LA woman stabbed, killed taking pictures of homeless

[Rodchenko]

A little bit of research shows that the USA has a larger percentage of homeless people vs. total population than the UK, so I concede. My point though is that not everyone in the US treats homeless people horribly. The US is not full of brainless and heartless people. We are just the wipping boy for other countries.

I don't doubt that the vast majority of Americans are warm and compassionate people. Just that the system lets people down.

 

[raid]

Shame on you Raid!

😉

I was very careful never to annoy people, and I often asked for permission first. I feel for them. Street musicians were of course very different from homeless people, and I focused on them.

 

[swoop]

Someone should read the article. I saw it in the LA Times yesterday morning. So this woman was a tourist in a touristy part of town. The homeless man was one of several in the area who hold up shocking/funny signs for tourists like "need money for weed" or something along those lines. Apparently this woman photographed this person with her cell phone and the man demanded a dollar, which she refused to give. Him and two off his friends then assaulted and stabbed her. Over a picture and a dollar.

http://www.latimes.com/news/local/la-me-0620-hollywood-killing-20130620,0,2642112.story

 

[Paul Jenkin]

This is a catastrophe from whichever angle you view it - whether it's "tourist attacked and killed for taking a photo" or "homeless beggar murders tourist".

It's always best to aslk if it's okay to take someone's photo - especially if they are in a vulnerable state or potentially unstable / volatile. Also, giving a few pennies / dollars for taking someone's photos isn't going to break the bank and might mean thedifference between eating or not eating that day.

Have we forgotten how to be resopectful members of society? I'm laying none of the blame at the hand of the poor woman who was attacked and died, nor am I condoning anyone attacking anyone else for no good reason. It just seems that we are prone to acting frst and thinking about the consequences of our actions second.

 

[hepcat]

Probably because it was largely beside the point and the insinuation that homeless should be in prison rather than on the street... well. 🙄 It's an opinion I guess.

This was not a case of somebody going into the "bad part of town" out on the "wrong side of the tracks". It was a case of somebody getting stabbed to death on a busy street by some people apparently looking for negative attention. Most people commenting here seem to be missing the point entirely, the story is really not about photography at all, that is likely simply incidental to what may turn out to be "just" an act of random violence.

I think you totally missed the point of my post, Tunalegs, and your post illustrates nicely exactly the point which you missed.

There is a subculture in EVERY large U.S. city of homeless. Although it's typically centered around missions in areas of downtowns, it exists everywhere that there is somewhere to shelter that is out of sight. Every time you walk a downtown street and see a homeless person, you're walking into their world, like the poster here who had a homeless (and apparently mentally ill) man calmly walk up to him, trash his bike, and calmly walk away. There was no interaction, no provocation, no pre-attack incident. The poster's only link to that person was proximity, and he didn't even see him until the attack occurred.

There are, of course, as many reasons to be homeless as there are homeless people, but in my experience working among those folks, many of them have mental health issues. Some of them are violent. In the homeless "culture" of any given area, the homeless all know one another, and generally support one another as best they can. They know who the violent people are and try to stay away from them, and the non-violent folks try to stay together for safety in numbers where and when they can... hence homeless "camps." There is frequently a loose "command structure" among those folks as well. There are usually one or two folks who assume a collective leadership role among the long-term homeless and who generally know what's going on with who at any given time. That culture leads to loners who are even ostracized from the homeless camps because of their bizarre behaviors, mental health issues, and/or tendencies toward violence. Sometimes those folks will even band together for mutual support. Those small groups of ostracized loners are exceptionally dangerous to the public and other homeless folks because they're so unpredictable.

If you spend time with the homeless sub-culture; get to know those people who live in it, you begin to see a very different view of their world emerge than what we, as middle class citizens, have. In the context of that sub-culture, that world view makes sense. In the middle-class view of the world, it's incomprehensible. Incidents like this victim being stabbed and the extraordinarily startling case of the English soldier being killed in London occur hundreds of times daily all over the world. Most, however, like our earlier poster whose bicycle wheels were attacked, don't result in injury or death. It's only the really violent cases like these that make the news. The everyday hustling and harassing "marks" for cash usually don't even get reported to anyone.

My point was NOT that those people belong in jail... my point was that there are little or no public mental health services available for those people with mental health issues to go in the U.S. for help managing their problems, so criminal detention facilities are where they end up after having mental heath issues that bring them to the attention of law enforcement. That's a sad state of affairs.

