NHLC Statement on Police Brutality Against People Experiencing Homelessness
In recent years and months, public outcry and resistance against police brutality and state-sanctioned violence have been an integral and growing part of the movement for racial, social, and economic justice. But those who have been paying attention know that this type of violence is anything but novel; while it may take a different shape or reach and resonate with new audiences when compared with the violence of generations past, it has nonetheless been a fixture of our society for as long as we have called ourselves a society. Of particular concern has been the prevalence of police violence against individuals and communities of color, particularly against Black Americans.
As the only national legal group dedicated to ending and preventing homelessness, we seek to elevate a reality already deeply understood by unhoused communities and their allies: that this racialized, state-sanctioned brutality occurs with particular force and frequency against people and communities experiencing homelessness. Moreover, we seek to highlight how the criminalization of homelessness results in a severe and targeted rise of private violence and vigilantism by private citizens against unhoused people. In so doing, we call on all levels of government to end the criminalization of homelessness, cease utilizing police forces to respond to homelessness, and promote viable, long-term solutions to our national homelessness crisis, such as affordable, dignified housing for all.
Laws criminalizing homelessness lead to physical, and often fatal, violence against unhoused people.
The Law Center’s Housing Not Handcuffs Campaign seeks to bring attention to, and ultimately end, the criminalization of homelessness. In tracking cities and states that criminalize basic survival acts such as camping, sleeping and sitting in public spaces, sleeping in vehicles, and asking for help, we have confirmed what many have long known: law enforcement sees unhoused people as problems to be handled rather than as members of communities, and seldom treats them with the dignity and respect that all people deserve. Almost always, this results in arrests, fines, displacement, and the perpetuation of cycles of homelessness and poverty. It also leads to an erosion of trust between struggling communities and the entities tasked with serving and protecting them. Too frequently, contact with police results in state-sanctioned physical, and often fatal, violence against unhoused people.
Contact with police results in state-sanctioned physical, and often fatal, violence against unhoused people.
In November, Tustin, California police released body camera footage depicting the inhumane and unjustifiable murder of an unhoused and unarmed man, Mr. Luis Manuel Garcia, at the hands of police. A few weeks prior, Indianapolis police released their own disturbing body camera footage of a police sergeant brutally stomping on the head of an unhoused man, Jermaine Vaughn, while he was handcuffed and laying on the ground. Only days earlier, an encampment sweeps program enacted by the D.C. Government and overseen by law enforcement resulted in an encampment resident’s tent being bulldozed with him still inside of it.
These incidents are far from isolated and highlight a nationwide pattern of violence against unhoused people, carried out by state agents and officials who are funded by taxpayer dollars and pledge their commitment to “the people” or “the public good.” These are not simply the acts of a few “bad apples.” This violence is predicated and fueled by the very laws and policies that criminalize homelessness: laws that codify and enable racist, ableist, and classist beliefs about who is included in our collective definition of “the people” and “the public.”
The police brutality and state-sanctioned violence experienced by unhoused people are undeniably linked to deeply embedded racist ideologies in our institutions.
The police brutality and state-sanctioned violence experienced by unhoused people are undeniably linked to deeply embedded racist ideologies in our institutions. Ideologies that create and exacerbate severe disparities in both who is most likely to experience homelessness and the extent and severity to which individuals are punished under laws that criminalize homelessness. For example, nearly 40% of people experiencing homelessness in the country are Black despite representing only 13% of the US population.[1] But this disproportionate representation is not the only factor leading to greater violence against Black and Brown individuals experiencing homelessness — rather, it is also significantly more likely that police will elect to enforce the laws that criminalize homelessness against BIPOC communities, in particular against Black Americans, than against white individuals.[2] Further, and as has been well documented, researched, and publicized, the rate of police brutality and fatal police shootings among Black Americans is alarmingly higher than that of other racial demographics. Thus, just as BIPOC communities are more likely to be targeted by police enforcing anti-homeless laws, they are also far more likely to have these encounters end in physical injury or death.
The list of recent tragedies discussed above, far from exhaustive, demonstrates that over-policing of unhoused communities does not create viable pathways out of homelessness nor increase unhoused people’s safety or wellbeing. Rather, police contact consistently results in individuals becoming further ensnared in cycles of criminalization and poverty and contributes to an increased number of fatalities among unhoused individuals – whose life expectancy already stands at thirty years below the national average.
[1] In contrast, white individuals account for 72% of the total US population yet only 48% of those experiencing homelessness. Homelessness and Racial Disparities – National Alliance to End Homelessness
[2] While national statistics do not yet exist on the subject, regional snapshots are telling: a leading report out of California illustrates that unhoused Black and Latinx people are 9.7 and 5.8 times more likely to be cited under these laws than white people who engaged in the same activities. San Francisco Lawyers’ Committee for Civil Rights, Cited for Being in Plain Sight, p.5
The existence and enforcement of laws criminalizing homelessness fuel and embolden private violence.
