Hate incidents toward Asian-Americans rise

LOS ANGELES — Hate crimes and incidents directed at Asian Americans have surged during the coronavirus pandemic, according to the Los Angeles County Commission on Human Relations, whose director said Wednesday that civic groups and police departments have fielded more than 100 reports of hate incidents tied to the pandemic from February through April.

Many of these incidents were “acts of hate-motivated hostility” that did not amount to hate crimes but were no less jarring, the commission’s director, Robin Toma, said in a virtual town hall.

He described several reported incidents: A man spewed racial and misogynistic epithets at an Asian American woman walking her dog. A resident of an apartment complex, assuming an Asian tenant had contracted the coronavirus, tried to get that tenant evicted. A bomb threat targeted “a major Asian American institution,” which Toma didn’t identify by name.

Throughout the country, law enforcement has identified hate crimes directed at Asian Americans and believed to be motivated by the pandemic. In New York, teenage girls accosted a 51year-old Asian woman on a bus, hitting her over the head with an umbrella and making “anti-Asian statements,” city police said. Three 15-year-old girls were charged with hate crimes.

In Midland, Texas, a 19year-old man stabbed an Asian American father and his children, ages 2 and 6, at a Sam’s Club, law enforcement authorities said. “The suspect indicated that he stabbed the family because he thought the family was Chinese, and infecting people with the coronavirus,” FBI agents wrote in an intelligence report circulated to local law enforcement agencies and reported by ABC News.

In the first four months of this year, the Los Angeles Police Department has investigated 10 hate crimes, three of them “COVID-driven,” Dominic Choi, an LAPD deputy chief, said during the virtual town hall. The department noted four hate crimes in the same period last year. Choi said city residents probably have suffered more hate crimes than the numbers reflect because such encounters often go unreported.