Hate Crimes Against the Homeless

Here's an op-ed an intern and I wrote in response to an editorial in the Los Angeles Times:

The recent murder of John Robert McGraham, a 55-year-old homeless resident of Los Angeles' Mid-Wilshire area, is chilling testimony to the unique vulnerability that often accompanies homelessness. On October 9, McGraham, while sitting on the sidewalk, was doused with gasoline and set ablaze by an unidentified perpetrator. In spite of the assistance of passersby, McGraham failed to survive the attack.

A few weeks later, a similar occurrence took place in Long Beach, where five homeless individuals were shot dead in a homeless encampment.

Our organization, the National Coalition for the Homeless, has kept track of unprovoked attacks against the homeless such as these since 1999, when we released our first annual report on the topic. In our 2007 study, we reported that at least 160 homeless persons were violently attacked in that year--with at least 28 of those attacks resulting int he victims' deaths. While the nature of these attacks varies, they are most frequently committed by young men and teenagers against older male victims. Many attackers draw their inspiration from pop culture fads such as "Bumfights" videos and the YouTube phenomenon "Bum Hunters," in which actors assault, throw projectiles at, or set on fire unsuspecting, real-life homeless people. Only occasionally, according to our findings, are such attacks committed for material gain.

In response to mounting evidence that systematic, dehumanizing bias is at the heart of so many violent crimes against homeless persons, we advocate passage of the Hate Crime Against the Homeless Statistics Act (H.R. 2216) and its sister bill, the Hate Crimes Against the Homeless Enforcement Act (H.R. 2217). The former would direct the FBI to collect data on potential hate crimes against the homeless, while the latter would add "homeless status" to the list of protected categories under existing hate crime statutes--a list that currently includes "actual or perceived race, color, religion, national origin, ethnicity, gender, disability, and sexual orientation."

Expanding hate crime laws to protect homeless individuals would indeed mandate stricter sentencing for bias-motivated attackers. Our judgment that hate crimes warrant more severe punishment than some other forms of crime--those motivated by retribution or material gain, for example--has been corroborated by the U.S. Supreme Court, who in 1993 unanimously agreed that "bias-motivated crimes are more likely to provoke retaliatory crimes, inflict distinct emotional harms on their victims, and incite community unrest." Furthermore, our statistics, measured against the FBI's indicate that a higher proportion of attacks against homeless individuals results in death than do those against individuals of all other protected categories combined.

More significant to us, though, is the federal government's recognition that dehumanization and neglect of homeless persons is a cultural problem that manifests itself at all levels of society, from laws to attitudes. It is this recognition, we suspect, that has earned our proposed legislation the co-sponsorship of 20 members of Congress and the support of over 150 national, state, and local organizations, including the NAACP, the National Council of La Raza, and the National Gay and Lesbian Task Force.

It is not our desire to suggest that crimes against the homeless are categorically worse than crimes against anyone else. Whether or not the recent attacks in the Los Angeles area warrant the "hate crime" label, we are unable to say. Sadly, however, our research suggests that violent crimes against homeless victims, motivated by little more than prejudice and hate, are not without precedent. As long as it is within the realm of possibility that homeless individuals like McGraham have been targeted solely on the basis of their homeless status, the hate crime question should continue to be asked.