Politicians often link crime and homelessness. The reality is more complex

Melissa Farmer often walks her dog through Gompers Park on Chicago’s northwest side.

“This park is gorgeous. People don't know about it,” she said, walking along a lagoon on a recent morning. “I want to keep my fingers crossed that people continue not to.”

In the last year, though, a homeless encampment moved in. In that time, Farmer said she has seen people steal bikes, sell drugs and burn fires. Now, she carries pepper spray. She has complained to police, the city’s parks department and her alderman.

“They're like, ‘you're basically stuck with them,’ which is infuriating,” Farmer said. “I don't personally understand how we can't say, like, ‘hey, you can't live in the park.’”

Many people across the country share Farmer’s concerns. As more people end up living in parks and under viaducts nationwide, residents and politicians in the communities around them have increasingly seen encampments as a threat to public safety.

It has become a major talking point in the race for governor in Washington state and in San Francisco’s mayoral race. A speaker at the Republican National Convention spoke of drug deals and “filthy tents” on her block in Pittsburgh. Before the Democratic National Convention, city officials in Chicago built a fence to deter an encampment there in the name of public safety.

And in a recent Supreme Court decision allowing cities to prosecute people for sleeping outside, a lead attorney spoke of dangerous encampments causing spikes in violent crime.

But how much do homeless encampments really affect crime in communities?

‘The crime itself is due to the nature of being homeless’

Homeless people are more likely to have a criminal record, but researchers caution it’s difficult to disentangle cause and effect.

For example, people who have been incarcerated may find it harder to get a job or housing, which in turn makes them more likely to end up homeless. What’s more, laws banning panhandling or sleeping in public can make run-ins with police more likely.

“A lot of that is just that the crime itself is due to the nature of being homeless,” said Nyssa Snow-Hill, an assistant professor at DePaul University.

Being homeless is a desperate situation. Researchers – and many homeless people – acknowledge that crime happens in encampments. But it tends to be low-level property crime, like petty theft.

“They're not the scary, threatening, threat-to-larger-society crimes that are happening, right? Maybe you're breaking park rules and you're having a bonfire to stay warm or to cook your food or maybe you’re using drugs to self-medicate and cope,” said Christian Zamarriego, director of the homeless outreach program at Thresholds, an Illinois nonprofit that provides services to people with mental health and substance abuse disorders.

Research on whether crime in encampments spills out into surrounding neighborhoods is limited, partly because property crime often goes unreported. Residents around Chicago’s Gompers Park told NPR they’ve noticed an influx of bicycles at the camp, or seen propane tanks disappear from patios and end up there. According to city data, some types of reported crime have risen in the last year around the park, but overall crime is down. However, it’s difficult to isolate an encampment's exact effect on crime trends.

A 2022 study in Seattle found an increase in the size of encampments did not increase the city’s property crime rates as a whole. Still, crime statistics don't always match public perception. Snow-Hill said that has to do with the way people use context clues to understand the world.

“We assume if we see someplace that's unclean, that's in disarray, that there must be crime that's taking place there,” she said.

‘Being with others makes me feel safe’

Many researchers stress that homeless people are more likely to be the victims of crimes.

Most days, outreach workers with Thresholds ride the train and visit encampments in Chicago. They hand out snacks, hygiene products, even clothing from thrift stores to gain trust. They help people obtain needed documents to apply for services and sign them up for mental health care.

On a recent outing, two workers met Donald Hasten standing against a wall on a busy street corner. The workers were on their regular route, but hadn’t met him before. Hasten said that’s because he fled his encampment.

“I've been attacked several times. They just tore up my tent. They caught it on fire. They stole all my stuff,” Hasten said.

Four people were recently shot and killed in Chicago while sleeping on the train. Hasten, who said he knew some of them, no longer felt safe on the train or in an encampment.

“But not everybody's like that. Some people are trying to survive,” he said.

Others said encampments make them feel more secure than being alone.

In Chicago’s Humboldt Park, 36-year-old Dennise is staying in an encampment with her wife. She didn’t want to use her last name because some family and friends don’t know she’s homeless. She said not every encampment is safe. You have to find the right one.

“The majority is mostly males in each camp, so it's a little hard to be a female within that. You definitely have to be looking out,” she said. “We kind of worry a little bit, but when we stay in little communities like this, it makes us feel a little safer.”

Brian Bayawa had similar thoughts when he moved into the Gompers Park encampment.

“Being with others makes me feel safe. We got each other's back,” he said, adding that he tries to greet people walking by, so they’ll know he’s a “nice, law-abiding citizen.”

Chris Herring, assistant professor of sociology at the University of California, Los Angeles, lived in encampments for weeks as part of his research. He said homeless people often try to keep areas clean and safe.

“Even at camps with what many would consider problematic behavior, all of them stressed some ethos of being good neighbors. And this was not always in altruism, although sometimes it was. It was out of a logic of survival,” Herring said.

“If you want to remain where you are, in the place in the city where you have somehow carved out a place where you feel safe, where you can be with other people and community members who can watch after your belongings, where you have some stability, the way you protect that is by not pissing off your neighbors.”

‘The conditions shouldn’t be as they are’

Zamarriego, of Thresholds, said most people agree encampments are not a good place to live.

“The conditions shouldn't be as they are, right? No matter where you stand on the issue, we don't want encampments. How we go about addressing the issues of encampments differ,” Zamarriego said.

Many researchers say laws criminalizing homelessness worsen the problem by making the lives of people on the street even more challenging. Advocates like Zamarriego say the solution lies in providing more affordable housing.

In Gompers Park, Alderman Samantha Nugent said she wants the city to do an “accelerated moving event.”

“What that looks like is all of these folks from different social service agencies going out there for about a month and really working with the people that are experiencing homelessness and putting a date on when they might have to move out of the specific area, with lots of housing being offered, lots of wraparound services,” Nugent said.

That strategy was successful in a different park in her ward, she said, but City Hall hasn’t given a satisfying answer on what can be done at Gompers Park. City officials have said they’re forming a task force to tackle homeless encampments and are working to move people out of encampments while offering other housing options.

But without a specific plan, the Gompers Park encampment remains intact.

Bernadette Foley, a retired Chicago police officer, often walks in the park. On the job, she found it frustrating to respond to calls about homeless people, a sentiment shared by other officers.

“As a police officer, you do want to help people. And this is a problem that you keep getting calls on that you can't do anything about,” she said.

She doesn’t think cities need to provide everything for everybody, but she said the safety net should catch more people.