A commenter contested my statement that gang murders are a much greater menace to public safety than homelessness – at least, here in Albuquerque. So let’s unpack.

Preliminaries

We’ll first acknowledge that we feel compassion for the unhoused who suffer from various kinds of PTSD (and may have turned to illegal drugs for relief), who are too paranoid or claustrophobic to stay in a shelter, or who have been so beaten by our economic system that they cannot afford housing. Homelessness is not a crime.

Sometimes the unhoused can annoy you: By panhandling, by their uncertain hygiene, by their unsightly campsites, by their occasionally unhinged behavior. Again, not crimes, unless it’s where panhandling or camping is banned. These things are only annoyances. I am not bothered by your annoyance; That’s your problem to deal with.

Sure, some homeless people commit crimes.

We don’t even need to investigate whether they commit crimes at a greater rate, per capita, than the general population. Here’s why: The unhoused are such a tiny fraction of the city’s population that the total number of crimes committed by sheltered people is way higher than the number committed by the unhoused. So let’s not focus disproportionately on the latter just because the unhoused are in our faces and easier to hassle.

(If you think I’m being too woke by using this ‘unhoused’ term, I’m not. They’re not homeless, because their home is Albuquerque. They just don’t have a house, an apartment, a trailer, or whatever. If I use ‘homelessness,’ it’s because it’s less clunky to write than ‘unhousedness.’)

What kinds of crimes do the homeless commit, other than illegal camping or begging? There’s commerce in and use of illegal drugs. The occasional car smash-and-grab. The answer, of course, is to prosecute the crime, not the homelessness. And the bigger point is, nobody dies. Except for overdose deaths, horrible, and not excusable.

More serious crimes, with victims

There’s prostitution and forced begging. Both are types of human trafficking. The answer is to prosecute the pimps and the mafia-types, not the homeless victims.

More dangerous, as the fall weather gets colder, are impromptu fires. When set on a sidewalk in front of a store, a fire causes temporary loss of business, and nobody dies.

When set in a brushy area, large-scale and devastating fire damage can result, and perhaps deaths. Careless middle-class weekend campers cause forest fires, too, but homeless encampments add to the risk.

To my mind the worst and most vicious crime committed by some homeless – and here too, a sheltered teen from a “good” family, looking for a private place to shoot up, can commit the same crime – is to leave a used needle on the grass in one of our parks where children play. The needles are hard to find, and the act is hard to trace to an individual perp. We need to place sharps receptacles next to every Narcan dispenser. It won’t totally eliminate the problem.

Where that leaves us

We must continue to drive toward humane ‘solutions’ to homelessness. Yet I have to say that when I encounter unhoused people on Central, they’re usually happy to exchange a polite ‘good morning,’ or else they’re so completely inner-directed that they don’t notice me. In other words, they are not threatening.

They’re no more likely to commit a serious crime than anyone else, and, I believe, much less likely to carry a gun. Meanwhile, other kinds of citizens, throughout the city and often with roofs over their heads, continue to murder each other.

Let’s direct our indignation to those who deserve it more. Those include developers who refuse to build low-cost housing, and their NIMBY enablers; city homelessness task forces who can’t agree what the goal is; the VA that puts distressed veterans on the streets, untreated; and the politicians who sent them off to senseless wars in the first place.

I look forward to your views, in the comments.