California led the nation in violent crimes against the homeless by “housed” assailants last year, with San Diego contributing one of 20 known crimes statewide, according to a report released this week by the National Coalition for the Homeless.

The report, entitled “No Safe Place,” covers 2014 and 2015, and includes trends the nonprofit group has identified since it started compiling the semi-annual counts in 1999.

In the 17 years the group has been gathering data, it has identified 1,657 homeless people who were victimized by people who had stable housing and may have attacked victims because they were homeless. At least 428 of the victims died.

The report comes after attacks on four homeless men last week in San Diego. Three died and one was critically injured. The attacker lit two of the men on fire. All the victims were sleeping when they were attacked.


A Chula Vista man was arrested last week on suspicion of the crimes, but has been released from custody without charges. As of Tuesday, no suspects were in custody, and the motive for the attacks was unknown.

Regardless of the killer’s identity or motive, the brutal killings speak to the vulnerability of people who don’t have stable housing, and the housed-public’s negative perceptions of them, advocates say. The negative feelings have been driven in part by public policy that “criminalizes” homelessness, advocates say.

“The people who are generally there (on the streets) are people who have no place to go,” said Megan Hustings, director of the National Coalition for the Homeless. “They’re not a welcome part of society, and then they end up being perceived as sub-human — like you lose your citizenship when you lose your home — and it shouldn’t be that way.”

In the past decade, at least 11 homeless people have been victims of violence in San Diego, according to The San Diego Union-Tribune’s review of the coalition’s archived reports.


Elsewhere in the San Diego County, there were at least five others: one each in Santee, Ramona and Lakeside, and two in Escondido. Statewide, at least 197 were victimized because they were homeless.

Homeless people are not a protected population under federal or California hate crime laws, so the FBI doesn’t track hate-crime-like violence against the population as it counts crimes motivated by bias against the victim’s religion, sexual orientation, race, and other protected identifiers.

The Coalition for the Homeless in 1999 began tracking the number of homeless people killed in what the group considered bias-motivated attacks. The total number of homeless people killed is nearly three times the combined death toll in all populations protected under federal hate crime laws, the group says.

“From the surveys that we’ve seen, the victimization rates among the homeless are, if not the highest, among the highest victimization rates we have,” said Brian Levin, a legal scholar and professor at California State University San Bernardino, who has long studied hate crimes and has contributed to the National Coalition for the Homeless research and reports.


The rates mean that a homeless person living outside for one year faces the same risk as a “housed” person faces over decades or a lifetime, Levin said.

The coalition’s annual count of attacks has climbed steadily in recent years, even though the data probably misses several instances. Experts agree that many violent crimes against homeless people are never reported because homeless people often fear or mistrust authorities.

The National Coalition for the Homeless used sources including national and local news reports, incidents self-reported by homeless people and information from local agencies and organizations to identify the incidents that bore the hallmarks of hate crimes, according to the report.

The motives for each attack were not always known, but for each incident, the group’s review of the known facts found confirmation or strong reason to believe that a “housed” perpetrator victimized a homeless person because they were homeless. Crimes committed by homeless people against other homeless people were not counted.


The group’s most recent report identified two hate crimes against the homeless in San Diego during 2014 and 2015:

June 17, 2014, Ocean Beach: A homeless man was sleeping in an alley when two men, both of whom appeared to be in their 20s, began hitting him about 3:30 a.m. One of them stabbed the victim in the back, then the two assailants fled. The victim, who was treated for cuts, bruises and a stab wound that was not considered life-threatening, told authorities attack was unprovoked. There were no arrests.

March 20, 2015, Downtown San Diego: A homeless man in his 30s was found with serious head injuries, apparently from an assault in the Gaslamp Quarter near a grocery store. Witnesses reported seeing a silver sedan leaving the scene. Police stopped the car but determined the occupants were not involved in the crimes and let them go. Investigation was ongoing.

Advocates said the best way to protect homeless people from bias-driven attacks is to provide them with safe shelter.


Better data collection by law enforcement agencies could help authorities fight the violence more effectively, they said. And adding more legal protection for homeless people could send a message that people without housing are not a socially-acceptable target for violence.