Assaults on the homeless are becoming more common and are often captured on video, like the image above, which was taken earlier this year in Fort Lauderdale.
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ST. PETERSBURG, Fla. — Harold Washington has two strikes against him: He's black, and he's homeless.
For the last seven months, Washington has slept in tents, under bridges, or on park benches. He temporarily claimed a room at a friend's apartment until his roommate got in a fight with his girlfriend and she set the place on fire.
"We were all lucky to get out of that one," says Washington.
Last November, the day before Thanksgiving, he wasn't so lucky.
Washington had just finished a day of labor at Tropicana Field, a major league baseball stadium located in a formerly African-American, working-class neighborhood near downtown St. Petersburg. Soon after he left the stadium, Washington was ambushed by a gang of six white youths he describes as "skinheads."
"All I remember was waking up from a coma," says Washington. "I ain't heard no more about it."
Similar reports of violent targeting of the homeless are rising sharply in America. According to Hate, Violence, and Death on Main Street USA, a 2006 report from the National Coalition for the Homeless (NCH), 26 states recorded assaults or murders of homeless people committed last year, not counting so-called "homeless-on-homeless" violence. Nationwide, there were 142 reported attacks on homeless persons, up 65% from the 86 logged in 2005, and up almost 300% from the 36 docked in 2002. Included among the 2006 crimes were five rapes, six people set on fire and 20 murders. These numbers are almost certainly low, because a high percentage of attacks on the homeless are believed to go unreported.
The escalating violence and accompanying media coverage has prompted lawmakers in six states — California, Florida, Maryland, Massachusetts, Nevada and Texas — to introduce legislation that would extend hate crime laws to enhance penalties for violent crimes committed against homeless people. A seventh state, Maine, recently passed a law mandating harsher penalties for violence against the homeless without labeling such attacks hate crimes.
Florida led the nation in 2006 with 48 reported attacks on the homeless in cities in all regions of the state — but legislators there voted down the proposed legislation in May. The state with the second highest tally, Arizona, had 16, all but one of which occurred in the Phoenix metropolitan area.
Last January, shortly before the NCH report came out, three teenagers were arrested for shooting to death two homeless men in St. Petersburg, Fla. during a botched robbery.
"Clearly, homeless people are targeted because of their lack of housing," said NCH executive director Michael Stoops. "If every homeless person had a door, a key, whether to a shelter, or apartment or motel room, there would be less attacks."
The spreading violence has raised a key question for Stoops, other advocates for the homeless, and the larger civil rights community: Should the homeless, who are frequently targeted out of hatred but also because of the sheer ease of attacking them, be protected by hate crimes legislation?
Mutual Protection
Harold Washington, who considers himself lucky to have survived last year's beating at the hands of six skinheads, still carries his Bayfront Medical Center hospital records in a black leather waist pouch. They show he was admitted to the emergency room and discharged last Dec. 1. The attack left scars on his forehead and an abscess below his bloodshot right eye.
After the attack, Washington moved into St. Petersburg's infamous "tent city," a place where dozens of homeless people congregate inside tents on a small plot of land just outside the downtown business corridor. St. Petersburg homeless advocate Eric Rubin, who used to be homeless himself, said that homeless people created the tent city last year to be a safe zone of mutual protection, with its own democratically elected government and security patrols. "That is what brought it [the tent city] together, people being beat up and murdered," Rubin told the Intelligence Report. "The homeless spontaneously came together for protection, and that's what we're still working toward."
The tent city made headlines in January when local police raided it, slicing tents down with blades while homeless men and women cringed inside. The campers rebuilt. But on March 13, the encampment swarmed with police and contracted workers who broke the city down again. Municipal officials planned to move the campers to a city-run lot where they would be photographed, fingerprinted and wristbanded, then supervised by city officials.
Washington, who is the tent city's elected donations intake officer, sat aloof in a rickety lawn chair, watching the city workers dismantle his city one stake at a time. Kathy Hines, the encampment's elected mayor, said almost everyone who stays there has been attacked or harassed, including herself.
"I've had eggs thrown at me and my stuff stolen," said Hines, known affectionately to her constituents as "Mom." "They're just rich kids. … When they throw whatever at you and you see the car they're driving, it's not an old Chevy, y'know?"
Many attacks on the homeless go far beyond throwing eggs from nice cars.
In February, two white teenagers and a 22-year-old white man videotaped their premeditated attack on a randomly chosen homeless person, who they kicked and beat in Corpus Christi, Texas.
On March 27, homeless Army veteran John D'Amico and his friend Michael Wantland, who's also homeless, were attacked by two 10-year-old kids and one 17-year-old in Daytona Beach, Fla. One of the 10-year-olds allegedly smashed D'Amico in the eye socket with a cinderblock.
"Yeah, they attacked me because I'm homeless," D'Amico told the Intelligence Report. "They were calling me 'ol' man'— this and that. They were just looking for a fight."
Two days later, in Laguna Beach, Calif., a 22-year-old member of MS-13, a particularly violent Latino street gang, was arrested for stabbing a homeless man he apparently chose at random.
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