Groups probe role of police
They have concerns about law enforcement’s response when anti-Asian incidents occur
A racist verbal attack she endured while jogging through her Los Angeles neighborhood last year, just as the pandemic was about to take hold, left Khinn Ung frightened and confused, and prompted her to make a simple vow: Don’t go out alone.
“Are you from Wuhan? Are you from Wuhan, China? Why do you bring the virus to us?” Ung, who is Asian American, recalled a man yelling at her as he chased her during the February 2020 incident in Chinatown. Luckily, a bystander intervened, scaring off the culprit.
Ung, who has lived in the United States since 1980, when she emigrated as a child from Cambodia, was rattled by the unprovoked verbal assault. But she would hardly be alone: As COVID-19 gradually worsened into a public health crisis, it also fueled an alarming torrent of physical and verbal attacks aimed at Asian Americans in Southern California and elsewhere.
As attacks like the one on Ung mounted — each one unique but all rooted in racism and xenophobia — Asian Americans in many Southern California communities have increasingly had to grapple with questions about what can be done to make them feel safe.
One possible solution has been to turn to local law enforcement. But for a variety of reasons, some rooted in recent events and others deeply in history, not all Asian Americans have embraced that response.
After the murder of George Floyd spurred uprisings last summer against police violence and systemic racism within policing, many Asian Americans began to rethink the role law en
forcement should play in combating attacks against their community. Recognizing harm that police sometimes posed to Black Americans and confronting their own traumas with law enforcement, some Asian American advocates began to ask the question of protection another way: Can we truly rely on police for our safety?
After the March 16 shootings in Atlanta in which a gunman killed eight spa workers, including six women of Asian descent, some Asian Americans living in Southern California, afraid for their safety, began to turn to local law enforcement.
The Los Angeles Police Department boosted patrols in Asian communities, including Chinatown and Koreatown, after business associations sought a stronger law enforcement presence. Police Chief Michel Moore also walked the streets of Chinatown, shaking hands with shop owners; the department posted a message with photos on social media: “We are here for you; we are here together.”
That same month, after a number of Asian American residents living in Hacienda Heights and Rowland Heights told Los Angeles County Board Supervisor Janice Hahn’s office they felt unsafe being out in public, the board asked the Sheriff’s Department to look at the costs and where to place advanced license plate readers — surveillance devices that scan and collect license plate data from vehicles to aid criminal investigations — along Colima Road, a thoroughfare that cuts through a large swath of the southern portion of the San Gabriel Valley, which has among the highest concentrations of Asian residents in the U.S.
“These residents are concerned with public safety in the unincorporated areas of the county and they want to not only be safe, but also feel safe,” Hahn wrote.
In her motion, she asked for further research into the surveillance plan, which passed unanimously April 6.
Prosecutors across Southern California also have pledged to prosecute hate crimes more aggressively. In Orange County, for example, District Attorney Todd Spitzer formed a unit of attorneys dedicated to handling hate crime cases.
Lawmakers in Sacramento also have introduced bills that would stiffen penalties for individuals convicted of hate crimes. President Joe Biden several weeks ago signed a bill into law that will expedite Justice Department reviews of hate crimes and offer federal grants to local law enforcement agencies to bolster their hate crime investigations.
But not all Asian Americans are keen on turning to law enforcement for safety.
Connie Chung Joe, who heads Asian Americans Advancing Justice Los Angeles, spoke against the county Board of Supervisors’ law enforcement surveillance motion during the April meeting. She cited fears about policing among the Asian American community and possible harm that an increase in policing would cause for other people of color, specifically Black and Latino individuals.
As Black activists across the nation in 2020 highlighted local cases of police killings, laying bare the impacts of overpolicing and mass incarceration on many of their communities, protesters demanded change, ranging from the abolition of police departments to police reforms.
Joe said Asian Americans and public officials cannot afford to toss aside the progress made by movements like Black Lives Matter.
“There is a need to balance the safety for Asian Americans, but at the same time, to do it in a way that is not at the expense of other communities of color,” Joe said.
Though Joe acknowledged cameras may play a role in recording when incidents do happen, she said they do not offer protection for Asian Americans harassed in those incidents. Joe mentioned an attack in New York City where surveillance cameras and nearby security guards failed to stop a man from brutally assaulting and yelling racist slurs at a 65-year-old Filipino American woman.