The other point that you missed was that, whenever you engage a homeless person on the street, or they choose to engage you, you have left your regular "safe" world, and have entered the world THEY live in. Because of mental health issues, substance abuse, criminal intent, or all three that person with whom you now share his world may be in a state of altered reality where you're either a threat or a potential mark or victim as an outlet for some violent hallucination they may be suffering. And there's no way to know that just by looking at them. Obviously, while most of the homeless you encounter on the street are the sharks who are just bumping into you to explore you and find out more about you, the one who is violent is the shark who will try to eat you, but he doesn't necessarily look any different from all the others at first glance.

The lady who is the subject of this thread ran into that shark (or school of sharks) and was unprepared to be in that world. As are most people, I fear.

 

[Roger Hicks]

I dunno. as I get older, I tend to grow more empathetic. You know: "There, but for fortune, go you, go I." When I was in my 'teens and 20s, I tended to think that my good fortune (born in a rich country at a rich time with generous parents) was nothing unusual. That's why I take far fewer pictures of homeless people; why I geerally try to engage with them first if I do; why I smile a lot; and why I'll give 'em a dollar.

How did she respond? With a smile, and "Ah, c'mon"? Or with a frozen face and trying to walk on? Sure, no-one deserves to die for mistaking social signals. But not everyone is as lucky as we are.

(And yes, I have read the article).

Cheers,

R.

 

[tunalegs]

I think you totally missed the point of my post, Tunalegs, and your post illustrates nicely exactly the point which you missed.

Frankly I have no idea what exactly you are trying to get at. But you seem to be assuming that I must not have had any experience with homeless people or homelessness or even assault.

And while it is sad that the U.S. does not provide access to help for those who are disadvantaged, as of yet we have no idea if the people in this particular case are afflicted with any mental illness. So it is still sort of beside the point.

 

[pdh]

gosh I don't think hepcat could have been any clearer about his points.

 

[hepcat]

Frankly I have no idea what exactly you are trying to get at. But you seem to be assuming that I must not have had any experience with homeless people or homelessness or even assault.

Do you?

And I'm "getting at" that it's not reasonable to expect anyone on the street to play by the same societal rules as those who post here, and to do so is at your own peril.

And while it is sad that the U.S. does not provide access to help for those who are disadvantaged, as of yet we have no idea if the people in this particular case are afflicted with any mental illness. So it is still sort of beside the point.

Really? A middle-class tourist's world view colliding on the street with an unknown-to-her homeless man's world view that results in her death is beside the point?

 

[pdh]

and what's more they are entirely apposite and rather beautifully expressed

 

[noisycheese]

I dunno. as I get older, I tend to grow more empathetic. You know: "There, but for fortune, go you, go I." When I was in my 'teens and 20s, I tended to think that my good fortune (born in a rich country at a rich time with generous parents) was nothing unusual. That's why I take far fewer pictures of homeless people; why I geerally try to engage with them first if I do; why I smile a lot; and why I'll give 'em a dollar.

How did she respond? With a smile, and "Ah, c'mon"? Or with a frozen face and trying to walk on? Sure, no-one deserves to die for mistaking social signals. But not everyone is as lucky as we are.

(And yes, I have read the article).

Cheers,

R.

Roger, I agree with you 100%.

When I see people on the street with signs, asking for money - it sends a cold chill to my bones. I know that in today's unstable and volatile job/economic environment, that could easily be me one day - or any one of us here.

I have seen documentaries on TV showing people who live in dilapidated, rattle-trap cars - people who are wearing clothes that look like they were rummaged out of the Salvation Army's dumpster - only to find out that these people used to live in homes costing four times what my home is worth and drove high dollar Mercedes or BMWs to their six figure income occupations, wearing a fine Cartier watch on their wrist.

Of course, some of these people overextended themselves, spent too much money, used credit cards like a drug, lived foolishly luxurious lives and were not financially responsible. The fact remains though that many people in the same dire straits did none of those things and still ended up living in a run down beater of a car, having lost everything. There are no guarantees in this life. It could happen to any one of us.

