Eddie Bernice Johnson Wants FBI to Include Attacks on the Homeless in Hate Crimes Stats

By Robert Wilonsky Fri., Jul. 31 2009 at 2:10 PM

Categories: News

Congresswoman Eddie Bernice Johnson

Last year, The New York Times noted a sharp increase in violent crimes committed against the homeless -- up 65 percent from '05 to '07, according to statistics kept by the National Law Center on Homelessness and Poverty. But at the moment, attacks on the homeless aren't considered hate crimes and aren't counted as such by the FBI when it compiles those particular stats. At the moment, the Hate Crimes Statistics Act only demands the Justice Department gather from local law enforcement agencies data concerning crimes that "manifest prejudice based on race, religion, sexual orientation, or ethnicity," then include those numbers in the agency's annual uniform crime statistics report.

But Congresswoman Eddie Bernice Johnson wants to change all that: Yesterday, she introduced a bill that calls for including crimes against the homeless in the FBI's uniform hate crimes statistics; not surprisingly, the bill is called the Hate Crimes Against the Homeless Statistics Act of 2009, and the entirety of the proposed legislation can be found after the jump. Says Johnson, "In the past 10 years, there have been 880 reported cases of violence against people who are homeless, including 244 that have resulted in death. Homeless advocacy organizations have tracked these statistics in the absence of uniform law enforcement reporting. It is clear that homeless people are targeted simply because they are homeless, and it is time for the federal government to start tracking the number of violent attacks more closely." Homeless Hate Crimes Stats 2009

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Johnson is Exhibit A for term limits. She's WAY past hers.
House burglars target people with houses. If the owner of the house didn't have a house, the house burglar wouldn't burglarize it. Hence: hate crime.
Oh c'mon, beating the crap out of homeless people is just good ol' fashioned fun, has nothing to with hate. And the homeless enjoy it too, go ahead and beat the hell out of one of 'em and then give 'em a bottle of Thunderbird afterwards, he'll be the happiest hobo in the gutter.
Catbird, if you're on Medicare you're already on Obamacare. Your fears are totally unfounded. You need to see a doctor right away, you're becoming delusional. You perfectly embody the wisdom in the saying, "don't let the gov't get it's hands on my Medicare."
Don't forget about all those dogs with a prediliction to attack cats. We need laws to curb that behavior too...
On August 22, a bunch of old white males will meet-up at Congress Woman Johnson� Dallas office on Maple Avenue to engage her about Obama Care healthcare rationing. I�m thinking that President Obama and the Democrat Congress are setting me up to be denied lifesaving healthcare because of my age, gender and skin color. I'm calling Obama Care a HATE CRIME. If you�re interested in the EBJ meet-up go here: Nationwide Recess Rally [rally@americanlibertyalliance.com]
Agreed, and I am about to go fix it ... Done.
Massive cut-and-pasting in a blog comment is a crime against humanity...
Aren't double-standards just so super cool??? Mob attack obviously about race http://tinyurl.com/no282q Police: Brick thrown through window not hate crime Incident is linked to an undercurrent of racism that city leaders have yet to address in East Austin, NAACP leader says. http://tinyurl.com/m2ky5j [Edited by Unfair Park to eliminate full stories that were cut and paste from other news sources.]
If someone beats up an elderly person who's waiting for a bus, do we automatically assume that the attacker hates all old people, as opposed to simply being a dangerous thug who picks easy victims, including the elderly? i.e. should there be a hate crimes category for the elderly, too? Should it be necessary to show that the attacker has a history of targeting primarily a specific group? What constitutes sufficient history to establish a pattern? The same questions apply for women, children, and the disabled and mentally ill. btw, if an attacked person falls into multiple "hate groups," e.g. a gay, black, Muslim, homeless person, do they assume that the attacker's hateful intentions were triggered by every one of those group memberships, and if not, how do they know which ones apply? But I'm sure that EBJ has thought this all through much more carefully than I have...
Aren't most violent crimes against the homeless by other homeless persons?
I'm all for this expansion of hate crime status. Pretty soon it will only be hetero white men that aren't covered by hate crime laws, until a few years down the road when we become the ethnic minority due to changing demographics, thus resulting in our own coverage by hate crime laws resulting in the whole stupid thing becoming moot.
I'm not sure that I agree with hate crimes generally, though I guess the homeless are a group which probably get attacked because of their being in that group. I guess anyone who is indiscriminately attacked deserves special protection vis a vis crimes of passion or where there is no motive. These attacks are attacks on all of us as compared to when some irate husband shoots his wife, or two gang bangers have it out over turf, or some other intrigue. I try to keep my belligerence rhetorical. I'm a huge fan of Winne the Pooh for Taosakes. I was a bouncer though I never got in a fight even with some unruly folks. I try not to screw people over and hope for the same. So, these stories of people minding their own business getting shot really scare me. That is my idea of a hate crime.
Over 5,000 people die year year while walking and we should probably consider that a hate crime, 'cuase, you know, some of those folks might have caused someone to hate them. Frankly I'd rather see Congress have to live by the rules and benefits that the rest of us have to live by. And if they don;t, then lets classify that as a hate crime against the tax payers.