According to experts and advocates, the last year has seen a spike in violence against the homeless. There was a beheading in Colorado. A sleeping man lit on fire in the stairwell of a New York City apartment complex. An attack by four juveniles on a sleeping woman in Washington state. Beyond these lurid headlines, however, are dozens of daily acts of violence occasioned by increasing collisions between the housed and unhoused populations in the wake of the coronavirus pandemic, experts say.
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Crime perpetrated by unhoused people against others is certainly also happening. On Jan. 16, Martial Simon, 61, who police have said was unhoused, fatally pushed Michelle Alyssa Go, 40, in front of a New York City subway in Times Square.
But past studies have shown the homeless are more likely to be victims of violent crime than housed people. Tracking crimes against individuals experiencing homelessness has always presented a deeper challenge. Unlike sex or race, housing status is not often a factor logged by authorities when recording a crime victim’s details.
People experiencing homelessness are also often reluctant to engage with law enforcement even when they are the victims of a crime.
“They may have had bad experiences in the past with police,” said Bobby Watts, chief executive of the National Health Care for the Homeless Council. “Many of them also have outstanding warrants. Not because of major crimes, but most of those citations would be for vagrancy or public urination, because they don’t have anywhere else to carry out these activities.”
But advocates are mounting a new effort to try to capture violence against the unhoused. In 2020, the National Coalition of the Homeless released a report looking at 20 years of police reports related to crime targeting people living on the street. The analysis found that between 1999 and 2019, there were 1,852 incidents of violence against homeless individuals. Of those attacks, 515 were fatal.