Brutal attack renews volunteers’ patrol efforts
NEW YORK » Fed up with the incessant attacks on Asian Americans, Stan Lee recently started voluntarily patrolling San Francisco’s Chinatown. So when the 53-year-old fire lieutenant saw a video of a New York City woman getting brutally beaten, he didn’t have to guess how his fellow volunteers — other Asian American firefighters — were taking it.
“I’m pretty sure they’re all steamed, like I am,” said Lee, who is Chinese American. “It’s personal. It could have been our aunt or our mom or our grandma.”
The vicious assault of a 65-year-old woman while walking to church this week near New York City’s Times Square has heightened already palpable levels of outrage over anti-asian attacks that escalated with the pandemic.
New York police say the assailant yelled racial slurs at the Filipina American woman and told her, “You don’t belong here!” The video quickly drew millions of views along with widespread condemnation, not just for its heinous nature but the seemingly indifferent bystanders. The assailant was arrested and charged Wednesday with hate crimes.
Asian American groups from coast to coast, already doing more than digital activism — patrolling, escorting, chaperoning — are trying not to let this latest hate crime discourage those efforts.
“I think that gives us more motive to take care of our own,” Lee said. “We see everyone in our community as our own. It doesn’t have to be just Asians.”
In New York City, Teresa Ting, a 29-year-old Chinese American, started what has become the Main Street Patrol following an attack on another older Asian American woman in the Flushing neighborhood of Queens in February.
“It literally could have been my mother had it been the wrong place, wrong time,” Ting said of that attack.
She wanted to do something more than posting messages on social media and was happily surprised when people showed up to volunteer. The group has since organized volunteers to go out in parts of Flushing, a heavily Asian neighborhood, on weekend afternoons.
Volunteers travel in groups of three, and have an app to communicate with each other. Ting, who wants to expand to offer a chaperone service, said she wanted people to know how to get involved and tactics they could use.
“I think it’s very necessary, especially in the Asian community right now, just because a lot of the elders have a language barrier. They can’t speak or understand English,” she said. “That’s why I feel a lot of hate crimes have been unreported.”
Bystander training has also been on the rise and the need was only reinforced by the video of this week’s attack. Emily May, co-founder of Hollaback!, which offers training on how to respond when witnessing harassment, said it was disturbing that the video showed several witnesses who didn’t seem to render aid to the woman, who has been identified as Vilma Kari.
In a post on a fundraising page Thursday, Kari’s daughter, Elizabeth, said a bystander not seen on the video yelled at the attacker and drew him away from her mother. “THANK YOU for stepping in and doing the right thing,” she wrote.