The man who beat an Asian woman to the ground then kicked her in the head in a brutal, caught-on-camera hate attack in Midtown earlier this week was arrested by police early Wednesday morning, cops said.
Brandon Elliot, 38, was arrested at about 2 a.m. Wednesday and hit with a number of charges, including assault as a hate crime and attempted assault as a hate crime, police said.
Elliot lives in a nearby hotel that serves as a homeless shelter, according to cops.
A racist attacker beat an Asian woman in Midtown on Monday morning in a suspected hate-driven attack.DCPI
He allegedly beat a 65-year-old woman after hurling anti-Asian statements at her on West 43 Street near Ninth Avenue on Monday morning, cops said.
Several witnesses from a nearby residential building — including workers employed there — did nothing to stop the beating, video of the assault shows.
Staff members were suspended by the building management after the attack — and the lack of response — drew national outrage.
“The staff who witnessed the attack have been suspended pending an investigation in conjunction with their union,” a statement by building management said. “The Brodsky Organization is also working to identify a third-party delivery vendor present during the incident so that appropriate action can be taken.”
On Tuesday, the victim’s daughter’s boyfriend told The Post that her attacker “locked eyes” with her — then beat her so mercilessly that “she wasn’t there” after the first blow.
“She said he was walking towards her and he locked eyes with her,” said the woman’s daughter’s boyfriend, who gave his first name, Luca. “She tried to avoid him, like how people do when you walk in New York City, but he came right for her. After the first hit, she wasn’t even there. I can’t see how she got up from that.”
The victim was rushed to NYU Langone Hospital, where she was listed in stable condition, authorities said.
Elliot was being held at a Midtown police precinct pending his arraignment.
A man kicked a 65-year-old woman to the ground in broad daylight on a Midtown Manhattan sidewalk on Monday, stomped on her several times and made anti-Asian remarks in what the police called another targeted hate crime.
The police said the attack happened around 11:40 a.m. outside an apartment building at 360 W. 43rd St., where a surveillance video showed an unidentified man kick the woman in the torso after the two approached each one another on the sidewalk.
The attacker, who the police department’s hate crimes task force asked for the public’s help in identifying, stomped on the woman’s upper body and head at least three times after she fell to the ground.
The victim was hospitalized at NYU Langone Medical Center in Manhattan with what the police described as serious injuries. Further information about her condition was not immediately available.
The video, which was released by the police and drew widespread attention online, showed a man who appeared to be a building worker standing in the lobby, unwilling to intervene. He then closed the building’s front door while the woman was lying on the ground after the attacker walked off.
The management company for the luxury apartment building did not immediately respond to a request for comment early Tuesday morning.
The attack represented another jarring reminder of the rise in violent crimes targeting people of Asian descent across the United States, which advocates say has been exacerbated by pandemic-related racism. On March 16, a gunman killed six women of Asian descent in attacks on massage businesses in the Atlanta area that left eight people dead.
The assault on the woman in Midtown Manhattan also came as hate crimes investigators said they were investigating the subway beating of an Asian man on a busy J train in Brooklyn, an attack that was recorded by another passenger in a TikTok video that has been viewed more than 2 million times. The unidentified attacker, who was still at large, punched the man repeatedly and put him in a chokehold until the man became unconscious. The timing of the attack and the nature of the victim’s injuries were not immediately clear.
According to the New York Police Department, there have been 33 hate crimes with an Asian victim so far this year, two of which were motivated by the coronavirus pandemic. The police did not say if Monday’s attack was connected to Covid-19.
SAN FRANCISCO (AP) — Prosecutors in Seattle and San Francisco have charged men with hate crimes in separate incidents that authorities say targeted people of Asian descent amid a wave of high-profile and sometimes deadly violence against Asian Americans since the pandemic began.
Hundreds of protesters took to the streets of Los Angeles and throughout the San Francisco Bay Area on Saturday, the latest in a series of rallies in response what many said has become a troubling surge of anti-Asian sentiments.
“We can no longer accept the normalization of being treated as perpetual foreigners in this country,” speaker Tammy Kim told a rally in LA’s Koreatown.
At rally attended by more than 1,000 people in San Francisco’s Civic Center, the city’s police chief, Bill Scott, drew loud applause when he said, “Hate is the virus, and love is the vaccination.”
