The Manchester Police Department says they are investigating a series of incidents of an unknown drone dropping objects outside the city’s Families in Transition shelter. Chief of Police Allen Aldenberg said the department has a good relationship with the victims, who are people without homes.
“That has allowed them to feel comfortable to come forward and report crimes,” he said in a written statement. He did not give more details about the investigation.
The area where the drone has been dropping water balloons, ice sticks, sodas, eggs, and bags with feces is a well-known gathering spot where unhoused people seek shade in the summer and where usually dozens of people make a line for a bed in the shelter. Around 130 people sleep inside every night.
The drone started surveilling the zone by the end of June, says Dam Wright, an advocate who does outreach to the local homeless population. He recounts one day he was helping several people retrieve belongings they lost after an unexpected power wash around the shelter, when in the midst of the confusion, a friend told him “objects were falling from the sky,” he said.
Wright went to the targeted place and saw cracked eggs on the ground. The witnesses told him something, like a drone, had been dropping things a few times.
“Cookie,” who did not want to share her name for fear of stigmatization, says she saw it happen another time.
She and her friend Harley Arkhan saw the drone dropping a soda can a couple of weeks ago. “No one was hurt,” Arkan said.
“Hopefully somebody doesn’t treat them the way they treat us,” said Cookie. “It’s going to touch them in one way or the other,” says Arkhan.
Another man outside the shelter says it almost hit him once.
“Does it hurt my day? No. But do something else with your time, something productive; we care about having a better life.” he says. “Thinking you are in a video game is low.”
Wright says harassment is something the unhoused community in Manchester has to deal with constantly: from being humiliated by individuals who shout at them to dance for money to being shot at by BB guns.
In February, people outside the shelter told NHPR they go through horrible experiences, such as individuals spitting on them or throwing rocks from cars.
“I am just happy it's not guns,” Wright said. “That’s the kind of world we live in now.”
Adrienne Beloin, Manchester director of homelessness initiatives, says harassment adds to the trauma some people carry.
“[It is] callous and damaging,” she said in a written statement.
She thinks the drone strikes should be considered a “hate incident,” which are usually motivated by prejudice.
Wright agrees; for him, the city and state efforts to provide this community a home should be accompanied by laws that protect them when they are still on the streets.
According to a report from the National Coalition for the Homeless on bias-motivated violence against unhoused people, as of 2017, there weren’t any such instances in New Hampshire. However, some unhoused people have told NHPR in previous stories they usually do not report harassment incidents.
“There is a car of girls who for months use a megaphone and call us junkies and working girls, all types of things,” says Cookie. “When we say things back to them, they get super mad.”
Neither woman has reported this to the police. Like them, many say they are just used to being harassed.
The New Hampshire Law Against Discriminationdoes not include harassment or violence to unhoused people, specifically as a hate crime or incident. Hate crimes are committed based on the victim’s perceived or actual race, color, religion, national origin, sexual orientation, gender, gender identity, or disability.
New Hampshire does not have a Homeless Bill of Rights or homeless courts, as do Maine and recently New York, that grant authority to judges to give punishment for crimes against people without homes.
In 2006, Maine became the first state in the nation to include hate crimes against this community after a person without a home was allegedly burned to death in Bangor.
About the harassment incidents outside the shelter, Beloin says, “knowing this occurs, we need to be doing all we can to lift people up."
