New Focus on Homeless Attacks, Victims

MICHEL MARTIN, host:

I'm Michel Martin. This is TELL ME MORE from NPR News.

Later in the program, we're going to talk about a provocative new play that uses three common racial slurs to attack stereotypes. But first, we're starting the program at one of Washington, D.C.'s largest homeless shelters - the Community for Creative Non-Violence. If you watch cable news or YouTube, you've probably seen the videos - homeless people being viciously attacked, some just for sport, others seemingly out of hate.

Michael Stoops is here with me at the shelter. He's the director of the National Coalition for the Homeless. They study the attacks on the homeless, and results from their research show an increase in such attacks. Several states have taken notice and are attempting to pass hate crime laws that would extend to attacks on homeless people.

Michael, thanks for speaking with us today.

Mr. MICHAEL STOOPS (Director, National Coalition for the Homeless): It's good to be here.

MARTIN: What prompted your organization to study attacks on the homeless? I mean, the idea of people attacking a homeless people for sport is not exactly new. I mean, it's sort of part of literature, it's part of films. But what prompted you to organize a study on this?

Mr. STOOPS: Well, in the '70s and '80s and early '90s, there were that occasional attack of a homeless person in the big cities of America - New York, Los Angeles - teenagers setting a homeless person on fire. In the fall of 1999, there were seven homeless people who were murdered over the course of a four-month period. Two were beheaded in Denver, Colorado, and that got our attention. And we began to do our own little study, which we've been doing now for eight years.

MARTIN: How do you actually get the information, because, as I understand it, a lot of police departments don't separate out the homeless for its own category. You see what I'm saying? It's hard to get statistics, as I understand it. How do you do it?

Mr. STOOPS: There is no police department in the country that tracks attacks on the homeless, so we're the only group that does it. So how do we get our information is from homeless people themselves that we verify from news accounts, from advocates throughout the country. And we have found that there's been twice as many murders of homeless people in terms of hate crimes than all the minority groups combined over the last seven-year period.

MARTIN: You - that number comes from aggregating seven years.

Mr. STOOPS: Yes. From 1999 to 2005, all the minority groups covered under federal hate crime laws versus our data, twice as many homeless people have been murdered. So it's clear there's…

MARTIN: Is that based in one city, is that based in, what, major cities?

Mr. STOOPS: We have found over the last eight years, there have been attacks in over 200 cities. So it's no longer just a big-city thing. It's happening - just last week there was a homeless man that was killed in Statesville, North Carolina. So it's everywhere, not just in New York City.

MARTIN: What are you finding out about who the perpetrators are of these attacks?

Mr. STOOPS: Well, there was a 65 percent increase between 2005 to 2006. Sixty-eight percent of the perpetrators over that eight-year historical period were between the ages of 13 and 19. And most recently in Daytona Beach, three boys - 10, 10 and 17 - attacked a homeless man.

So it's definitely a young thing, and it's primarily men - young men. And we would say it's 80 percent white men that are attacking a predominantly people of color homeless population in urban areas. But I think they'll attack anybody regardless of their race or their gender if they come across a homeless person.

MARTIN: What do you think the motivation is?

Mr. STOOPS: Some are for sure hate crimes. Some are crimes of opportunities. Teenagers no longer work during the summer, like I used to as a teenager -group mentality, drugs, alcohol. They think they can beat up a homeless person because nobody will care. The homeless won't fight back. The police won't report it.

MARTIN: But when you say hate crime, does it - your sort of suggestion is it's motivated by animus toward a particular group.

Mr. STOOPS: It's clear there's bias against homeless people. People in our society know that homeless people are living outside, and cities are declaring a war on the homeless. They're criminalizing homeless people out of existence. Cities passed laws - you can't feed the homeless.

So - and that gets down to immature teenager that thinks that society sanctions going after to beat up a homeless person.

MARTIN: But one would think that there would be a big increase around the time that you - more homeless people started showing up on the streets, for example, which would have been, say, in the early to mid '90s, I think, is when people first became aware of, you know, homeless people in the street. There should be more homeless people on the street in response to a lot of factors, including the institutionalization.

Mr. STOOPS: Right.

MARTIN: I guess what I'm asking you is do you think the problem is worse, or is it just that you have some numbers, you've studied it? It's like other things that once you start to study it, it seems bigger because you now have the data, and you didn't have it before.

Mr. STOOPS: I think it's a combination of both. I think we're doing a better job of reporting the data and there's more homeless people living outside - 44 percent of the nation's homeless are unsheltered. And there's a greater scorn towards the homeless population. In the 1980s, there's a lot more support, churches and synagogues were opening their doors.