I photograph people on the street - everyone. Families, men in business suits, finely dressed people, women, students, police, construction workers, road repair crew men - and yes, even the down and out who live on the ragged margins of our society. At times, I have given my last dollar to homeless people on the street. I have gone to the grocery, bought bags of food and given them food. I try to help them, not (supposedly) exploit them by photographing them.

Photographing a poverty ridden person is not inherently abusive, dishonorable, exploitative or unscrupulous as so many of the uninformed and misinformed try to claim. It's just photography. What the photographer does with the images after the shutter is clicked is what determines whether his/her intent is for good or for ill.

The story of the woman in L.A. who was murdered over a photograph and a dollar should make us all photograph carefully. No photograph (and no dollar) is worth dying over.

There are no guarantees that a dollar would placate an obviously violent and unstable street person, though. The woman could have pulled out her wallet to hand him a dollar and he could have said, "On second thought, I'll have that stack of twenties in your wallet, bitch!!" Or the original demand could have been for $20, $50 or $100 rather than for a dollar. Then what?

At some point, panhandling becomes extortion or even bald-faced robbery. How are we photographers to address those situations? Are we to never photograph on the street because someone - anyone - might extort or rob us?

I guess in the end, there are so many things and people in this world to photograph that it makes no sense to risk life and limb for photographs of potentially violent people (although I too have done just that at times).

The phrase "photograph carefully" comes to mind yet again.

 

[tunalegs]

Really? A middle-class tourist's world view colliding on the street with an unknown-to-her homeless man's world view that results in her death is beside the point?

I honestly cannot understand your line of logic here, unless of course these people who attacked her are indeed afflicted with some mental illness.

Not everybody out on the street is psychotic.

To clarify, I'm not suggesting you're wrong, I just don't see what connection you're aiming for here.

 

[hepcat]

Roger, I agree with you 100%.

When I see people on the street with signs, asking for money - it sends a cold chill to my bones. I know that in today's unstable and volatile job/economic environment, that could easily be me one day - or any one of us here.

There is a truism that says that at any given moment, most of us in the U.S. are only two paychecks from being homeless. A sobering thought indeed.

Photographing a poverty ridden person is not inherently abusive, dishonorable, exploitative or unscrupulous as so many of the uninformed and misinformed try to claim. It's just photography. What the photographer does with the images after the shutter is clicked is what determines whether his/her intent is for good or for ill.

And there are very good reasons for photographing the homeless/disenfranchised/mentally ill. Raising awareness of their plight in the political arena to try to gain resources to help them, or photojournalism as part of an expose' with a message come immediately to mind.

There are no guarantees that a dollar would placate an obviously violent and unstable street person, though. The woman could have pulled out her wallet to hand him a dollar and he could have said, "On second thought, I'll have that stack of twenties in your wallet, bitch!!" Or the original demand could have been for $20, $50 or $100 rather than for a dollar. Then what?

And my guess is that this incident specifically turned into a robbery that went bad.

At some point, panhandling becomes extortion or even bald-faced robbery. How are we photographers to address those situations? Are we to never photograph on the street because someone - anyone - might extort or rob us?

That, my friend, depends on your pluck, and to what use you are putting your photographs. Combat photographers and journalists get injured and killed and they know exactly what they're getting into. Photographing on the streets and turn into exactly the same situations very quickly because incidents on the streets turn violent very quickly, yet I'd venture to say that few folks with cameras are prepared to be involved in violent confrontations either directly or indirectly.

Thousands of photographers take thousands of photos on the streets every day without incident, of course. That doesn't mean that there isn't a threat just around the next corner, and that threat may target you if you engage them, even pleasantly and innocently.

If you are a photographer who can keep your head while all those around you are losing theirs, and continue to be able to document the incident while recognizing the danger, accepting that the danger may hurt or kill you, and still continue shooting while remaining as safe as possible, then by all means continue to shoot.

If you're a person who doesn't know what to do when confronted with a violent situation and you don't recognize potential threats, and are kind of clueless about when things are about to turning nasty without a TV commentator to tell you about it, then perhaps street/combat photography/photojournalism may not be where you should focus your time and energy.

