In England the advice is that the best thing you can do for homeless people is refer them to the correct social services, which has the resources and skills to deal with people who are often mentally damaged or unwell in some way.

The case of Aaron Barley triggered this after a lovely and caring family took in a homeless boy into their own home leading to a terrible situation in which he murdered two of the family.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4elLA4FpnHQ

There's no way I'd let random people into my home - you absolutely do not know what might happen, what their history is, their mental state, their criminal background. Be kind in other ways.

From the article

> Rob studied the man's face and vaguely remembered him as Ronnie Lockwood, someone he would occasionally see at Sunday School as a boy and who he was told to be kind to as he was a "bit different".

> Ronnie was then almost 30 and had been without a home from the age of 15, living in and around Cardiff and moving from job to job - Rob would sometimes see him at a youth club he ran.

> The pair planned to let him stay until the day after Christmas, but when the day came, they couldn't bring themselves to cast Ronnie out and sought advice from the authorities.

You aren't entirely wrong, but this wasn't a random person and they did contact a homeless centre for advice.

Given that Ronnie had apparently already gone through some sort of system to end up at a "school for subnormal boys", it seems pretty clear that Ronnie lived a much better life through this family's actions and generosity.

The institutional advice would struggle to directly recommend any other action as it can only be seen to create an unconstrained liability - if not legal, then social. That does not mean they wouldn't be amenable to a system of placing people who were vetted and managed if they were sufficiently convinced it would resolve the issue (at institutional scale).

Its worth noting that the homeless person in this situation was in fact known to those who provided the home - and not as casually as the first para suggests.

I think the more earnest approach would be to understand the risk first. Blanket avoiding something because the chance for a bad outcome is not 0 is fairly lame.

And Michele and Rob Reiner were murdered by their own son and my uncle while going shopping. You don't have to do anything, but this kind of comment puts a huge stigma on homeless people and others.

the best thing that you can do for yourself maybe, but not for them...

Who says that's the advice "in England"? I'm in England and it isn't my advice.