MARTIN: And I want to bring in another voice. David Curdle(ph) is also here. He at one time was a resident at this shelter - not really a resident because it's a day shelter. You've kind of dropped in…

Mr. DAVID CURDLE (Resident, Washington, D.C.): Yeah, I dropped in for a weekend.

MARTIN: …because it's sort of a drop-in shelter. And I wanted to ask if you ever had the experience of being attacked because you were homeless, or you thought was because you were homeless?

Mr. CURDLE: Yeah, well, I knew because I was homeless. Let me tell you - when you're on the street, the worst day of the week is Friday night, you know, because all the drunk kids'll come out. So I was attacked repeatedly in New York and here in D.C. just for sleeping out in public.

MARTIN: Do you think that it was, as Michael was putting it, a crime of opportunity? You were there and kids…

Mr. CURDLE: Yeah, yeah.

MARTIN: …that were just acting up, and so you were somebody to pick on.

Mr. CURDLE: Sure. I don't - it is just something to do, not even somebody to pick on. Because they don't think of homeless people as human beings, you know. I mean, we've been so degraded by the media and by things like "Bum Fights."

MARTIN: Bum fights. Tell me about it.

Mr. CURDLE: "Bum Fights" is a series of videos that were produced, I believe, starting in 2001 that have people who are homeless paid to go and beat up other people who are homeless. And then they also have people who are paid to do something like pull out a tooth or set their hair on fire, put their head through a window. And when I say paid, I mean, they give them a couple of beers and maybe a couple of bucks.

MARTIN: OK.

Mr. CURDLE: My least favorite is - and everyone else's favorite - the one that's the best-seller is called "Bum Hunts." And it's got a guy who dresses up like Steve Irwin, the crocodile hunter…

MARTIN: Yeah.

Mr. CURDLE: …only he's the Bum Hunter. He goes around and ties up people who are sleeping on the streets.

MARTIN: Oh, dear.

Mr. CURDLE: Yeah.

MARTIN: If you're just joining us, I'm speaking with Michael Stoops. He's director of the National Coalition for the Homeless. We're talking about an increasing number of attacks on homeless people in cities around the country. We're speaking at the Community for Creative Non-Violence Shelter in Washington, D.C.

How long were you on the street?

Mr. CURDLE: I was on the street for almost three years.

MARTIN: And how many times do you think you were attacked in that time?

Mr. CURDLE: Well, probably the most serious attacks, I'd say five serious attacks. I mean, I can't tell you how many times there's something thrown at me, you know.

MARTIN: But what about other homeless people?

Mr. CURDLE: You mean homeless people attacking me?

MARTIN: Yeah, attacking people…

Mr. CURDLE: No, no, absolutely not.

MARTIN: (unintelligible) That was…

Mr. CURDLE: No.

MARTIN: I think that's the stereotype. But you're saying that's just not true.

Mr. CURDLE: No. One of - the first thing that you'll learn when you're homeless is that the only people who are looking out for you are the other homeless people.

MARTIN: Okay. All right.

Mr. CURDLE: So, myself I was - I have schizophrenia, and so while I was trying to recover from that and then I started my medication, I was just always tranquilized and very vulnerable.

MARTIN: Yeah.

Mr. CURDLE: Everybody looked out for me.

MARTIN: Okay.

Mr. CURDLE: And so the only people whoever messed with me were housed people, usually drunken teenagers or young adults.

MARTIN: Michael, I want to talk to you about some of the laws that are being proposed. There are seven states, as I understand it, are considering legislation that would include being homeless among the states protected by hate crime statutes. Do you think that that would make a difference?

Mr. STOOPS: By adding homelessness to state and federal hate crime laws, it will send a symbolic message that society will not tolerate attacking homeless people. And then we would have a practical side, that if you decide you want to beat up someone because they're homeless, you're going to spend a few more years in prison. And we hope that that will send a message.

There are six states that have introduced legislation this year - California, Nevada, Texas, Florida, Maryland, Massachusetts and Ohio is the seventh state, and it'll all be reintroduced again. And a month ago, Congresswoman Eddie Bernice Johnson, Democrat of Texas, introduced two bills in the U.S. Congress, one that will mandate law enforcement to keep track, and the other will do the adding homelessness to the federal hate crimes laws. This is going to take a few years to build up momentum, but the attacks continue.

MARTIN: Michael Stoops is director of the National Coalition for the Homeless. He joined us here at the Community for Creative Non-Violence shelter in Washington, D.C.

Mr. STOOPS: Thank you for having me here.

MARTIN: We're also joined by David Curdle. He's a former resident of the shelter, formerly homeless and is now back on his feet. David, thanks so much for speaking with us also.

Mr. CURDLE: Thank you. Transcript provided by NPR, Copyright National Public Radio.