 

[Brian Legge]

I photograph people in the streets but generally avoid photographing homeless people for a few reasons:

- Everyone should have a private space. For most people, that is their home. If someone is living on the streets then anything that seems to be their private place is off limits to for me in the same way that I wouldn't walk in to someones house and randomly take pictures.
- I try not to photograph anyone in situations that they'd feel embarrassed about or that they wouldn't want photographed. If I think a shot is particularly good and I'm unsure, I approach the person and ask. The homeless are much less likely to want that moment recorded or shared with others.
- The homeless populations I've been around (Seattle, San Francisco) do have a higher percentage of drug users and mentally ill than the general population. Obviously not everyone is dangerous but there is a much higher risk of dealing with instability and having less to loose than with a randomly selected individual. The risk of confrontation is simply higher. While this is my personal experience, most statics I've seen align with this view. Obviously their is risk photographing anyone - or just being out with a camera.

I do worry at times that I'm whitewashing some of the locations i photograph by generally ignoring this element. At times, I'll try to include it in ways that don't identify the person, to acknowledge its presence as part of our society.

 

[hepcat]

I honestly cannot understand your line of logic here, unless of course these people who attacked her are indeed afflicted with some mental illness.

Not everybody out on the street is psychotic.

To clarify, I'm not suggesting you're wrong, I just don't see what connection you're aiming for here.

And re-reading my post, I think it may have sounded unnessarily challenging which is not where I'm at either.

Not everybody out on the street is psychotic.

Nor, can you necessarily differentiate those who are with a casual glance.

I'm not suggesting that anyone abandon street photography, nor am I suggesting that this woman's assailant was anything more than a petty street crook turned murderer.

But... approaching an unknown "street person" is much like approaching an unknown large dog. They may be friendly, but they may be just as likely to attack you and each case is different. Just because you've approached and talked to a thousand street folks successfully means nothing in your next encounter. That person's assessment of the circumstances may be very different from yours, and there's absolutely no way to know that by looking at them. They may, in fact, be paranoid, psychotic, and delusional and percieve you as a threat. Or they may see you and your wallet as their next meal ticket. Or they may just be the most pleasant person you've met all day, but in any case, assuming that they'll play by your societal rules, regardless of their appearance (or yours) is naive. If you choose to engage them, you have to be prepared for whatever response you may get.

 

[jcrutcher]

A lot if different points of view in this thread. I simply feel for the young lady and her family and may they be at peace with their God.

 

[tunalegs]

And re-reading my post, I think it may have sounded unnessarily challenging which is not where I'm at either.



Nor, can you necessarily differentiate those who are with a casual glance.

I'm not suggesting that anyone abandon street photography, nor am I suggesting that this woman's assailant was anything more than a petty street crook turned murderer.

But... approaching an unknown "street person" is much like approaching an unknown large dog. They may be friendly, but they may be just as likely to attack you and each case is different. Just because you've approached and talked to a thousand street folks successfully means nothing in your next encounter. That person's assessment of the circumstances may be very different from yours, and there's absolutely no way to know that by looking at them. They may, in fact, be paranoid, psychotic, and delusional and percieve you as a threat. Or they may see you and your wallet as their next meal ticket. Or they may just be the most pleasant person you've met all day, but in any case, assuming that they'll play by your societal rules, regardless of their appearance (or yours) is naive. If you choose to engage them, you have to be prepared for whatever response you may get.

Ok. I can understand that.

My personal experiences have shown me that a good deal of homeless, perhaps even the majority - are perfectly reasonable people. They're not on the street because they're crazy, or they're lazy, or anti-social. They're there because they got shafted, or made some bad choices. We don't like to face up to it, but our society is basically set up to keep people down once they've fallen down - and when you realize this and you're in their position, you might act unreasonably despite being a reasonable person.

I've also witnessed people who've pretended to be crazy or acted pathetic to guilt money out of people, and I've known people who panhandled but also had a steady job. I've met poor people who came to my town to get a job which turned out to be a bust, and were left without enough money to get on the bus back home. I've also met plenty of people who took me for a sucker they could cash off on, but decided they didn't actually want food when I offered to buy them lunch, or need gas when I offered to get my gas can and help them.

The real truth is, you don't know anybody you don't know. The guy in the suit and tie might be on edge or drunk because he had a bad day. Some other clean, well dressed person might be a paranoid anticipating the moment he'll get to put his self defense weapon to use. That woman might have been assaulted last week and wary of anybody who might appear to be following her. Or maybe her car was towed and she just needs an excuse to lash out at whatever next might upset her. You never know. And unfortunately a lot of aggressive, "crazy" people can make a lot of money and keep up appearances, my alcoholic step father for instance was a great example of this.