Beyond increased state violence, laws criminalizing homelessness also catalyze and embolden violent acts by private citizens. By criminalizing basic survival activities that people must do in public by the very nature of their status as unhoused, these laws mark whole communities as less-than-human, undeserving of the same health, safety, and dignity of the broader “public.” This dehumanization not only leads to more state violence, but it also fosters an ethos of hate, prejudice, and fear that fuels rampant violence and vigilantism by private individuals against unhoused communities.
The Western Regional Advocacy Project (WRAP), the National Coalition for the Homeless (NCH), and the Law Center have documented this rise of private violence. We have collected reports of vigilantes entering people’s tents, destroying belongings and even the tents themselves. Private homeowners have erected cameras to surveil their homeless neighbors day and night. While some vigilantes act alone, many act together as part of vigilante groups dedicated to harassing and displacing unhoused individuals. Local Facebook groups form, and amass thousands of members, to patrol harass, and DOX unhoused individuals in their communities. Some of these groups have faced public backlash due to the active participation of local police officers, while others are explicit that their surveillance and harassment of unhoused individuals is done in collusion with local police to sweep encampments and remove unhoused people from their neighborhoods. At least one local radio station has taken up this mantle and called for submissions from private citizens on “the vagrant invasion” in their neighborhoods, publishing photos of unhoused people on the station’s website.
Beyond increased state violence, laws criminalizing homelessness also catalyze and embolden violent acts by private citizens.
Some vigilante violence may be limited to verbal or digital harassment, or even physical assaults meant to humiliate or cast-out an individual rather than cause serious bodily harm.[3] However, far too often unhoused people are physically attacked, seriously injured, and even killed by individuals emboldened by the environment of fear and hatred generated by elected officials and law enforcement.
In its 2019 report “20 Years of Hate,” the National Coalition for the Homeless scrupulously investigated and documented over 1,850 incidents of private violence perpetuated against unhoused people since 1999, at least 515 of which resulted in death.[4] The deaths described within the report reflect “a litany of atrocities: murder, beatings, rapes, and mutilations [in which] victims have died in unfathomable ways.” Over the past two decades, hundreds of unhoused people have been shot, stabbed, set on fire, burned with acid, drowned, or even beheaded – often while they are sleeping in public space. They have been attacked by adults and teenagers, acting in groups of friends or as individuals, across almost every state in the country. Moreover, even these staggering numbers from the Coalition’s report likely reflect a serious undercount as attacks on unhoused people often go unreported.
If public officials continue to approach homelessness and extreme poverty as individual behaviors to be criminalized, brutalized, and banished, this horrific environment of individualized violence will only continue to grow and fester.
[3] See e.g., Michael Gold, Dunkin’ Donuts Worker Dumps Water on Homeless Man in Viral Video. He’s Fired., NY TIMES (Oct. 2, 2018), https://www.nytimes.com/2018/10/02/nyregion/dunkin-donuts-homeless-man-video.html
[4] Importantly, this number reflects only attacks on unhoused people by housed individuals. While there is certainly violence committed within unhoused communities, the 1,852 figure does not reflect attacks committed by other unhoused people. See “20 Years of Hate” methodology, p.6.
Call to Action
We must remove the narrative that homelessness is a choice and instead acknowledge that this crisis was born from multiple systemic failures. The severity of our country’s homelessness crisis arises from a myriad of historic and contemporary policy decisions: the gutting of federal funding for affordable housing, the explosion of laws at the state and local levels that criminalize alternative forms of shelter, a severe underfunding of basic healthcare, and the lack of meaningful requirements around discharge from state-funded institutions (e.g., prisons, health care facilities, foster care, etc.), to name just a few.
Furthermore, these existing shortcomings were only aggravated by governmental responses to the COVID-19 pandemic.
As we call on all levels of government to address this issue, we must emphasize that the right to housing is more than a right to four walls and a roof over someone’s head, but a right to live – and to live with dignity. The United Nation’s comprehensive definition of the Human Right to Housing defines adequate housing to include, among other things, non-discriminatory access to affordable housing, protection from forced evictions and arbitrary destruction of one’s own home, and hygienic, peaceful living conditions. Yet, our country’s extensive history of segregation and redlining, defunding low-income housing, and police brutality in poor and unhoused communities consistently violates these terms.
Criminalization will never end homelessness; it will only deepen the vicious cycles of violence and poverty that drive our nation’s homelessness crisis. Our first steps in addressing the source and scale of this crisis must include the immediate cessation of the enforcement of laws that criminalize the acts unhoused people must engage in to survive, followed by the eradication of these laws across the country.
We must simultaneously dismantle barriers to accessing adequate, affordable housing. In 2022 and beyond, we call on all levels of government to create housing programs and policies in accordance with international law and the Human Right to Housing framework. As colorblind policies fail to address the critical intersection of racism and homelessness, we emphasize that housing programs aimed at addressing homelessness must explicitly and effectively prioritize racial justice.
Our unhoused neighbors have the same constitutional rights to life, safety, privacy, and dignity as our housed neighbors. Those rights can only be ensured by decriminalizing survival acts related to homelessness and dramatically increasing access to safe, stable, and adequate housing.