“Surveillance is something that can bring a sense of immediacy to folks, but it’s not something that is going to transform the underlying conditions that create violence,” said Janis Yue, an organizer with Chinatown Community for Equitable Development, whose group also opposed the board’s motion. “And that can be used as a tool that ultimately harms Black and brown members of the community even further.”
After she suffered the verbal attack in 2020, Ung didn’t think to report the incident to police, due to fear and the sense that officers had nothing to offer her.
“Every time I see the cops, I’m scared,” Ung said.
Having fled Cambodia during the Khmer Rouge regime’s genocide, Ung saw firsthand how horrific statesanctioned violence can be.
Ung also is a tenant union leader for her apartment complex on Everett Street, where she and other tenants, mostly working class families, are fighting a landlord who wants to evict them. For her and other working class tenants, they view police as protectors of the wealthy and the property they own.
“What do police do for me?” Ung said. “I don’t think they do anything for me. The law is not on our side.”
Joe also mentioned Asian Americans who are undocumented or whose families have mixed immigration status. California is home to more than 460,000 Asian immigrants here illegally. For them, the sight of law enforcement may bring about worries of detainment and deportation, Joe said.
For many Arab, South Asian and Muslim Americans, increases in government surveillance of their communities after the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks brought its own kind of terror.
Over the past two decades, the federal government has spied on, mapped and tracked Muslim communities across the U.S., said Amr Shabaik, the head civil rights attorney for the Council on American-Islamic Relations Los Angeles, based in Anaheim, which offers legal support to victims of discrimination.
His group is currently working with members of the Islamic Center of Irvine, where members still are recovering from the trauma of learning that an alleged undercover FBI informant had befriended worshipers at their mosque to spy on them for the federal government in 2006 and 2007.
“It’s a very real thing and it does create a hesitancy and suspicion of law enforcement, which is warranted given this past history,” Shabaik said.
Such fear and suspicion drive people away from reporting a hate incident or hate crime, even if they are a victim.
Even opponents of increased policing agree that obtaining data on hate crimes and hate incidents is important in understanding the magnitude of the issue, and to figure out where the biggest needs exist. Data collected by law enforcement agencies are widely accepted as under-counted.
After a 16-year-old Asian American boy in the San Fernando Valley was assaulted at his school in February 2020 in an alleged hate incident based on the boy’s race,
Manjusha Kulkarni, director of Asian Pacific Policy and Planning Council, a coalition of dozens of communitybased groups, helped write a letter to the state Attorney General’s Office, requesting that it keep track of hate incidents as they grew more prevalent in the early days of the pandemic.
The letter was signed by 50 Asian American activists, attorneys and professors from across the state who noticed rising numbers of such attacks in their own respective cities.
The Attorney General’s Office declined and told the group it relies on local law enforcement agencies to report data and does not collect such data on its own, Kulkarni said. The group instead made its own online reporting system, forming Stop AAPI Hate, which between March 2020 and March 2021, has received reports of more than 6,600 hate incidents targeted at Asian Americans and Pacific Islanders, according to a report released by the group earlier this month.
Though physical attacks both locally and elsewhere continued to make headlines, the vast majority of incidents reported to the group were not crimes, Kulkarni said.
Most of the incidents reported to the group were verbal or written attacks, civil rights violations such as workplace discrimination and refusal of service, as well as online harassment. About 90% of all incidents reported to Stop AAPI Hate did not rise to the level of a crime.
Based on this data, Asian American activists such as Kulkarni see the role of criminal law enforcement in combating anti-Asian attacks as a small one. The new federal bill recently signed into law has been heralded as a landmark piece of legislation, though it still leans too heavily on law enforcement, especially on the local level, said Kulkarni, who testified in March at a rare congressional hearing about antiAsian discrimination, the first of its kind, she said, since the 1980s.
“There is still a reliance on criminal enforcement, and so, that’s obviously in our mind going to have limited applicability,” she said of the new bill.
Kulkarni said she understands the recent calls for increases in law enforcement, given the tendency for people to turn to policing for many societal issues, such as mental health or homelessness.
“There’s a whole host of areas where law enforcement is being asked to do things they are not equipped to do and is not in their mission to undertake,” she said. “But as we know, even over the past year, policing is not the answer.”