You're right, you may never know just by looking at somebody what their state of mind is, what they may be going through, how they may react. But that's not just "street people" it could be anybody on the street.

 

[zauhar]

I think you totally missed the point of my post, Tunalegs, and your post illustrates nicely exactly the point which you missed.

There is a subculture in EVERY large U.S. city of homeless. Although it's typically centered around missions in areas of downtowns, it exists everywhere that there is somewhere to shelter that is out of sight. Every time you walk a downtown street and see a homeless person, you're walking into their world, like the poster here who had a homeless (and apparently mentally ill) man calmly walk up to him, trash his bike, and calmly walk away. There was no interaction, no provocation, no pre-attack incident. The poster's only link to that person was proximity, and he didn't even see him until the attack occurred.

There are, of course, as many reasons to be homeless as there are homeless people, but in my experience working among those folks, many of them have mental health issues. Some of them are violent. In the homeless "culture" of any given area, the homeless all know one another, and generally support one another as best they can. They know who the violent people are and try to stay away from them, and the non-violent folks try to stay together for safety in numbers where and when they can... hence homeless "camps." There is frequently a loose "command structure" among those folks as well. There are usually one or two folks who assume a collective leadership role among the long-term homeless and who generally know what's going on with who at any given time. That culture leads to loners who are even ostracized from the homeless camps because of their bizarre behaviors, mental health issues, and/or tendencies toward violence. Sometimes those folks will even band together for mutual support. Those small groups of ostracized loners are exceptionally dangerous to the public and other homeless folks because they're so unpredictable.

If you spend time with the homeless sub-culture; get to know those people who live in it, you begin to see a very different view of their world emerge than what we, as middle class citizens, have. In the context of that sub-culture, that world view makes sense. In the middle-class view of the world, it's incomprehensible. Incidents like this victim being stabbed and the extraordinarily startling case of the English soldier being killed in London occur hundreds of times daily all over the world. Most, however, like our earlier poster whose bicycle wheels were attacked, don't result in injury or death. It's only the really violent cases like these that make the news. The everyday hustling and harassing "marks" for cash usually don't even get reported to anyone.

My point was NOT that those people belong in jail... my point was that there are little or no public mental health services available for those people with mental health issues to go in the U.S. for help managing their problems, so criminal detention facilities are where they end up after having mental heath issues that bring them to the attention of law enforcement. That's a sad state of affairs.

The other point that you missed was that, whenever you engage a homeless person on the street, or they choose to engage you, you have left your regular "safe" world, and have entered the world THEY live in. Because of mental health issues, substance abuse, criminal intent, or all three that person with whom you now share his world may be in a state of altered reality where you're either a threat or a potential mark or victim as an outlet for some violent hallucination they may be suffering. And there's no way to know that just by looking at them. Obviously, while most of the homeless you encounter on the street are the sharks who are just bumping into you to explore you and find out more about you, the one who is violent is the shark who will try to eat you, but he doesn't necessarily look any different from all the others at first glance.

The lady who is the subject of this thread ran into that shark (or school of sharks) and was unprepared to be in that world. As are most people, I fear.

Very well said. This is a little broader than your first post, and paints a picture that I agree with. Philadelphia has homeless people everywhere, but their dead bodies don't litter the street - they are not all out-of-control zombies, just a few of them are. The unfortunate lady in the story ran into one of the zombies.

From that angle I would see this more as an act of random violence. There are psychos at all levels of society, even people in quiet upscale suburbs get hacked to death (two local cases come to mind as I type this)

Randy

 

[cosmonaut]

Many homeless people have deep mental issues. Though I know some of the homeless in my area I avoid taking pictures unless they ask to be photographed.

 

[Bill Clark]

Sad what happened in L.A.

I recently retired from volunteer teaching an eight week class here:

http://twincitiesrise.org/

Eight weeks on, two off, then eight weeks on and so on.

Here is what I worked on, using "Speechcraft" as developed by Toastmasters:

http://twincitiesrise.org/the-program/personal-empowerment.html

There are folks who want to improve their lives. That's what Twin Cities Rise is all about.

A sidebar, I didn't realize how fortunate I Am to live in the United States of America until I served in our military, traveled to parts of the world where most would cringe at the living conditions of some folks.