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A fatal stabbing beneath the Jacksonville Beach Pier this week placed two homeless men on opposite sides of the same violent crime.

According to the Jacksonville Beach Police Department, both the man charged with murder and the man killed were homeless. Police said the stabbing followed a drunken dispute between the men. The case illustrates two realities often discussed separately: homeless people can perpetrate serious crimes, and they also face an elevated risk of becoming crime victims.

Jacksonville has seen examples of both.

In May 2025, police identified a homeless man as the suspect in an apparently unprovoked attack on two women along the Southbank Riverwalk. In October, three teenagers allegedly attacked 64-year-old Roger Borkum, a homeless man, three times within an hour in downtown Jacksonville. Borkum died from his injuries. Police also accused the teenagers of attacking another homeless man.

These cases receive extensive coverage individually. What Jacksonville cannot readily determine is how frequently homeless people appear collectively as suspects, defendants or victims.

The missing measurement

The Jacksonville Sheriff’s Office publishes extensive crime and homicide information. The FBI and Florida Department of Law Enforcement collect standardized crime data. Those systems track offenses and characteristics such as age, sex and race—but they do not provide a readily accessible measurement separating housed and unhoused suspects or victims.

An arrest report might describe someone as homeless, transient or having no fixed address. Another might list a shelter, an outdated residence or no address at all. News organizations generally report housing status only when police disclose it and editors consider it relevant.

Jacksonville Beach, Atlantic Beach and Neptune Beach also operate their own police departments. Producing a countywide calculation would require collecting and reviewing records from multiple agencies, potentially at considerable expense.

Consequently, Jacksonville can tell residents how many murders or aggravated assaults occurred, but not what percentage involved homeless suspects or victims.

One night is not one year

The population side presents another complication.

Jacksonville’s 2026 Point-in-Time Count identified 1,071 homeless people in Duval County on one January night, including 379 living outdoors, in vehicles or in other unsheltered locations.

That count does not represent every person who experiences homelessness here during the year.

People enter and leave homelessness. Others arrive in Jacksonville from elsewhere, including homeless people drawn to Florida or simply traveling through it. Some remain here; others move again. A person passing through in March will not appear in a January count. Someone avoiding shelters and outreach workers may never enter the Homeless Management Information System.

If Jacksonville maintained an average nightly homeless population of approximately 1,071, the annual number of different people would depend heavily on turnover. An average local homeless period of 180 days would produce roughly 2,200 people during a year. Ninety days would produce approximately 4,300. An average stay of about 39 days could push the annual population to approximately 10,000.

Those are scenarios, not documented Jacksonville totals. They demonstrate why the one-night count cannot function as the annual denominator in a crime-rate calculation.

What other communities have found

Available studies show that homeless people have disproportionately frequent contact with police and jails.

A national jail-roster analysis found unhoused people accounted for approximately 4% of unique bookings but 8% of people booked repeatedly. More than 40% of the unhoused people booked into jail returned within a year.

A Justice Department-sponsored study covering 23 metropolitan areas found homeless adults constituted roughly 5% to 6% of arrestees—well above their estimated population share. However, homeless arrestees were less likely than housed arrestees to face violent-crime charges. Public-order, drug, trespassing, property and survival-related offenses accounted for much of their disproportionate arrest exposure.

Los Angeles data offer a more direct warning about violent crime. From 2018 through 2021, homeless-related incidents constituted approximately 11% to 15% of violent crime while homeless people represented roughly 1% of the city’s population. But “homeless-related” included incidents involving a homeless suspect, victim or both. It did not measure perpetration alone.

That qualification brings the issue back to the Jacksonville Beach Pier. One killing involved both a homeless defendant and a homeless victim.

The evidence supports concern, but Jacksonville lacks the information needed to measure it responsibly. Without consistent housing-status data, the public cannot determine how much serious crime homeless people allegedly commit, how frequently they become victims or whether a relatively small, repeatedly arrested subgroup drives much of the problem.

That is not an argument for assigning collective guilt. It is an argument for collecting facts communities currently cannot see.