I’ve been an avid consumer of true crime ever since my mother handed me an Ann Rule book some time around the age of 14. I recognize that it’s a genre shot through with ample issues — it’s problematic on a good day and patently exploitative on its worst. Often aggressively adhering to strict codes of morality rooted in the virtue of police and courts, these programs frequently present an unpalatable smorgasbord of prejudice, specifically around race, class and housing.
Listen for how often the victims of crimes, onlookers or police will go straight to the suspect with the least stable housing. Frequently, fingers are pointed not at the “perfect father” or the “brother with a heart of gold.” Instead, to an almost comedic degree, the first suspect will be “a drifter” or “a homeless person.”
As though people who live outside are more likely to be the perpetrators of random murders, rather than the victims…
If you’ve never noticed this before, here’s a challenge: Watch any episode of “Dateline” or “Forensic Files” and specifically listen for instances where poverty or perceived mental illness are substituted for evidence or probable cause. Once you’re looking for it, you’ll see it.
A woman gets murdered in her home and her roommate — the actual perpetrator — mentions that there’s an encampment nearby. Maybe one of them did it?
A man is found dead in his barn. Surely it was one of the transient ranch hands, who had nothing to gain from the murder, and not his son, who stood to inherit everything?
It couldn’t be “one of us.” It couldn’t be someone who seemed so normal. It couldn’t be someone who lived inside.
There are decades of data available about violent crime among, by and against people living unstably. While crime and poverty are intricately linked — in no small part because the revolving door of incarceration is very expensive, and there are functionally no laws around releasing inmates onto the streets without any plan for housing — violent crime and homelessness simply don’t correlate the way people think that they do. The myth of the violent homeless man who breaks into the homes of innocent people and commits a grisly murder is an urban legend that many people choose to believe.
If you want to know who and what people are afraid of in the United States, look to who they initially blame for crimes, especially violent crimes, regardless of any number of statistics or anecdotes that are readily available. These are neighbors who are more afraid of the residents of tents in a park than they are afraid for them, because while they’ve never actually experienced any violent crime as a result of those residents, they feel afraid.
And that’s enough to draw a lifetime of conclusions.
Hanna Brooks Olsen is a writer living in Portland.
Read more of the Jun 1-7, 2022 issue.