On Friday, prosecutors in King County, Washington, charged Christopher Hamner, 51, with three counts of malicious harassment after police say he screamed profanities and threw things at cars in two incidents last week targeting women and children of Asian heritage, The Seattle Times reported Saturday.
In San Francisco, Victor Humberto Brown, 53, made a first court appearance after authorities say he repeatedly punched an Asian American man at a bus stop while shouting an anti-Asian slur.
Brown was initially booked on misdemeanor counts, but prosecutors recently elevated the case to a felony, the San Francisco Chronicle reported. He said in court that he has a post-traumatic stress disorder.
In Seattle, according to court documents, Hamner yelled profanities and threw things at a woman stopped at a red light with her two children, ages 5 and 10, on March 16. Three days later, authorities say Hamner cut off another car driven by an Asian woman, yelled a profanity and the word “Asian” at her and then threw a water bottle at her car after charging at her when she pulled into a parking spot.
Hamner was being held on $75,000 bail on Saturday. It wasn’t immediately clear if Hamner, who has not yet made a court appearance, had retained an attorney or would be assigned a public defender.
In the first instance, the woman told her 10-year-old daughter to try to take a cellphone photo of the man. The woman, identified by KIRO-TV as Pamela Cole, posted about the incident on social media and a friend’s husband identified Hamner as a possible suspect.
The second woman who was accosted had a dashboard camera in her vehicle that captured the license plate of the other car, which is registered to Hamner, according to court documents. The police detective investigating the case reviewed the video and determined the women’s assailant “was clearly Hamner,” according to the charges.
Cole, who said she identifies as part Chinese and part Malaysian, told KIRO-TV she felt like “a sitting duck” when Hamner approached her car, hitting his fists together and screaming at her to “Get out! Get out!” while spewing profanities about her Asian heritage.
“I was in complete shock. Are you talking to me?” Cole told the station.
“He jumps out the car, and he’s charging at us,” she said. “That was the scariest part for me.”
In San Francisco, Ron Tuason, an Army veteran of Filipino, Chinese and Spanish descent, told the Chronicle he was at a bus stop in the city’s Ingleside neighborhood on March 13 when Brown approached him, yelling “Get out of my country” before using a racial slur meant to denigrate Asian people. Tuason said Brown also said, “It’s because of you there’s a problem here.”
Tuason, 56, said he believes Brown was referring to the coronavirus. Brown punched him multiple times, he said, knocking him to the ground. He suffered a black eye and a swollen cheek as a result of the attack and said he’s also experiencing memory loss.
Police found Brown shortly after Tuason called 911.
It’s not because of the virus as Covid-19 continues to rage in my home state of California. It’s because she is absolutely certain that as an older Asian woman with a limp she will be targeted by violence.
Since the horrific news of the Atlanta shootings broke, I’ve been stuck in this simmering rage while following events from afar here in Hong Kong. I can’t hug my American family and friends. I can only communicate through screens and doomscroll online.
I’m told it’s too early to call Tuesday’s shootings a hate crime even though six of the eight victims who were shot at three separate locations were Asian women.
I’m told the alleged shooter was “having a bad day” and suffering from “sex addiction” after innocent Asian women were murdered while working to support themselves or their families.
This is the kind of thinking that feeds into the sickening stereotype that Asian Americans are “TOTALLY FINE” and not being targeted by racist violence.
How many more members of the community have to be assaulted, attacked or slaughtered before this is widely recognized?
Let’s look at the stats. Anti-Asian hate crimes in the US are up 150% during the pandemic, according to the Center for the Study of Hate and Extremism at California State University, San Bernardino.
Around 3,800 anti-Asian racist incidents took place in the past year with 68% of cases targeting women, according to new research out this week from Stop AAPI Hate.
There have been increasing attacks on Asian Americans, especially elder members of the community who are now too scared to leave their homes.
Back in February last year, my mom started to self-isolate during the outbreak just to avoid the comments and stares she received while wearing a mask outside.
She told me on FaceTime with a self-deprecating chuckle, “It’s allergy season too. I’m too afraid of sneezing or ‘coughing while Asian.'”
