Our Media Is Fueling Vigilantism Against Homeless People

Years of dehumanization and associating the unhoused with criminality help create conditions of violence.

In recent days, we have seen a spate of recent attacks on the unhoused, including former San Francisco Fire Department Commissioner Don Carmignani spraying homeless people with bear spray, and a transit rider killing Jordan Neely, a reportedly unhoused person suffering from mental health issues, on a New York City subway. These incidents highlight an anti-social climate of vigilantes viewing it as their job to step in and use ad-hoc violence to “deal with” social ills caused by poverty, a lack of care, and the mental strain of baked-in precarity. 

The direct line between demagogic media coverage and vigilante assaults and killings is difficult to pin down—incitement is never that clean and simple. But a general environment of sensationalist media coverage of the unhoused is contributing to a broader climate of dehumanization and “othering” of the most vulnerable in our society and those in the media should take inventory of their role in this toxic dynamic. 

As I noted a year ago, there are common tropes the media employs that put a target on the backs of unhoused populations. The examples are too many to count: Fox News running anti-homeless screeds 24/7. Local news coverage promoting vigilantism. A Los Angeles Times columnist doxing a homeless encampment, egging on her readers to visit a specific homeless encampment to look for their stolen items. Sinclair Broadcasting pushing out dozens of nonstories about fake violin players. And the deluge of other Welfare Queen nonstories pushed on us all day, everyday. The amount of coverage demonizing and smearing unhoused populations is too common and banal to bother indexing.

In a society with such stark inequality, and so many scrambling to keep their heads above water, dehumanizing those at the very bottom of our social ladder—who couldn’t “make it”—isn’t just inevitable, it’s necessary. The specter of homelessness and destitution is how the bottom rung of wage labor is disciplined and kept in line. A moral ecosystem emerges to support this necessity, one based on the manifestly goofy idea that we currently live in a plentiful welfare state and everyone who is currently unhoused is so because of a moral failing, or a lack of sufficient arresting and caging, rather than a deficit of social welfare and care. Obviously, they must all want to be poor, or are not well enough to get better and are better left dying on the streets, or being thrown into a cage and given up on. Cruelty is baked into our puritan culture, reinforced daily by our media’s love of everything from Perseverance Porn to the aforementioned Welfare Queen tropes. 

This all creates a media environment where people increasingly see unhoused people having a mental health episode as deserving of a summary death sentence. Verbal threats from someone having an emotional breakdown is not sufficient reason to extinguish a human from Earth. Even supposedly liberal tabloids like The Daily News encourage the extrajudicial violence with propaganda headlines like, “NYC man threatening strangers on Manhattan subway dies after Marine Corps vet puts him in chokehold: NYPD,” obscuring that this was, by all objective metrics, a murder. The New York Times headline also obscured what happened, going with the mealy mouth, “Man Dies on Subway After Another Rider Places Him in Chokehold”. To say nothing of the obvious racial implications of white guys snuffing out black men simply because they viewed them as threatening. 

After the fact, there’s a popular talking point on the Right that when someone takes matters “into their own hands,” this is an inevitable response to failed liberal or far-left governance. Setting aside the myth that the status quo is any type of social welfare hegemony, this line is the go-to because it’s a wink and a nod endorsement without the mess of having to explicitly condone extrajudicial violence. It was a common talking point from Tucker Carlson in his coverage of the Kyle Rittenhouse killings—failures by big city liberals to contain lawlessness makes these types of killings predictable. The fact that there exist countless vigilantes eager to harm or kill people they view as criminals is an obvious statement, and not one that, in any way, rationalizes random guys deputizing themselves as judge, jury, and executioner. 

But there’s something deeper at work, something more ominous, something more corrosive to our national soul. Social media and nonstop tabloid coverage equating the unhoused with criminality and violence has helped contribute to a normalization of dehumanization. When the average person is accosted by someone displaying erratic behavior outside of their home or kid’s school or on public transit, their response is, “Why isn’t this man in jail?” Not, “Why did society fail to care for this person?” Because this is what they are conditioned to think—by the media, politicians, pop culture, and decades of carceral ideological framing. 

The frustration underlying this instinct is understandable. Here in Chicago I’ve been approached by random aggressive people on the streets yelling or coming into my personal space a few times. This isn’t new, but some view this as happening with more frequency. Whether it be due to more potent drugs or a spike in Visible Poverty, is all up for debate. And it’s reasonable to find these interactions troubling, especially those with small children. But these episodes are, at their core, a failure of social systems, a failure of care, a failure of our dog-eat-dog capitalist system where an inability to produce enough income means hunger and destitution, not a series of discrete moral failings on the part of the unwell, or—most absurdly—a social welfare state that’s simply too “enabling”. And they’re absolutely, it should go without saying, not an opportunity to choke someone to death with impunity.

Generally, we could all afford to be a little nicer, a little more patient, a little more systemic in our thinking. When we’ve gotten to a place where media outlets are casually and implicitly encouraging summary killings because someone with apparent mental health issues is making verbal threats, something is deeply rotten in our society. The widespread contempt for the poor, namely the black poor, is so pervasive in our media culture, an extrajudicial murder is turned into a harrowing tale of a vigilant “marine” saving the day without a second thought. Our anger should be directed not at those we see struggling on the streets, or some phantom social welfare state that’s just Too Nice. It should be directed to a system that clearly isn’t providing housing, healthcare, and social systems for our most vulnerable. Let these systems of austerity and precarity be the subject of our outrage, not those suffering from its inevitable outcomes.