Director’s Desk | The LA Times covered the stabbing death of Xavier Cerf earlier this month with vague assertions that had nothing to do with Cerf

If a housed person commits a crime, media reports do not mention their housing status. If a person is experiencing homelessness, the media often presents it as their core identity.

It’s worth pausing to notice this and how reverting to stereotypes about homeless people affects readers.

The Los Angeles Times reported June 18 that a man stabbed another man to death behind a row of fraternity houses on the University of Southern California campus.

The article began by describing how Ivan Gallegos, 19, was held on bail for allegedly fatally stabbing a man described as homeless. What happens next in the article is a loose web of accusations against other anonymous unhoused people.

Unnamed “members of the fraternity Zeta Beta Tau” asserted that their house manager was “stabbed by a homeless person last year in the same alley,” and then a staff member added another assertion about a past incident that “they said a homeless guy stole stuff from the car.”

This is a lot of hearsay journalism with details stacked into a makeshift rationale for a killing. The media coverage read as though the deceased man was on trial, with guilt constructed across a class of homelessness.

I tried to imagine those same sentences written substituting “housed” for “homeless.” If a housed person was stabbed to death when they were suspected of breaking into a car, the story would not have been about various crimes other housed people might have committed. That story wouldn’t be written.

I am not arguing a journalist shouldn’t write a rich portrayal of someone’s life that might include housing status. Maybe those details are part of a larger description, but simply using “homeless” as an adjective is both superficial and laden with assumptions.

Later, when the victim was named as Xavier Cerf, the Los Angeles Times and, to a greater extent, the local NBC affiliate gave a richer description of him.

Cerf’s mother, Yema Jones, described how he was released from mental health treatment only days earlier, an indication of a broken safety net in which people are sent from institutional settings directly to the street. He was her baby, she said through tears on TV, a 27-year-old man who loved to dance.

The richer a description of a human life, the further it diverges from easy stereotyping. But even if less is known about a person, details should not be filled by parading out accusations against a number of people living without housing.

As readers, we need to be critically attuned to what amounts to cementing inequality into our perception. The uneven distribution of housing in this country has become such an intractable reality that homelessness is too easily used as an indictment of an individual when it should be an indictment of a systemic injustice.

The Los Angeles Times fired more than 20% of its newsroom to cut costs this spring, so I’m particularly watchful about how that impacts the reporting in the city with the highest reported count of homelessness in the nation. A weakened media is dangerous for democracy. It’s important to challenge kneejerk shortcuts.

If homelessness is elevated into a causal identity when a crime is committed, but housing is not, something larger is happening. Readers are taught to not only fear people but also subtly blame them for what are societal problems. It’s a freeze frame on a problem, one more reason to divide a society into worthy haves and despicable have-nots.

It becomes a justification for the way things are rather than a reason to build a more just future.

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