But the micro-aggressions continued: people coughing in her general direction, someone saying “you must be from Wuhan,” another asking, “Why are Asians so paranoid?”
As the pandemic dragged on, such casual slurs have morphed into next-level bigotry. Asian senior citizens have been robbed, slashed and killed as the number of hate crimes against Asian-Americans spiked.
And I find myself dreaming of being able to teleport my mom here to Asia.
She could wear a mask without being judged.
She could venture out to her favorite beef noodle restaurant without fear of being knocked down.
She could be left alone and perhaps, even respected.
This morning, to lift her spirits, I sent her a viral video of a local news report out of San Francisco. An elderly Asian woman who defended herself against a man who had attacked her. Images showed him leaving him on a stretcher with injuries.
But what I lapped up to be an “Equalizer” moment of street justice, my mom saw as another tragic example of hate and discrimination.
She points out the telling details in the video showing how the attacker is on a stretcher and receiving medical care while the woman, screaming and crying, is left alone nursing her wounds and her trauma.
“This poor old woman could have been me,” my mom tells me.
Susan Williams, a Conservative in the House of Lords and a junior minister in the Home Office, said in Parliament Wednesday that on an experimental basis, the government “will ask police forces to identify and record any crimes of violence against the person, including stalking and harassment, as well as sexual offenses where the victim perceives it to have been motivated by a hostility based on their sex.”
The move will not require a change in the law as it is already possible to categorize these offenses as hate crimes. Williams said the reason the move is experimental is because the UK’s Law Commission had said the designation wouldn’t guarantee greater effectiveness in bringing justice to offenders.
Numerous prominent campaign groups in the UK had been pushing for misogyny to be designated a hate crime for some time. However, the murder of Sarah Everard has forced a national conversation about the violence, harassment and intimidation that women face.
Everard, 33, went missing on March 3 after leaving a friend’s house in south London in the early evening. Her remains were found nearly two weeks later in Kent, southern England.
The man charged with her kidnap and murder was a serving police officer at the time of Everard’s disappearance, and police officers were pictured physically forcing women to the ground at a peaceful vigil for her at the weekend.
The move to record misogyny as a hate crime was welcomed by campaigners. Citizens UK, an organization that brings communities in the UK together to campaign for social change across society, tweeted: “Amazing news! … Recording is such a vital step – goes beyond policing. With the data, society & the state can now build on this and take on endemic #misogyny in our culture.” But others worried that the move wouldn’t necessarily lead to more crimes against women being reported.
“We urgently need better data on the prevalence and scale of the sexual harassment women face on a daily basis. A new way of recording crimes on its own will not achieve that unless it is accompanied by funding for training of police and transport workers,” says Caroline Criado Perez, author of Invisible Women: Exposing Data Bias in a World Designed for Men.
“One of the drivers behind the data gap on sexual harassment is that women do not report — and they do not report because they do not know who to report to or what they can report.”
UN Women UK last week published a report which said that over 95% of all women did not report their experiences of sexual harassment, with 98% of women aged 18-34 not reporting incidences of sexual harassment.
There is no fixed date for the new measures to come into effect, but Williams told parliament that the government “will shortly begin the consultation with the National Police Chiefs’ Council and forces on this with a view to commencing the experimental collection of data from this autumn.”
“I’m hiding right now,” the woman said. “Please come.”
What would unfold was not a robbery, but one of three deadly shootings at Atlanta-area spas — one in Cherokee County and two across the street from one another within the city. Eight people were killed and another was wounded in the attacks that police believe were perpetrated by the same suspect.
Six of those killed were Asian women, and South Korea’s foreign ministry has said four were of Korean ethnicity.
Robert Long, 21, was arrested in connection with the attacks 150 miles south of the city, and Atlanta Mayor Keisha Lance Bottoms said he was on his way to Florida to potentially take the lives of more victims.
The suspect told police he believed he had a sex addiction and that he saw the spas as “a temptation … that he wanted to eliminate,” Cherokee County sheriff’s Capt. Jay Baker said at Wednesday’s news conference.
However, Atlanta Police Chief Rodney Bryant said it is still too early to know a motive behind the devastating violence.
