Chinatown patrols met with hope, hesitancy
San Francisco Police Officer William Ma and Forrest Liu of the Chinatown Safety Patrol keep an eye on the streets. Liu helped organize the safety patrol as “an extra set of eyes.”
Fifteen people met in the deserted Willy Wong playground in Chinatown on March 18, heads bowed against the evening rain. They held a full minute of silence for eight victims, six of them women of Asian descent, of the mass shooting two days earlier in Atlanta. Then Forrest Liu, 27, broke the quiet to issue instructions to the assembled group.
Liu organized the San Francisco Chinatown Safety Patrol with Anthony Su, 23, he said, to “be an extra set of eyes” over a district grappling with fear and uncertainty about how to respond to a visible wave of antiAsian bigotry.
The Stop AAPI Hate reporting project recorded nearly 1,700 incidents of antiAsian discrimination in California from March 2020 through the end of February. At least 15 people of Asian descent have been robbed, beaten or killed in San Francisco this year, according to a Chronicle review of media reports.
While violence against Asian communities has a long, dark history in America, it’s risen to an “unprecedented level that I haven’t seen in my
lifetime,” said Cynthia Choi, coexecutive director of Chinese for Affirmative Action, one of the organizations behind the Stop AAPI Hate project. “Right now we are seeing community members and people from across communities standing with us and asking how they can help.”
Attempts to do so have come from several corners.
Rallies denouncing the violence have grown in size and frequency. State lawmakers have introduced more than a dozen hatecrime bills. San Francisco increased police and antiviolence community patrols in primarily Asian neighborhoods. Online fundraisers have raised money for victims and private security. Then there are the selfappointed safety patrols like Liu’s.
Since February, Liu’s group has walked the streets of Chinatown, fielding complaints from local business owners and residents, intervening in street disruptions and sharing observations with the police. He instructs his volunteers to keep an eye out for suspicious sights, including idling cars and people hanging outside ATMs.
Liu’s greatest stress, he said, is that he “can’t be everywhere at once.”
Yet some Asian American activists have cautioned against volunteer patrols, saying they can inadvertently increase tensions between police and other marginalized groups, including Black and unhoused people.
“My concern is that these (patrol) efforts can be problematic if they engage in racial profiling, if they do not receive the proper culturally responsive training and bystander intervention training to respond to complex issues,” said Lai Wa Wu, policy and alliance director of San Francisco’s Chinese Progressive Association. “If that doesn’t happen, it could possibly lead to dangerous interactions.”
Liu said he views his group as a bridge between the police and the people of Chinatown. While stopping attacks are the police’s job, Liu said he helps local business owners interact with people experiencing homelessness.
“Homeless people come and shoplift,” he told the group. “I feel bad because I know they’re hungry, but our merchants have a low margin of profit. Their businesses are hurting because of COVID19. Instead of them stealing, we can buy them (the food).”
Avoiding generalizations about marginalized people is one reason Wu said she is actively working with the Coalition of Community Safety to get funding for trained, streetoutreach initiatives. But she agreed that alternatives to policing should be the goal in Asian communities where language barriers, immigration issues and other concerns about law enforcement are present.
“Right now reliance on the police cannot be the only way for our communities to stay safe,” Wu said. “Our responses need to be humanizing and not scapegoating.”
Liu’s fellow volunteers, meanwhile, say they felt compelled to act.
“At this point, I’m out here because I don’t really know what to do,” said Su, Liu’s cofounder.
Many of the assembled volunteers that week were firsttimers. During the opening icebreaker, after sharing pronouns and fun facts, individuals gave their reasons for volunteering. Rocky Chau cited the March 17 attack on Xiao Zhen Xie, a 75yearold woman who fought off her assailant. An image of her swollen face has circulated widely online.
“That’s my potential grandma,” Chau told the group. “The most vulnerable people in our society are getting hurt.”
Not far away, San Francisco police Officers Loren Chiu and William Ma sat inside their patrol vehicle, parked at a street corner. The Chinese American officers volunteered to be stationed in Chinatown because of “familial ties to the area,” Chiu said.
“A lot of merchants prefer a highly visible police presence,” Chiu said. “That is not the case in all communities. But in ours, they want the lights and sirens flashing.”
William Lex Ham, a New Yorkbased organizer who oversaw the development of the Chinatown Safety Patrol, said the officers’ local ties differentiate S.F.’s police force from the one in his city.
“Many of the police officers are kids who grew up here,” he said. “That could be a model of reform, having police officers who actually live in the areas they serve. In New York we have lots of police who don’t live in Chinatown, don’t understand cultural or social norms of that community, and are quick to have their hands on their guns.”
Some merchants expressed mixed emotions about the current racial animosity and the attempts to address them.
At Grant Place Restaurant, owner Elaine Chiu stood behind the counter of an otherwise empty business that’s survived the pandemic partly through financial assistance from the nonprofit Feed and Fuel Chinatown. Speaking through an interpreter, Chiu, who’s cooked at Grant Place for 17 of its 27 years, sounded a note of resignation.
“Americans have always been like this, treating African Americans and Chinese people like lowerclass citizens,” she said. “That’s just the way it is.”
As it grew dark, the patrol stopped by the Golden Gate Fortune Cookie Factory. The popular tourist attraction, filled with sweetsmelling sesame cookies packaged by owner Kevin Chan’s mother, also features an elaborate display in honor of the police, with nearly a hundred badges pinned to the walls. Yet the 51yearold Chan, who wore a propolice cap,
said that when he was harassed in his shop by a group last October, he “didn’t do anything” and “just let them go.”
He said the Chinese community is targeted because of a perception that “we are easy to pick on and if something happens, we shut our mouths.” The presence of police and volunteer patrols are proving the opposite, he said.
“We did not come here to make trouble, but when things come over, we need to defend ourselves,” he said. “It’s the natural response.”
“Homeless people come and shoplift. I feel bad because I know they’re hungry, but our merchants have a low margin of profit.”
Forrest Liu, an organizer of the San Francisco Chinatown Safety Patrol