I think many people do not realise how quickly a situation like this unfortunate woman faced can turn ugly. As Hepcat said you cannot tell if someone is unstable. In this case both the victim and her friend were physically assaulted after she refused their demand for $1 after she had pulled out her cell phone to take a picture of them and their signs. The assailant jumped on top of her, knocking her to the ground and pinning her there. When she got up she realised she had been stabbed. She died very shortly afterwards.
I worked with inner-city unemployed for 17 years. Many were itinerant and queued up each night to get a bunk bed in a charity hostel. The unlucky ones slept rough. Most had drug or alcohol dependence. A significant proportion had a serious mental illness like schizophrenia - fluphenazine prescriptions were commonplace. When they forgot to take their meds, or if it was lost or stolen, they became unstable - but that was not always easy to identify. Unstable people can appear quite normal and then explode in just a second.
Each morning clients would queue at my office for help to find casual work. It was quite common for them to arrive showing evidence of having been bashed during the night. Sometimes they said the perpetrators were other homeless, sometimes young thugs, and sometimes they claimed it was the police. Most smelt of urine. Their world was very different from mine. All the staff, including me, knew almost all the clients by first name.
Despite the familiarity with clients one of my work colleagues was savagely bashed and hospitalised by a client he had interviewed earlier in the day. The person followed and ambushed him as he walked home. He had no idea at all why he was targeted. It was probably just another mentally ill person. Maybe my colleague said something during the interview that upset the client. It could have been anything at all; something entirely innocuous. You do not know what an unstable person is thinking. My friend required facial surgery and was scarred for life, both physically and emotionally. He left the job a short time later.
Hepcat's description of the world that homeless and street people live in concords with my own experience and observations. It is easy for people without experience to assume that danger signals are predictable, easily identified and avoidable. Tragically this woman in LA did not appear to see the possibility of danger when she raised her camera and refused to give in to the demand for payment. It is quite likely that there were no cues, it was a busy street and this all happened very fast.
Risk is everywhere, but if you photograph people who are obviously homeless, marginalised, or assertively panhandling, consider asking first or be prepared to run. Even if you are polite, something about you, even just speaking to them, can trigger an episode that may end as tragically as this one.
That's why I said "take care out there shooting on the streets, people" in my opening post.