And for Asians and Asian Americans facing increased incidents of hate in the wake of the Covid-19 pandemic, the attacks and questions around their motivations only exacerbate existing fears.
“When we learned about this last night, we were horrified and the sinking feeling that I had was this had to be a crime related to AAPI hate. As we have learned details of the event unfold, I still believe that this is a racially-motivated crime,” Georgia State House Representative Be Nguyen told CNN on Wednesday. “In this particular case, where the victims were Asian women, we see the intersections of racism, xenophobia, and gender-based violence.”
The way their race intersects with their gender makes Asian and Asian American women uniquely vulnerable to violence, said Sung Yeon Choimorrow, executive director of the non-profit advocacy group National Asian Pacific American Women’s Forum.
In addition to being fetishized and sexualized, Asian women — often working in the service sector — are subject to the same racism that affects Asian Americans more broadly, experts said.
“While we’re relieved the suspect was quickly apprehended, we’re certainly not at peace as this attack still points to an escalating threat many in the Asian American community feel today,” Margaret Huang, President & CEO of Southern Poverty Law Center, said in a statement Wednesday.
Eight people killed across 30 miles
Shortly before 5 p.m. Tuesday, deputies were called to Young’s Asian Massage between the Georgia cities of Woodstock and Acworth after reports of a shooting, Cherokee County sheriff’s officials said.
That shooting left four people dead — two Asian and two White — and one person injured, Baker said. Two of the victims were pronounced dead at the scene, while the other two died at a hospital.
Killed were Delaina Ashley Yaun, 33, of Acworth; Paul Andre Michels, 54, of Atlanta; Xiaojie Yan, 49, of Kennesaw; and Daoyou Feng, 44.
The injured survivor was Elcias R. Hernandez-Ortiz, 30, of Acworth, authorities said.
About an hour later and 30 miles away, Atlanta police responded to what was described as a robbery at the Gold Massage Spa on Piedmont Road in Atlanta. Police said they found three people dead.
While there, police received another call of shots fired across the street at the Aroma Therapy Spa, where they found one person dead, Bryant said.
The names of the four victims have not yet been released by authorities.
Investigators found surveillance video of a suspect near the Cherokee County scene and published images on social media.
Long’s family saw the images, contacted authorities and helped identify him, Cherokee County Sheriff Frank Reynolds said Wednesday.
“(The family members) are very distraught, and they were very helpful in this apprehension,” Reynolds said.
‘It would be appropriate’ if the suspect was charged with a hate crime, mayor says
Long has claimed responsibility for the shootings in Cherokee County and in Atlanta, the Cherokee County sheriff’s office said.
He is facing four counts of murder and a charge of aggravated assault, according to the county sheriff’s office. More charges are possible.
Bottoms added that she thought “it would be appropriate” if Long was charged with a hate crime.
“Sex” is a hate crime category under Georgia’s new law. If Long was targeting women out of hatred for them or scapegoating them for his own problems, it could potentially be a hate crime. The shootings don’t have to be racially motivated to constitute a hate crime in Georgia.
A law enforcement source told CNN on Wednesday that Long was recently kicked out of the house by his family due to his sexual addiction, which, the source said, included frequently spending hours watching pornography online.
CNN’s Jason Hanna, Amanda Watts, Audrey Ash, Casey Tolan, Nicole Chavez, Artemis Moshtaghian, Raja Razek, Jamiel Lynch, Steve Almasy and Kevin Liptak contributed to this report.
Rachel Lindsay has disabled her Instagram account because of what’s described as a torrent of hate by members of Bachelor Nation.
As you know by now, Rachel’s interview with Chris Harrison led to him stepping away from the show after he defended current contestant Rachael Kirkconnell over a photo taken 2 years ago where she attended an antebellum party.
Waiting for your permission to load the Instagram Media.
Van Lathan, who co-hosts the ‘Higher Learning’ podcast with Lindsay, tore into her critics, saying “Y’all have got to get a f***ing life.” As he puts it, “Rachel is not responsible for Chris Harrison, a 49-year-old man who can’t read the room in these 2021 times.”
For her part, Lindsay is done with “The Bachelor” franchise and has moved on, which may be an underlying reason why Bachelor Nation is so pissed off.
