Civil Rights

Visit the links on this page to learn more about NCH’s Civil Rights public policy recommendations, action alerts, and research.

Action Alerts:

ACT NOW to protect homeless Americans from hate-motivated violence.
Click here to read the Action Alert [PDF]
View the sign-on letter to Senator Benjamin L. Cardin here [PDF]
View the sign-on letter to Representative Eddie Bernice Johnson here [PDF]

Issues:

Hate Crimes Against the Homeless
Over the past eleven years, advocates and homeless shelter workers from around the country have received news reports of men, women and even children being harassed, kicked, set on fire, beaten to death, and even decapitated. From 1999 through 2009, in 47 states, Puerto Rico and Washington, DC, there have been 1,074 acts of violence committed by housed individuals, resulting in 291 deaths of homeless people and 783 victims of non-lethal violence. Those incidents have included setting a man on fire, pushing a sleeping woman into a river, and beating a woman’s face with a tire-iron. In many cases, the attackers have never met the victims, and they don’t benefit materially from the attacks; they are motivated only by a dehumanizing bias against homeless persons. Such attacks deserve to be called what they are: hate crimes.

The National Coalition for the Homeless (NCH) has spearheaded the introduction and passage of legislation to add homeless people to existing hate crimes laws at the local, state and federal levels.The Hate Crimes Against the Homeless Statistics Act and its sister bill, the Hate Crimes Against the Homeless Enforcement Act, would direct the FBI to gather data on potential hate crimes against people experiencing homelessness, and to prosecute accordingly. Those bills were introduced in the 110th Congress by Rep. Eddie Bernice Johnson (D-TX). NCH is preparing for reintroduction of those bills this year. NCH is also doing community education on homelessness through its Faces of Homelessness Speakers’ Bureau based in Washington, DC, with local Speakers’ Bureaus now operating in three states: Florida, Georgia and South Carolina.

Reports:

Hate Crimes Against the Homeless: America's Growing Tide of Violence (2009), published August 2010

“Hate, Violence, and Death on Main Street USA: A Report on Hate Crimes and Violence Against People Experiencing Homelessness, 2008”, August 2009