Terrorism

The new Real Change came in today. It's always a mob scene with everyone wanting to be first on the street with the new paper. I stood out on the sidewalk while Steve waited for the line to subside as he told me about last Friday.

"I was sleeping in Meridian Park in Wallingford, totally out. It was like 11 o'clock. Some guy kicks me in the hand, kicks me in the ribs, kicks me in the jaw, and says, 'I know where you live. I'm going to kill you.' And then he runs off. Never seen him before in my life. I called the police and it took them 45 minutes to show up. They took a report and left. Why does it take them 45 minutes?"

He was holding a cup of Ramen noodles. His lower thumb joint looked like a golf ball.

"That the hand he kicked?"

"Yeah, it's all swollen. It hurts. But I can move it. It's not broken." He twitched his thumb to demonstrate.

"Steve, it's fucking broken. There probably isn't much they can do, but you should have it looked at."

"That's all I need is to spend my day in an emergency room."

"Yeah, it sucks."

"I don't know what kind of shoes he was wearing, but it hurt like hell."

Then Steve told me about a couple of guys he knew who were attacked by three high school boys last summer while they slept out at Ballard Locks.

"They just started kicking them. Then they picked Pete up and threw him over the railing. The tide was out, so he hit the rocks. They were all covered with barnacles. He was all cut up. Split his head open. Busted his ribs and his leg. They caught a couple of them, but one is still on the loose."

As the City goes out of its way to identify homeless campers with urine, hypodermic needles, trash, and disease, there will be those who hear the not so subtle subtext loud and clear: These people are less than human. Do with them what you will. We don't care.

Last December, as the Mayor's moved toward the release of new protocols to justify sweeps of homeless encampments, the City Council passed hate crime legislation to increase penalties for malicious harassment of homeless people. This would include, causing physical injury, making threats which cause reasonable fear, or "causing physical damage to or the destruction of property of another person."

The Mayor's office has been quite clear that the ordinance does not apply to their routine practice of discarding homeless people's possessions. Given that this ordinance passed to "fight the dehumanization of the homeless by discouraging behavior that reinforces and promotes dehumanization of the homeless," this issue needs to be revisited.

Cognitive Dissonance

Hate crimes against homeless people is now a crime in Seattle, thanks to the excellent work of Seattle's Office for Civil Rights. I've always had mixed emotions regarding this particular tactic. Being homeless, unlike being gay, black, or a Muslim, is more of an economic status than an identity. But maybe I'm just wishing the world were other than it is.

Given, however, the Bumfights inspired mayhem that has become frighteningly commonplace, where, most typically, teen-aged boys go looking for easy targets to kill and torture, an additional penalty for that sort of violence doesn't seem like a bad thing. It is a stretch, however, to think that this legislation in and of itself will prevent a single act of harassment.

Crimes against homeless and other vulnerable people has more to do with an overall environment of dehumanization that lends itself to hate. Recent treatment of homeless campers in the local media is a case in point.

There was, however, an interesting wrinkle in the legislation that was unanimously adopted by city government this week. According to the brief article that ran in the PI, "The law also makes it illegal to damage the belongings of a homeless person."

This would include, I assume, throwing said belongings away, which has been the City's unrepentant practice during the recent wave of homeless encampment sweeps. Maybe, despite Human Services head Patricia McInturff's opinion that storage of belongings is "impossible," the City will have to find a way, or else.