An Indianapolis-area man who burned a cross and set up a swastika to intimidate his Black neighbor in June pleaded guilty to a hate crime and weapons charge Friday, prosecutors said.
Shepherd Hoehn, 51, who is white, was angry because a neighbor was removing a tree on June 18, the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the Southern District of Indiana said. The tree was on the neighbor’s property.
Hoehn then set up and burned a cross facing the neighbor’s house; used silver duct tape to create a swastika on his fence; blasted the song “Dixie” on repeat; and displayed a sign with racial slurs, according to a plea agreement.
“Hoehn’s hateful and threatening conduct, motivated by racial intolerance, is an egregious crime that will not be tolerated by the Justice Department,” Pam Karlan, principal deputy assistant attorney general of the department’s civil rights division, said in a statement.
A request for comment from Hoehn’s public defender was not immediately returned Friday evening.
Hoehn has not yet been sentenced, but he was taken into custody Friday by federal marshals and will be detained, according to court records.
He pleaded guilty to criminal interference with housing rights and a weapons charge because he had guns while a habitual user of marijuana, which is illegal in Indiana and federally.
“I wanted to make him miserable,” Hoehn told the FBI about his neighbor, according to an affidavit.
Hoehn repeatedly denied being racist, but told investigators: “He’s a Black man. Perfect opportunity, alright. So yes. I wrote a bunch of racial slurs on a piece of board an put ‘em out there,” according to the document.
The FBI affidavit also says that Hoehn told the agency that he was upset about Black Lives Matter protests around the country and efforts to remove statues — an apparent reference to the push to take down Confederate statues.
Hoehn walked around with a gun on his hip on June 18, and some construction workers said they were scared — one avoided turning his back on him, prosecutors said in a detention motion. The neighbor was so afraid he told family members to stay away and slept with a firearm.
A plea deal does not lay out a specific sentence that prosecutors will recommend. Each count that Hoehn pleaded guilty to carry a maximum sentence of 10 years in prison, the U.S. attorney’s office said.
Asian Americans have been victims of increased violence and harassment since the coronavirus pandemic began, but recent attacks have prompted some to “hunker down” again.
USA TODAY
A series of violent crimes against Asians and Asian Americans has prompted activists and experts to warn that racist rhetoric about the coronavirus pandemic may be fueling a rise in hate incidents.
Police in Oakland, California, announced this week that they arrested a suspect in connection with a brutal attack of a 91-year-old man in Chinatown that was caught on camera. In less than a week, a Thai man was attacked and killed in San Francisco, a Vietnamese woman was assaulted and robbed of $1,000 in San Jose, and a Filipino man was attacked with a box cutter on the subway in New York City.
It’s unclear whether the crimes were racially motivated, but advocates calling for more to be done to address violence against Asian Americans say racist crimes against the community are historically underreported for a variety of reasons.
Meanwhile, police departments across the country are warning residents of increased crime around Lunar New Year, in part because of the threat of robberies during the multi-day celebrations that begin Friday. Cash is a customary gift.
Lunar New Year 2021: What does the ox symbolize, and how will it be celebrated during COVID-19 pandemic?
Violence against Asian Americans sharply increased in March as COVID-19 began spreading across the country, and some politicians, including former President Donald Trump, blamed China for the pandemic, said Russell Jeung, who created a tool that tracks hate incidents against Asian American Pacific Islander communitiescalled the Stop AAPI Hate tracker.
“When President Trump began and insisted on using the term ‘China virus,’ we saw that hate speech really led to hate violence,” said Jeung, chair of the Asian American studies department at San Francisco State University. “That sort of political rhetoric and that sort of anti-Asian climate has continued to this day.”
Acts of racist violence lead to increased anxiety and fear in a population that already has higher rates of anxiety and depression related to COVID-19 than other racial groups, Jeung said.
Stop AAPI Hate, Jeung’s website, which includes a self-reporting tool for harassment, discrimination and violent attacks, recorded 2,808 incidents of anti-Asian discrimination across the U.S. from its inception on March 19 to Dec. 31, 2020. Another organization, Asian Americans Advancing Justice, recorded more than 3,000 hate incidents in their self-reporting system since late April 2020 – by far the highest number in the tool’s four-year history.
