Editor's note: This story contains graphic descriptions of violence.
In May, Willamette Week reported the Old Town homeless village was closing. One of the original C3PO (Creating Conscious Communities with People Outside) sites developed to provide shelter for homeless Portlanders during the pandemic, the Old Town village community hosted residents, providing shelter in individual structures in addition to a communal kitchen, laundry and supportive resources.
All Good Northwest, which began operating the village in October 2021, was closing the Old Town site because of dangerous conditions, specifically “daily and nightly gunfire and gun activity,” WW reported.
News of the closure preceded a rash of coverage pointing to the unsafe conditions in the core of Portland’s downtown, an area already fraught with contention over how city, county, state and federal agencies are addressing the homelessness crisis. Homelessness, particularly in the downtown area, has catalyzed a wave of neighborhood and business associations pushing to “save” downtown, some even characterizing the effort to clean up downtown and revive the economy as a “fight for the soul of Portland.”
But in the tumult of rising crime, protracted pandemic fallout and the twin crises of homelessness and housing, the actual cause of crime, danger and violence is often lost. For many housed people, the tendency is to conflate homeless populations with violent crime and danger. However, data and evidence show homeless people are more often victims of violent crime, rather than perpetrators.
Greg Townley, professor and co-founder of the Homelessness Research & Action Collaborative at Portland State, said concerns about connections between homelessness and crime are often misplaced.
“I think that often, community members do focus their fears too much on violence perpetrated by homeless people when it's really important to remember that homelessness increases vulnerability to violence among people who are homeless, not among people who are housed,” Townley said.
Unhoused populations are more likely to experience violence
A study from the National Healthcare for the Homeless Council found people experiencing homelessness are at an increased risk of victimization themselves. Nearly half — 49% for men and 48% for women — of those surveyed reported experiencing violence. Older people and those experiencing homelessness for more than two years faced an especially high risk of experiencing a violent attack. Being female and homeless was also a predictor of violence, including rape. Women were significantly more likely to know the perpetrator and experience continued suffering after a violent attack, researchers found.
“It's also really important to know that there are many instances of housed people enacting violence against people who are homeless.”
— Greg Townley, professor and co-founder of the Homelessness Research & Action Collaborative at Portland State University
Despite the myth of homeless violence, housed people are frequently perpetrators in cases of violence against homeless people.
“It's also really important to know that there are many instances of housed people enacting violence against people who are homeless,” Townley said.
At times, this violence comes in the form of hate crimes. The National Coalition for the Homeless found the number of undeclared hate crimes resulting in the death of a homeless person happened at double the rate of other hate crime deaths based on religion, race or disability. Between 1999 and 2017, hate crime deaths among the general population totaled 183. In this same time period, 483 homeless people were killed in attacks by housed people.
There are instances of violent crimes perpetrated by homeless people, but they are far less likely to commit violent offenses than housed people. Conversely, they are much more likely than housed people to be charged with crimes related to survival and lifestyle, such as property-related crimes, loitering, drinking outside, noise and panhandling.
Homeless people are arrested at higher rates
Overall, homeless people are much more likely to be arrested than housed people. An investigation by Melissa Lewis at Reveal found police in West Coast cities arrest homeless people at a disproportionate rate. In Portland, homeless people comprised 50% of all arrests between 2017 and 2020, even though the population of homeless people was less than 2%. In the same time period, homeless arrests accounted for 42% of arrests in Sacramento and 24% in Los Angeles. Unhoused residents were roughly 2% of the population in these cities, too.
According to Reveal, “neighborhood outcry is fueling the vast criminalization of the homeless for largely nonviolent violations.” The majority of the time police receive reports about homeless people, they aren’t crimes but are reports of a homeless person acting “suspicious” or for welfare checks. These calls often end in the arrest of a homeless person just the same, often for old infractions or low-level warrants.
Portland, like other cities in the nation, is experiencing a surge in gun violence. There were a record 1,288 shootings in Portland last year, wounding 385 people. In 2021, there were 90 homicides in the city, a count surpassing larger cities in the nation. More than 75% of these homicides were by gunfire.
This surge in crime is related to gang activity, but danger from gun violence still gets conflated with homeless populations, even by the Portland Police Bureau, despite data showing homeless people are often victims, not perpetrators, of violent crime.
Street Roots requested PPB stats showing how many instances of gun violence in recent years were perpetrated by homeless people and how many involved a homeless person as a victim. PPB said it doesn’t track this information.
How crime and violence unfold is often ignored, an oversight creating barriers to addressing homelessness, Townley said.
"Conflating criminal activity with homelessness leads to treating homelessness as a law enforcement issue, which results in increases in sweeps and arrests of homeless people, which then leads to trauma, the loss of belongings, and creates additional barriers to people accessing services and housing," Townley said.
Indeed, as the false dynamic connecting homelessness and violent crime grows more prominent, so too does the false dynamic claiming a ‘defunded’ PPB would solve many issues related to homelessness if only it were better funded and more empowered to enforce laws on homeless Portlanders. In addition to Reveal’s investigation finding PPB already arrests homeless Portlanders at an incredibly high rate with no evidence showing the practice is beneficial, PPB’s budget is actually higher than it was before 2020 — $249 million compared to $238 million.
Unhoused people are unfairly linked to gun crime
The reality described by Townley is absent from the conversation around rising crime in Portland. Instead, common refrains vaguely paint homeless people as frequent perpetrators of gun crime and assault, a false yet prevailing belief now associated with the Old Town village closure, obscuring the consistent mismanagement of the site contributing to deteriorating conditions.
Employees of All Good Northwest filed paperwork to unionize on April 28. In May, the Northwest Labor Press reported employees said rampant mismanagement put the safety of staff at risk, citing OSHA complaints alleging staff were cleaning up blood without proper equipment and blood-borne pathogen training and providing CPR without training or CPR masks.
The Old Town village closure is another chapter in the beleaguered push to alleviate homelessness downtown, an effort marked by deepening division between homeless advocates and some members of business and neighborhood associations.
Some businesses left the downtown area in recent years, partly in response to visible homelessness, rising gun violence and other violent crime. However, it’s worth noting recent examples of business losses and closures related to underperformance during the COVID-19 pandemic being falsely tied to other events, such as racial justice protests in 2020.
In the midst of a worsening homelessness crisis, there has been a rise in crime and gun violence, which has hit a peak since the pandemic. This year alone there have already been 670 shootings and 41 homicides. At least nine — nearly 25% — of those killed were homeless Portlanders. In 2020, the murder rate of homeless people in Portland was nearly double that of housed residents.
The surge in violent crime isn’t linked to homelessness and it’s important for the public to know that, Denis Theriault, deputy communications director at Multnomah County, told Street Roots.
“The community should be clear that people experiencing homelessness in Old Town/Chinatown are far more likely to be the victims of, and suffer the effects of, criminal conduct,” Theriault said.
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