Assemblyman Brian Curran (Lynbrook-21^st A.D.) joined his Assembly Minority colleagues to call for harsher penalties for squatting and more protections for homeowners in response to two horrific incidents in which one woman was arrested for changing the locks on her own home to try to remove squatters and another in which a woman was brutally murdered by squatters in her mother's apartment. Specifically, Curran is calling for squatting to be classified as criminal trespassing and to clarify that squatters will not be considered tenants (A.6894).

“The fact of the matter is that squatters have become a real nuisance all over New York, but especially in the City and Long Island, and now we even have people being murdered by squatters. We need to treat squatters as what they are: trespassers. No one should have to worry about coming home one day to find random people living in their property and not being able to remove them, that is complete lunacy. I will always stand with upstanding, law-abiding New Yorkers, not with those who seek to do them harm and deprive them of their property,” said Curran.