The FBI collects national hate crime data, but data for 2020 and 2021 has not yet been released. Two hundred sixteen anti-Asian hate crimes were reported in 2019, according to the latest data available.
That number may be just a fraction of the true total given that fewer than half of the victims of a hate crime ever report it to the police, according to data from the Bureau of Justice Statistics.
Jeung said the increase in hate incidents is a particular concern in urban areas. In New York City, police data shows there were 24 anti-Asian hate crimes related to the coronavirus between Jan. 1 and Nov. 29, 2020, compared with just three anti-Asian hate crimes in the same period in 2019.
‘We just want to be safe’: Hate crimes, harassment of Asian Americans rise amid coronavirus pandemic
“This increase was cultivated due to the anti-Asian rhetoric about the virus that was publicized, and individuals began to attack Asian New Yorkers, either verbal attack or physical assault,” Chief of Detectives Rodney Harrison told reporters in August.
The spike in hate crimes led the NYPD to create an Asian Hate Crimes Task Force.
Activists including Amanda Nguyễn, co-founder of Rise, a sexual assault survivor advocacy organization, are raising awareness of the Oakland case and the other violent incidents involving Asian Americans. Nguyễn said she created an Instagram video about the attacks, which has since gone viral, because she was angered not only by the violence but by the lack of media attention the cases received.
“When I made that video I was tired of living in fear and I wanted to scream,” she told USA TODAY. “It’s so absurd that I have to say ‘Stop killing us.’ … We are literally fearing for our lives as we walk out of our door, and your silence, your silence rings through our heads.”
In the Oakland assault, the district attorney’s office is investigating whether there is enough evidence to support hate crime charges, Alameda County District Attorney Nancy O’Malley said in a statement to USA TODAY.
⚠️ WARNING: this video is hard to watch. Another shocking attack in Oakland’s Chinatown. 8th and Harrison Streets. Outside the Asian Resource Center.
20+ robbery/assault incidents in the neighborhood according to the Chinatown Chamber president. https://t.co/9bo9PzuqiLpic.twitter.com/8h6dkNA1TG
— Dion Lim (@DionLimTV) February 4, 2021
The suspect in the Oakland assault, Yahya Muslim, was charged with three counts of assault, inflicting great bodily injury and committing a crime against an elderly person, O’Malley announced at a news conference Monday.
Police said Muslim is believed to have attacked a 60-year-old man and a 55-year-old woman the same day of the Chinatown attack.
Meanwhile, actors Daniel Dae Kim and Daniel Wu offered a $25,000 reward for information leading to an arrest in the case and are donating that money to community organizations like Stop AAPI Hate.
Dig deeper on race and identity:Subscribe to This Is America, USA TODAY’s newsletter
“The skyrocketing number of hate crimes against Asian Americans continues to grow, despite our repeated pleas for help,” they said on Twitter. “The crimes ignored and even excused.”
On Jan. 28, Vicha Ratanapakdee was attacked and later died in San Francisco. Eric Lawson, his son-in-law, told USA TODAYhe believes the 84-year-old was targeted because he was Asian. Lawson adde that his wife, who is Thai, was verbally assaulted twice and told to “go back to China” before the attack.
“Everyone is dancing around the issue, and no one’s addressing it,” he said.
San Francisco District Attorney Chesa Boudin filed murder and elder abuse charges against Antoine Watson, but her office has “no evidence of what motivated this senseless attack,” spokesperson Rachel Marshall told USA TODAY.
In San Jose, a 64-year-old Vietnamese woman was assaulted last Wednesday and robbed of $1,000 in cash she had withdrawn for the holiday. No arrest has been made, and there is no indication the robbery was race-related, said public information officer Sgt. Christian Camarillo.
That same day in New York, 61-year-old Noel Quintana, who is of reportedly Filipino descent, was slashed in the face with a box cutter on the subway. Spokesperson Detective Sophia Mason told USA TODAY police were investigating but did not answer questions about whether the incident may have been motivated by race.
Christian Hall: Ben Crump to represent family of Asian American teen killed by police while having ‘mental health crisis’
Although it’s unclear whether the particular cases are racially motivated, they are certainly “related” and “horrific,” Jeung said.
