New report shows violence against people experiencing homelessness increasing

The National Coalition for the Homeless (NCH) reported this week that there have been nearly 2,000 incidents of violence against people experiencing homelessness since 1999. The attacks have resulted in at least 588 deaths, the Washington, D.C.-based nonprofit reported.

There were between 25-49 acts of violence against people experiencing homeless in North Carolina between 1999-2022, according to NCH.

Nationally, the crimes against unhoused victims include beatings, rapes, mutilations and murders, the NCH said, and the murder victims who died were not only shot or stabbed, but also set on fire, drowned or beheaded.

“These crimes appear to have been motivated by a perpetrator’s bias against people experiencing homelessness, and to have been facilitated by a perpetrator’s ability to target homeless people with relative ease,” the NCH reported.

The NCH’s report, Violence and Hate Against Unhoused Americans: 2020-2022 is a follow-up to the group’s December 2020 report titled 20 years of Hate, which included data through 2019.

The NCH documented 97 reported acts of violence against people experiencing homelessness between 2020 and 2022. Nearly half — 48% — of them were fatal, the NCH reported.

The most violent of the three years was 2022. That’s when 60% of the fatal acts against people experiencing homelessness occurred, the NCH reported.

Here are additional key findings in the NCH’s report:

• Acts of violence occurred in 24 states and the District of Columbia, with 45.3% occurring in just three states: California (19.5%), Oregon (15.5%) and Florida (10.3%).
• Of the 47 fatal acts of violence, almost half (48.9%) occurred in just two states: Oregon (29.8%) and California (19.1%).
• There were five serial acts of violence over the three-year period, of which four were fatal.
• Of the non-lethal acts of violence, 53.3% were beatings — of which more than a third (37.5%) came at the hands of law enforcement.
• Four in five (81.9%) of the fatal acts of violence fell into one of three categories: shootings (45.5%); beatings (21.2%); and stabbings (15.2%).
• Half of the victims of non-fatal acts were between the ages of 21 and 40.
• A little more than four in five (80.5%) of the victims of fatal acts were between the ages of 21 and 60, with half of them between the ages of 21 and 40.
• A significant majority of the victims of both non-lethal (66%) and fatal (87.2%) acts were male.
• Nearly four in five (79.5%) of the perpetrators of non-fatal acts were 40 years old or younger; more than four in five (82.3%) of the perpetrators of fatal acts were 40 years old or younger.

The NCH fears that violence against people experiencing homelessness will increase as more communities adopt laws “criminalizing life-sustaining acts such as camping, sleeping, and panhandling.”

“Homelessness is not a moral failure of a person, it is a moral failure of society,” Donald H. Whitehead Jr., the NCH executive director, said in a statement. “It’s immoral to choose displacement and eviction over safety and equality.”

The NCH noted that the U.S. Supreme Court will soon rule in the case of Grants Pass v. Johnson, an Oregon case that would endorse the City of Grants Pass’s ordinance that prohibits people experiencing homelessness from sleeping in public.

“Such a ruling could open the door to mass criminalization of people experiencing homelessness, which could lead to more lost lives,” the NCH said in its report. “We believe there’s a direct link between these growing criminalization efforts and the increase in violence and vitriol toward people experiencing homelessness.”