A 2018 state auditor’s report showed local law enforcement agencies, including the LAPD and Orange County Sheriff’s Department, regularly misidentified hate crimes, failed to report them to the state and lacked the proper training to identify such incidents.
Law enforcement officials like LAPD Deputy Chief Blake Chow, who acts as a department liaison with some Asian American community and business groups, recognize the need for improving communication with Asian community members about hate incidents, along with more training on the subject for its officers.
Chow said he has collaborated with community groups who have made cards written in multiple languages such as Mandarin, Korean and Tagalog that instruct how to report hate crimes and incidents and lists mental health and legal resources.
Garden Grove Police Chief Tom DaRé said he communicates regularly with members of the city’s large Vietnamese and Korean communities and understands there is room in improving their reporting system.
But DaRé admits the role of police is limited in the fight against anti-Asian hate.
“Yes, your police department shouldn’t be involved in every single incident because it’s things we cannot fix,” he said.
But, he said, he wants his officers to connect with community members even in incidents that do not rise to the level of a crime to build trust and gather data.
In addition to underreporting from law enforcement agencies, hate crimes are difficult to file charges on and get convictions.
The 2018 auditor’s report also found that less than half of hate crime cases end in convictions, compared to an 84% conviction rate for other felonies.
DaRé said over the past year that his department submitted two hate crime cases, but prosecutors declined to file charges, including a case where a man called a Garden Grove Walgreens and said someone would “kill all the Asians” inside the store. Police arrested a man suspected of making the call, but DaRé said prosecutors cited insufficient evidence in the case and didn’t file charges.
Alex Bastian, advisor to Los Angeles County District Attorney George Gascón, said the burden of proof is high for prosecutors in all cases, and in hate crimes, where investigators must gather evidence to show a person was at least, in part, motivated by a victim’s identity, which makes filing such cases even more difficult.
Yet such a disparity in convictions can ultimately invalidate the experience of a person harmed by a hate crime, discouraging them from reporting anything in the future, CAIR-LA’s Shabaik said.
“I mean it’s traumatizing,” Shabaik said. “You’re traumatized in two ways: One, by the incident and then two, to say, ‘Well the system doesn’t care about me, it doesn’t validate my experience, it doesn’t validate what I just experienced, and this is gonna go swept under the rug and I’m not gonna see any type of justice.’ It’s traumatizing on both sides.”
For many Asian American activists in Southern California, the way forward begins with addressing the roots of systemic racism in the U.S.
Activists and academics point to a long history of violence toward Asians, including the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882 that barred Chinese workers from entering the U.S.; the incarceration of thousands of Japanese Americans during World War II; anti-Filipino race riots of the 1930s against Filipino farm and factory workers in California; the murder of Vincent Chin, a Chinese American who in 1982 was killed in a racially motivated attack; as well as the continued deportation of many residents of Southeast Asian decent who are living here illegally.
Such reckoning, Shabaik said, comes through improvements in the state’s education system.
He mentioned a recent plan to adopt ethnic studies for the state’s high school curriculum.
To address the issue of funding and resources, Kulkarni said her group supports the movement of Asian and Pacific Islander state lawmakers who are pushing for an increase in funding for local community organizations who already provide legal, health, and mental health relief for those who face discrimination.
And for those who are convicted of hate crimes, activists such as Kulkarni and Yue also would like to see the criminal system move away from a retributive justice system that seeks to prevent future incidents through harsh penalties and incarceration, which they say only furthers harm against convicted individuals, who they themselves come from marginalized communities.
Kulkarni and her group Stop AAPI Hate have called for the expansion of the current civil enforcement infrastructure, one that offers individuals a way to pursue accountability in a way that addresses racism on a systemic level.
“You look at our data, you have refusal of service by ride-hailing drivers, grocery stores and pharmacy chains, you have workplace discrimination,” said Kulkarni whose background includes working as a civil rights attorney. “The levers of power there are not individual perpetrators. … There’s a lot of opportunity now to essentially bring civil prosecution.”
In Los Angeles County, a county-led program called L.A. vs. Hate allows residents to dial 211 to report a hate incident and will be connected to various resources, such as social services, health and mental health services, and legal assistance for people whose civil rights may have been violated.
Kulkarni thinks programs like this should be in every U.S. city.