This story from the Bee last Sunday is a tragic reminder of the vulnerability of the homeless and the cruelty of the people responsible for attacking them.
As a community we have a special responsibility to the most vulnerable of our citizens.
In our report on the Lower Reach of the Parkway (see our website at arpps.org/news) one of the solutions we called for in addressing the illegal camping on the Parkway by the homeless is a nationally successful program called Housing First.
This is a program, subsequently approved by the city and county, which involves providing housing for the chronic homeless, those most vulnerable to attacks, before asking them to begin using the social services needed to rebuild their lives.
Though counter-intuitive on many levels, this is a program that has been very successful and is also one that provides the safety and security of a home; and for those who remember the Maslow hierarchy of needs, it is the basic human need for safety and security that must be satisfied before any of the higher human needs or aspirations can be addressed.
This is something we owe the vulnerable of our community, safety and security.
Here is an excerpt.
Faces of fear
Attacks on the homeless are common across the nation, and Sacramento's street people also tell of beatings
By Jocelyn Wiener -- Bee Staff Writer Published 2:15 am PST Sunday, January 22, 2006
They attacked him in the dark hours of last Sunday morning, while much of the city slept.
John Jewett, 53 years old and homeless, had hidden himself in a shed on a loading dock near the fancy new midtown Safeway. The young men, three by Jewett's count, arrived around 3 a.m.
While one held him down, he said, another hit him repeatedly in the face with a metal pipe.
Across the country that same day, two teenagers in Fort Lauderdale turned themselves in in connection with the beatings of several homeless men, one of whom died from his injuries.
Their images had been caught on a surveillance camera. The images of Jewett's attackers are seared only in his mind.
The incidents weren't connected, except in relation to a disturbing pathology. Some young men find sport in assaulting the homeless.
From 1999 to 2004, the National Coalition for the Homeless documented 386 attacks on homeless people in 140 cities.
At least 156 homeless people have died from beatings, stabbings or burnings often meted out by strangers. Countless others have been injured. Experts say the assailants tend to be young men. In Sacramento, 48-year-old Vinia Thomas said she was left bloodied after being shot with BB guns and kicked in the head last summer. Fred Finley, 50, said he awoke a few years back to see a grapefruit whizzing toward his face as he slept on church steps.
Jewett emerged from this latest attack with 14 stitches, facial cuts and a bruised jaw. A long thin scar creases his nose from an attack he says the same men carried out a month earlier.
On that occasion, he said, the men beat him with a pipe and a tree branch, splitting his nostril, scratching his cornea, then fleeing as he stumbled, bleeding, down the street. He finally collapsed near a register inside the Safeway, he said.
Jewett and other homeless victims who survive such attacks are left nursing their injuries and puzzling over one hard-to-answer question:
Why?
What spurs a group of young men - in Fort Lauderdale or Denver or Seattle or Sacramento - to attack those without the protection of a roof and four walls, many of them suffering from some form of disability or mental illness?
