, 510 people were moved.
When officers are working to move people from an encampment, Perrott said that individuals are “given sufficient time to gather important or irreplaceable items and then the remainder of the property is abated by the city.” He said in the email that the time varies depending on different factors.
Perrott said that HART officers are the only police department entity authorized to write subjects into HEART court, and participation isn’t automatic. The police are also no longer required to only abate people camping near “no camping” signs.
“The signage is a non-factor at this point, as the city council has removed the grace period in the law,” Perrott said in an email. “When parties are contacted, they are identified and cleared through police databases. If a party has had no prior contact, they are typically given education on the law and given a warning. This does not include when other criminal violations are present.”
Officers can distinguish whether a person is camping or resting because they are familiar with camping areas and observe the site long enough to determine whether an individual or a group of people is camping or resting, Perrott said.
“Officers are not mandated to issue a summons and are given the responsibility of using
sound judgement when taking enforcement action,” Perrott said in the email.
Perrott said that while HART is offering some resources to people, it is not providing any transportation to the Navigation Campus if people need to move and want to go there.
With HART cracking down on homeless encampments, Advance Pathways, the company running the Navigation Campus when it opens, said it has not noticed a significant increase in people seeking shelter at the Aurora Day Center Resource Center, which Advance has been using as an overnight shelter until the Navigation Campus opens.
The Day Center’s HNIS Coordinator, Khadijah Ali, said that on warm nights, the shelter has approximately 70 people, and it only reaches full capacity on cold nights. The shelter can fit up to 120 people when they’re packed in.
Other shelters close by, such as the Colorado Coalition for the Homeless, have not, to their knowledge, received anyone who has been moved from their encampment in Aurora because of HART, according to Cathy Alderman, the coalition’s chief communications and public policy officer.
During the Fall Workshop budget discussions, Councilmember Alison Coombs questioned whether the new court duplicated existing programs like Wellness Court, which serves residents with substance use and mental health issues.
“This seems a little duplicative,” she said, suggesting the funds might be better pooled until the program proves it fills a distinct need.
Day and Jessica Prosser, Aurora’s housing director, said that HEART court differs in focus by targeting offenses specifically tied to homelessness and integrating housing services through the Navigation Campus.
Judge Day said Wellness Court handles high-end users such as people with multiple summonses and chronic behavioral health needs. At the same time, HEART court focuses on those criminalized for survival behaviors like camping or trespassing.
The summons is specific to the HEART court, meaning that people are not going to the general court, where they’re not getting any resources at all, Prosser said.
“These things are just coming into formation,” Day said. “The only concern that I have is that it is funded, that there’s money available for the work that we do. We built the program for the specific direction that council said we needed a program.”
Unfortunately, there is no ‘one size fits all’ solution. The elephant in the room that is unaddressed by Chief Chamberlain, Judge Day, Ms. Prosser, and the Mayor is twofold. First and foremost, housing costs and availability are pivotal obstacles. Secondly, the homeless epidemic will not be solved by imposing a year long probationary period, predicated upon completion of a four tiered cognitive behavior modification program that implies that mental health treatment and substance abuse cessation will restore the participants to wholeness. It leaves out the dozens of seniors who had the same jobs for decades, living in the same homes for a generation who were displaced following catastrophic medical events, and the subsequent loss of employment and income that comes afterwards. It should be understood that if you are not a drug addict, alcoholic, or person requiring job skills or psychiatric care there are no avenues of assistance being extended to you. That’s what jail will be used for.
In the same budget year that programs like the Safe Parking Initiative were defunded, the City created a new criminal division of law enforcement, purchased a failed hotel, and hired outside individuals and companies to magically make it all work.
Are you really going for it, Aurora?
The program is a fraud.
While I would absolutely love and adore if this program was designed to actually help people, all it does is exploit the homeless population.
The only thing done by these HART officers majority of the time: They walk up on homeless people, immediately detain them and prevent them from leaving [often at threat of additional charges], look up if they have any warrant whatsoever to justify arresting them [and then effectively forcing them to abandon the personal belongings they can’t take with them], and then they tell the ones they couldn’t find warrants for that camping is illegal and give them a summons to appear in court. Real useful stuff for those people.
The Court has apparently gone out of its way to exclude Defense Counsel of any sort from “the team.” There is no one in this program representing or advising people while they are in the program, except for the Court who has a clear interest in creating some participation to maintain the extra funding.
It’s already a disgusting problem that Aurora is just criminalizing the state of BEING HOMELESS. The insistence that it’s good to tell homeless people about resources while threatening to resume their prosecution still assumes they need to somehow be punished for being homeless.
These programs are not what help look like, it’s punishment and a self lauding cash grab.
Homelessness should not be criminalized, yet that’s precisely what’s happening when people are cited or threatened with jail for sleeping outside. And Aurora keeps adding programs to ‘divert’ people from jail, but those programs are created only because the city criminalized survival in the first place. Nobody should be forced to go into a courtroom for a chance at safety, shelter, or support. The real crisis isn’t compassion; it’s control. High taxes, zoning restrictions, and endless fees make building or renting affordable homes harder and harder. Government created the shortage, and now it’s punishing people for the consequences. We can’t legislate our way out of homelessness by criminalizing poverty. We can only solve it by removing the barriers that made housing unaffordable to begin with.