“What makes it worse is we see our elderly and youth also targeted,” he said. “It seems like people are attacking vulnerable populations.”
CLOSE
As coronavirus spreads across the U.S., Asian Americans share how racism and microaggressions have, too.
USA TODAY
John C. Yang, president and CEO of Asian Americans Advancing Justice, said his organization has been tracking anti-Asian hate incidents and crimes for nearly 30 years and has received hundreds more hate incident reports in 2020 than in previous years. He said polls by IPSOS and Pew Research Center indicate that the true scope of hate Asian Americans are experiencing is probably much larger, and better data is needed.
“Although these reports are clearly incomplete, clearly just the tip of the iceberg that shows us that there is this dramatic increase in hate incidents,” he said, noting that it’s too soon to tell if that increase is continuing in 2021.
There are several reasons victims of a hate crime may not report it to the police, according to Yang.
Yang said victims may not be aware of the resources available for them, and there may be language barriers to accessing those resources for older Asian Americans in particular. He said there may be cultural barriers to reporting as well, including shame around being perceived as a victim. Some victims may also be concerned about interacting with law enforcement because of their immigration status.
Yang added that not all hate incidents rise to the level of crime, but they still “clearly inflict a level of mental trauma.” He estimated that only about 10% of the incidents reported to his organization could be considered crimes.
‘They look at me and think I’m some kind of virus’: What it’s like to be Asian during the coronavirus pandemic
Jeung, of Stop AAPI Hate, said that in addition to crimes such as physical violence, Asian Americans have reported experiencing violations of their civil rights including being denied service by businesses or rideshares, being verbally harassed with racial slurs and facing vandalism and property damage.
He said his wife was deliberately coughed on while jogging, noting the similarities to a New Jersey incident where a man was charged with making a terroristic threat after coughing on a supermarket employee and saying he had the coronavirus.
“There is such a climate of hate and anger that we need to again lower the temperature and remind people to treat others with respect,” he said.
President Joe Biden signed a memorandum in late January denouncing xenophobia and violence against Asian Americans and Pacific Islanders. Yang said the the Biden administration’s words have made a difference, but the recent violence has caused the community to “hunker down again” during a normally celebratory time.
He said more needs to be done to ensure victims have support systems and to educate bystanders about safe intervention. He warned against relying too heavily on law enforcement.
Despite the horrific crimes, Jeung was excited to see the Oakland community organizing efforts to reduce crime in the neighborhood.
“What I’m really heartened by is the Asian American community is really standing up,” he said. “I want people to know we’re not simply victims of discrimination, but we’re advocating for racial justice for everyone in the United States and we’ll continue to do so.”
Follow N’dea Yancey-Bragg on Twitter: @NdeaYanceyBragg
Autoplay
Show Thumbnails
Show Captions
Last SlideNext Slide
Read or Share this story: https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/nation/2021/02/12/asian-hate-incidents-covid-19-lunar-new-year/4447037001/
During one of the most politically divisive years in recent memory, the number of active hate groups in the U.S. actually declined as far-right extremists migrated further to online networks, reflecting a splintering of white nationalist and neo-Nazi groups that are more difficult to track.
In its annual report, released Monday, the Southern Poverty Law Center said it identified 838 active hate groups operating across the U.S. in 2020. That’s a decrease from the 940 documented in 2019 and the record-high of 1,020 in 2018, said the law center, which tracks racism, xenophobia and anti-government militias.
“It is important to understand that the number of hate groups is merely one metric for measuring the level of hate and racism in America, and that the decline in groups should not be interpreted as a reduction in bigoted beliefs and actions motivated by hate,” said the report, first shared exclusively with The Associated Press.
The Montgomery, Alabama-based law center said many hate groups have moved to social media platforms and use of encrypted apps, while others have been banned altogether from mainstream social media networks.
During one of the most politically divisive years in recent memory, far-right extremists migrated further to online networks, leading to a decline in active hate groups last year. (Feb. 1)
Still, the law center said, online platforms allow individuals to interact with hate and anti-government groups without becoming members, maintain connections with likeminded people, and take part in real-world actions, such as last month’s siege on the U.S. Capitol.
