Why anti-Asian hate incidents often go unreported and how to help
The white gunman's deadly rampage in Georgia that left six Asian women dead, and occurred amid a spate of anti-Asian attacks nationwide, has sent shockwaves of fear through the Asian American community.
Local police, citing the gunman, said the deadly violence was not racially motivated. Many Asian Americans and advocates say this doesn't lessen the collective pain or fear, and the incident exposes new gaps in data collection on anti-Asian attacks and law enforcement responses to alleged hate-fueled incidents.
"There has to be acknowledgement that regardless of what that person's motivations were, Asian and Pacific Islander communities are still feeling this act of hate very deeply and very personally," Carmelyn Malalis, the commissioner of the New York City Commission on Human Rights, told ABC News, "especially in light of the violence and stigma that we have continued to endure and that has continually been leveled against our communities over the past year."
"How the community is feeling is something that we have to focus on regardless of how something might be investigated by local police forces," she added. "There's so many people who even doubt there is such a thing as anti-Asian racism."
Experts and advocates say data on racist incidents is crucial for addressing the issue, yet comprehensive and accurate statistics on anti-Asian hate are currently sparse.
"Unfortunately, there's no uniform database for collecting anti-Asian attacks, most of the data that we have is based on self-reporting from a website called Stop AAPI Hate, as well as our website at StandAgainstHatred.org," John C. Yang, the president and executive director of civil rights group Asian Americans Advancing Justice-AAJC, told ABC News. "But these are only voluntary, and only as good as the outreach that can be done by us as nonprofit organizations."
There were nearly 3,800 anti-Asian hate incidents in the U.S. between March 19, 2020 and Feb. 28, 2021, according to data from the Stop AAPI Hate coalition released this week. The coalition formed in response to the uptick in anti-Asian xenophobia linked to the coronavirus pandemic, and includes verbal attacks as well as other incidents that might not fit into state-by-state legal definitions of a hate crime.
Lawmakers and advocates have said they believe this is a tiny fraction of the total.
"The federal government, through the FBI, did have collection efforts on hate crimes, but that's incomplete for several reasons," Yang added. "No. 1 ... that requires state and local governments to ensure that they have the right resources and understanding on how to report. And then No. 2, that assumes that people have trust in those governments to report it to them."
The FBI has not released data for 2020 yet, but said there were 158 reported anti-Asian bias crimes in the U.S. in 2019.
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