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The tide is turning against public tolerance of homelessness, and for good reason. Homelessness is not a lifestyle choice that should be considered acceptable, and policymakers need to prioritize eliminating homelessness and the property destruction, health hazards, and safety risks it creates.
In December, a mother in New York City was attacked while changing her baby in a Macy’s bathroom. The woman was stabbed in the shoulder, back, and arm. Thankfully, the story avoided a number of tragedies: the alleged attacker was also a woman, meaning the mother was able to fight her off and the 10-month-old baby was unharmed.
The alleged attacker was Kerri Aheme, a homeless woman who had been released from a psychiatric facility the very morning of the attack. The attack was entirely random and unprovoked; a woman went to the bathroom to change her daughter’s diaper, and was brutally stabbed multiple times, allegedly, by a deranged homeless person.
Stories like these occur far too often across the country. From 2018-2021, Los Angeles Police Department data show that homeless people were suspects in 11%-15% of violent crimes while making up just 1% of the city’s population. Meanwhile, the San Diego County District Attorney’s office in 2022 stated that homeless people were 514 times more likely to be arrested and face felony charges.
You can see the effects in high-profile cases, where the very tragedies avoided by the family mentioned above come to fruition. In Charlotte, a young woman, a refugee from the war in Ukraine, was brutally stabbed to death on a light rail by a homeless man with a history of violent crime who is supposedly suffering from mental distress. Passengers on the New York City subway system avoided a similar fate when former Marine Daniel Penny fatally restrained homeless Jordan Neely as Neely became aggressive toward people and was threatening to kill them. This led to a farcical trial of Penny, the hero, who very likely protected those passengers from being harmed or even killed by Neely. Other subway passengers haven’t been so lucky.
In major American cities, the decision by politicians to tolerate homelessness has led to an ever-increasing possibility of random stabbings or other violent attacks perpetrated by people with histories of mental illness and violent crimes. Stepping onto public transit or walking into a Macy’s bathroom should not carry with it the possibility of being violently attacked by a homeless person. This is not something societies need to permit.
What’s more, Los Angeles has seen homeless fires double from 2020 to 2023, with one-third of the fires the Los Angeles Fire Department has responded to in the past six years being homeless fires. In 2021, it was reported that San Diego spent nearly $1 million every single year to sanitize sidewalks covered in drug needles and human feces from its homeless population. In Tulare, California, a little boy was poked by a dirty needle while warming up for his Little League game, resulting in him being rushed to the hospital as a precaution. Tulare’s baseball fields are right next to railroad tracks and a public park, which attracts several homeless people in the city.
REPUBLICANS RALLY AROUND TRUMP AFTER MADURO CAPTURE AS DEMOCRATS CRY FOUL OVER ITS LEGALITY
Homeless people are also victims of tolerating homelessness. That includes being the victims of crime, typically committed by the aforementioned class of mentally disturbed, violent homeless people. More often, it includes dying from hypothermia due to prolonged exposure to the cold or dying from drug overdoses or the health effects brought on by long-term drug addiction.
One such high-profile example is playing out on the streets of Riverside, California, at this very moment. The homeless man in question is Tylor Chase, a former actor who served in a supporting role on the Nickelodeon show Ned’s Declassified School Survival Guide. Riverside police claim that their hands are tied by state law, as they cannot arrest Chase and force him into a drug treatment program. As a result, Chase is out on the streets, declining any sort of help while he slowly kills himself with a meth addiction. This is the case for many homeless people, who have had their freedom to kill themselves secured by “homeless advocates” who oppose using the weight of the law to force them into homeless shelters and drug treatment programs.
It does not need to be this way for anyone, and people across the country are starting to recognize that. A poll from the Cicero Institute found that 82% of people think murderers should be permanently removed from society “even if they have a mental illness,” and that 64% of people want the homeless to be mandated drug treatment, mental health treatment, and job programs as a condition of receiving taxpayer-funded housing.
OPINION: A WELCOME END TO THE MADURO REGIME
These are not unreasonable requests. There is no justification for violent repeat criminals to be out on the streets committing random stabbings, even if they are homeless people with mental issues. You can choose whether you want the time to be spent in a jail cell or in a psychiatric facility, but those homeless people who are so mentally disturbed that they can turn homicidal at a moment’s notice should spend all of their time locked up somewhere.
Iryna Zarutska, the Ukrainian refugee murdered on the Charlotte light rail, would still be alive today if her attacker, with his history of violent crime, had been locked up for life. So, too, would Jordan Neely be alive, if New York had a homeless policy regime that prioritized keeping people like him in a psychiatric facility where he could get the treatment he needed, instead of letting him roam free to threaten New York City subway riders.
So-called “homeless advocates” will wail and gnash their teeth, but the fact is that turning down such help should not be an option. San Jose Mayor Matt Mahan (a Democrat) recognizes this, advocating for it to be a crime for a homeless person to refuse a vacant shelter spot three times in an 18-month span. Unless a city has reached its maximum occupancy in all of its homeless shelters, there is no reason for city leaders or residents to tolerate homeless people turning sidewalks, street corners, train crossings, and public parks into their literal dumping grounds.
REINSTITUTIONALIZING THE HOMELESS
Ask yourself this question with regard to Tylor Chase: Would he be better off if he were arrested for refusing shelter and drug treatment programs in Riverside and then presented with the option of going to a homeless shelter and receiving mandatory drug treatment or spending time in jail? Or is he better off now, falling further into a meth addiction and slowly dying on a public sidewalk, assuming he isn’t killed by hypothermia or by another, more violent homeless man?
We can have a society where people are protected from violent homeless people on the Charlotte light rail or in Macy’s bathrooms, and where homeless people like Chase or Neely are protected from themselves and the consequences of their actions resulting from their mental conditions. All it takes is a recognition that there is nothing noble about homelessness, and that it isn’t an option that cities should humor through continued decriminalization and a tolerance of violent crime and health risks that come with homelessness.
