Unprovoked beatings of homeless rising

As he puts it, “Our young people get prejudices from their parents in regard to homeless people. They don’t identify with the homeless, and they don’t seem to see them as important.” With Felix, Ring adds, “the juveniles targeted him because he was easy prey.”

Homeless advocates also link the trend to the popularity of “Bumfights,” a video series created in 2001 and sold on the Internet. The videos feature homeless people battering one another for money.

A Bumfights DVD was cited as inspiration by a 19-year-old who pounced on a homeless man as he slept on a Los Angeles sidewalk, then pummeled him with an aluminum baseball bat. The 2005 beating put Ernest Adams, 56, into a coma for three weeks and cost him the sight in one eye.

Last July, a jury found his attacker, Justin Brumfield, guilty of assault; he is serving an 11-year prison sentence.

Internet site Bumfights.com, which sells the videos, says the purpose is to call attention to poverty and violence. “Please do not miss the point of these videos! Educate yourself. Help those who are less fortunate. Spread love not hate,” the Web site says.

In 2002, Donald Brennan and Rufus Hannah, two homeless, army veterans, filed suit against the Las Vegas producers, alleging they were paid small amounts of money to bash their heads into walls, light their hair on fire, attack each other, and to tattoo “Bumfights” in bold letters across their hands and foreheads.

Later, the Bumfights producers agreed to pay an unspecified amount in damages and to no longer use Hannah and Brennan’s images for promotional purposes.

The shock-video producers also pleaded guilty to charges of conspiracy to stage an illegal fight for their videos in 2003, and were ordered to perform community service. (In 2005, they were sentenced to six months in prison for having failed to complete the community service.)

The Associated Press sent an e-mail to Bumfights.com seeking comment for this story, but got no response.

City crackdowns
A number of local governments have adopted ordinances that restrict where and when the homeless can sleep, stroll, beg, eat, bathe, or do laundry. And this trend may have an unintended effect — reinforcing negative stereotypes of homelessness, which contributes to the violence, some advocates say.

“When cities pass laws that target homeless people, they send a message to their communities that the homeless are not as valuable in the public eye as those with homes,” says Tulin Ozdeger, a civil rights attorney at the National Law Center on Homelessness & Poverty.

Of late, there have been signs that lawmakers may be ready to crack down harder on those who assault the homeless without provocation — one being a recent push to categorize such attacks as hate crimes.

Currently, gays, along with racial, ethnic and religious groups, are covered by various hate crime laws around the country; convictions under these statutes usually carry harsher sentences than other types of crime.

Brian Levin, a criminologist and hate crimes expert at Cal State San Bernardino, says attacks on homeless people “fit the category like a glove,” and should be punished as severely.

Hate crimes, he says, bear similar hallmarks: stereotyped victims, offenders who act on latent prejudices, offenders who seek thrills or feel superior to their victims, and a mob mentality that sweeps away caution.

“And on all these points,” says Levin, “the attacks against the homeless are really indistinguishable from other hate crimes except for one difference — there are a heck of a lot more of them.”

Between 1999 and 2005, 82 people were killed in America because of their race, ethnicity, or religious or sexual orientation, according to the FBI, which has been collecting data on hate crimes since 1990.

There were 169 homeless people murdered during that same period, the National Coalition for the Homeless says — a statistic that Levin describes as “astounding.” It has caught the attention of some lawmakers.

Twenty-six members of Congress have asked the Government Accountability Office to determine whether attacks on the homeless should be classified as hate crimes under federal law.

In the meantime, homeless hate-crime bills are moving through the legislatures of six states: Maryland, California, Massachusetts, Nevada, Texas and Florida.

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