White nationalist organizations, a subset of the hate groups listed in the report, declined last year from 155 to 128. Those groups had seen huge growth the previous two years after being energized by Donald Trump’s campaign and presidency, the report said.
The number of anti-immigrant, anti-Muslim and anti-LGBTQ hate groups remained largely stable, while their in-person organizing was hampered by the coronavirus pandemic.
Bottom line, the levels of hate and bigotry in America have not diminished, said SPLC President and CEO Margaret Huang.
“What’s important is that we start to reckon with all the reasons why those groups have persisted for so long and been able to get so much influence in the last White House, that they actually feel emboldened,” Huang told the AP.
Last month, as President Joe Biden’s administration began settling in, the Department of Homeland Security issued an early national terrorism bulletin in response to a growing threat from home-grown extremists, including anti-government militias and white supremacists. The extremists are coalescing under a broader, more loosely affiliated movement of people who reject democratic institutions and multiculturalism, Huang said.
The SPLC’s report comes out nearly a month after a mostly white mob of Trump supporters and members of far-right groups violently breached the U.S. Capitol building. At least five deaths have been linked to the assault, including a Capitol police officer. Some in the mob waved Confederate battle flags and wore clothing with neo-Nazi symbolism.
Federal authorities have made more than 160 arrests and sought hundreds more for criminal charges related to the deadly Jan. 6 assault. Authorities have also linked roughly 30 defendants to a group or movement, according to an AP review of court records.
That includes seven defendants linked to QAnon, a once-fringe internet conspiracy movement that recently grew into a powerful force in mainstream conservative politics; six linked to the Proud Boys, a misogynistic, anti-immigrant and anti-Semitic group with ties to white supremacism; four linked to the Oath Keepers, a paramilitary organization that recruits current and former military, law enforcement and first-responder personnel; four linked to the Three Percenters, an anti-government militia movement; and two leaders of “Super Happy Fun America,” a group with ties to white nationalists known for organizing a so-called “straight pride” parade in downtown Boston in 2019.
Bipartisan critics of Trump have blamed him for inciting the attack on the Capitol, which some far-right groups have declared a success and are using as a recruitment tool to grow membership, according to the SPLC.
The final year of the Trump presidency, marked by a wide-ranging reckoning over systemic racism, also propelled racist conspiracy theories and white nationalist ideology into the political mainstream, the law center said.
According to an SPLC survey conducted in August, 29% of respondents said they personally know someone who believes that white people are the superior race. The poll also found that 51% of Americans thought the looting and vandalism that occurred across the country around Black Lives Matter demonstrations was a bigger problem than excessive force by police.
Protests over the Minneapolis police killing of George Floyd last May spurred a push to make the November election a referendum on white supremacy. Nestled in Trump’s baseless claims of widespread voter fraud was a reality that turnout among Black and Hispanic voters played a significant role in handing victory to Biden and Vice President Kamala Harris, the first woman and first person of Black and South Asian heritage to hold that office.
During his inaugural address, Biden issued a strong repudiation of white supremacy and domestic terrorism, which is rare for such consequential speeches.
Full Coverage: Race and ethnicity
The SPLC made several recommendations for the new administration in its latest report. It called for establishing offices within the Department of Homeland Security, the Justice Department and the FBI to monitor, investigate and prosecute cases of domestic terrorism. It also urged improving federal hate crime data collection, training, and prevention; and for enacting federal legislation that shifts funding away from punishment models and toward preventing violent extremism.
People who support or express hatred and bigotry are not always card-carrying members of far-right groups. But that doesn’t mean they can’t be activated into violence, said Christian Picciolini, a former far-right extremist and founder of the Free Radicals Project, a group that helps people disengage from hate organizations.
It also doesn’t mean that they can’t be reached and deradicalized, he said.
“We have to have kind of a dual approach to stop what’s happening now, but also to make sure that we are not creating a problem for us in the future, to understand how the propaganda is spread that is recruiting these people,” Picciolini said.
“Right now, it’s in a very self-service format online,” he added. “We’re facing a really big problem.”
___
Morrison reported from New York. AP writer Michael Kunzelman contributed from College Park, Maryland.
___
Morrison is a member of the AP’s Race & Ethnicity team. Follow him on Twitter: https://www.twitter.com/aaronlmorrison.
