News from
For Asian community, official bias attack
tally shows fraction of the problem
BY ESE OLUMHENSE, RACHEL HOLLIDAY
SMITH, ANN CHOI AND CHRISTINE CHUNG
THE CITY
Reports popping up all over the internet — lengthy
Facebook threads, frustrated tweets, and heartbreaking
Instagram stories — point to a wave
of anti-Asian sentiment, unleashed by the coronavirus
pandemic, in the city and beyond.
Meanwhile, local Asian-American community advocates
say offi cial tallies aren’t capturing the magnitude of what’s
happening, prompting groups and individuals to begin
collecting complaints themselves.
“We’ve been suffering from business slowdowns, from
bias crimes and hate crimes and yet City Hall is still
working on a plan,” said Jo-Ann Yoo, executive director
of the Asian-American Federation. “All of this was happening
in January. Here we are in mid-April and they’re
still working on a plan.”
The City Commission on Human Rights (CCHR),
which enforces human rights law in the city, on Sunday
announced it was just launching a special task force to deal
with the rise of anti-Asian incidents.
“While this task force is welcome news, we still believe
the city needs to do more to meaningfully address the uptick
in and prevention of these incidents,” said Joo Han,
deputy executive director of the federation, in a statement.
The city Commission on Human Rights, which also
investigates employment and housing discrimination, says
it has teamed with other agencies, Asian community organizations
and politicians to coordinate a dozen COVID-19
public education events since February.
Five of them took place before the state’s PAUSE began,
and fi ve were in Mandarin or included interpretation services,
offi cials added.
Unreliable Statistics
Recently released NYPD statistics only included one
recorded report of a hate crime directed toward Asians
this year through April 12 — down from three during the
same period in 2019.
Police created a new hate crime category called “Other
Corona,” which has logged 11 incidents. All of those
attacks targeted Asian people, the Wall Street Journal
reported. Put another way, reported attacks against Asians
were actually up 300%, not down 67%.
Hate crimes only include criminal acts spurred by bias
— not all racist incidents, like hurling slurs. According to
the police department’s guidelines, a hate crime is motivated
because of the identifi cation of the victim, which
could include their race, ethnicity or religion.
And even 11 seems extremely low to advocates and
politicians like Assemblymember Yuh-Line Niou (D-Manhattan),
who reports a huge increase in people contacting
her offi ce about racist verbal and physical assaults.
The incidents began in January, just as news of the
coronavirus spreading in Asia ramped up, she said. Now,
it’s an everyday thing.
After Niou, the only Asian woman in the state legislature,
Police patrol Chinatown during the coronavirus outbreak on April 20, 2020.
appeared on a segment of PBS’ MetroFocus discussing the
issue in late March, victims fl ooded her inbox and phone.
“Every time that they air it, I get at least — I’m not
even kidding — at least 20 to 40 emails, 10 or 12 texts, if
they know me. People who follow my Twitter account DM
direct message me … reaching out to me telling me what
happened to them,” she said.
“There’s two viruses going around, two epidemics. One
is the virus itself, COVID-19. The other one is xenophobia
and racism,” she added.
‘Pretty Horrifi c’
Questions over accounting of hate incidents has led
some groups to take the task into their own hands.
“We’re on edge,” said Jan Lee, Chinatown resident and
co-founder of Neighbors United Below Canal. “I tell my
family members to not go outside alone. Even my partner
and I only go out in the daytime.”
He monitors incidents reported through a Facebook
group called Crimes Against Asians, created by the
English-language Asian media site NextShark.
“It is just a constant scroll every day of new stories. And
a lot of it is backed up by video evidence, so you can’t say
that people are making it up,” he said. “It’s actually pretty
horrifi c.”
Not all of these incidents are reported to police, community
members said. And even when a report is made with
police, some who spoke with THE CITY said, sometimes
there’s little or no action taken.
In one case noted by the group, a young Asian-American
family reported being harassed in late March by a white
homeless woman on a Midtown street covered by the 17th
Precinct.
PHOTO: BEN FRACTENBERG/THE CITY
The woman allegedly approached their toddler shouting
racial slurs, including the n-word. The child’s mother,
who spoke to THE CITY on the condition of anonymity,
said she called police right after the incident. She said she
took a picture of the woman and preserved her building’s
recording of the altercation.
But she said when two police offi cers heard the description
of the woman, they told the family they were familiar
with her — and that she could not be committed to a
hospital for mental health reasons because she knew her
name and birthday.
“They asked me whether she had lunged at us with a
closed or open fi st,” the woman said, “and asked if my
husband was black.”
The mother asked for a report number but the offi cers
declined, saying an investigator would follow up with the
family, she recalled. She missed a call from the NYPD
investigator on the day of the incident and called back
for the next fi ve days, but could not reach anyone with
information about her case, she said.
A friend of the woman connected her to the CCHR, but
she was unsure whether a civil complaint was the right
step.
“I’m not trying to sue her for money,” she said. “I just
want her to not kill my child.”
The city’s Human Rights Commission confi rmed the
woman did not fi le a case with the agency.
The NYPD did not respond to a request for comment.
This story was originally published on April 22, 2020 by
THE CITY, an independent, nonprofi t news organization
dedicated to hard-hitting reporting that serves the people
of New York. Read more at THECITY.nyc.
Schneps Media April 23, 2020 13