Killed Beneath An Open Sky

A disproportionate number of Atlanta's murder victims were homeless when they died.

Atlanta has about 506,000 residents. Last year, people murdered 159 of them. That works out to a murder rate overall of about 31.4 per 100,000. Or, perhaps, you might like to think of it like this: one out of 3,182 people were murdered last year in Atlanta.

Only, that’s doesn’t quite capture the odds, because everyone isn’t at exactly the same risk. The overall number is misleading.

I’ve mentioned before how white people — as a function of relative wealth — are much, much less likely to be a victim of violence than Black Atlantans, who are far more likely to be poor. Poverty creates a risk for crime.

Consider how the murder rate changes, depending on what Atlanta policing zone you’re in. The zones do not have equal populations — hat tip to Dr. He Wang at Georgia Tech for his work on rebalancing Atlanta’s policing zones and giving me population estimates to help get these numbers right.

Atlanta Murder Rates, by Zone (homicides per 100,000 population)

Zone 1: 50.7

Zone 2: 11.1

Zone 3: 64.2

Zone 4: 40.9

Zone 5: 31.0

Zone 6: 20.4

Atlanta’s Zone 3, on the south side, has a murder rate nearly six times that of affluent Buckhead. The Westside, all questions of gentrification aside, still has a murder rate that’s about five times higher than Buckhead. Murders tend to be associated with areas of high poverty.

I’ve been looking for more data to confirm or confound that assertion, particularly this week when every shooting that makes the news seems to be coming from nowhere and nothing; acts of violence over shockingly trivial nonsense.

The Fulton County coroner’s office provided me two years of spreadsheets showing the causes of death of people classified as homeless. And it’s clear that homeless people are far and away more vulnerable than others to violence.

(The link to the spreadsheets will be paywalled; the sheets have names attached to the cause of death.)

At least ten people experiencing homelessness have been murdered in Atlanta since 2020 — seven in 2020 and three in 2021.

Consider Joshua Evans, a 36-year-old man who was hanging out in front of the Pic N Pay corner store near the City of Refuge with two other people last July when a teenager opened fire on them. It is one thing to say that Evans was not the intended target. It is another to call his death an accident. The accused killer, Antonio Deon Waller, remains in the Fulton County jail awaiting trial.

For context, the Fulton County Medical Examiner’s office will tag someone as homeless only if there’s substantial evidence of homelessness, like being in the city’s coordinated entry system. Atlanta just conducted its annual point-in-time count for homelessness for 2022; we won’t have results from that for a few months. But in previous years, the city counted 3,240 people experiencing homelessness.

By that standard, in 2020, the odds of being killed as a homeless person in Atlanta were almost seven times higher than the city’s average — 216 per 100,000. War zones have lower kill counts. The ME’s office investigated 96 deaths among the homeless in 2020 and 2021 and more than 10 percent of those deaths were murders, roughly twice the rate of other cases requiring a medical examiner’s investigation.

I remember a series of knifings in encampments began near the start of the rise in violence in 2020. In a city where 90 percent of murders are shootings, four of the seven murdered people experiencing homelessness in 2020 died at the edge of a knife.

Four killed themselves. Six froze to death.

I have watched hypothermia cases closely in Fulton County over the years, after helping shut down Peachtree and Pine in 2017. The number of deaths from the cold has remained more or less constant over the years, indicating that the closure of the shelter did not directly cost lives to the elements.

Most deaths among the homeless are accidents or “natural” deaths that are a product of physical conditions and personal maladies. Drugs and alcohol claimed 27 of their lives over the last two years. Eight died of hypertension and four of diabetes. Three more died of infections that I suspect would have been treatable had they been hospitalized. Two died of cancer. One died of AIDS.

Their average age was 53.

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