A few posts back, I promised to explore the rise in anti-Asian hate crimes. First let me explain two challenges: one is the difference between data and numbers, and the other is the difficulty in determining intent behind an action.
First, I think we all know what numbers are, but how to distinguish them from data? Data are just numbers that have been processed in some way to make them useful in comparing or combining. A simple example: if I told you the temperature in Cincinnati today was 40° but only 20° in Ajijic, you might assume Ohio was warmer than Jalisco, and that would be wrong. Those are numbers, not data. The numbers are in different scales (Fahrenheit and Centigrade); placed in the same scale, they become data and we can compare.
Another example: I just saw a headline (later revised) that said “One hundred fully-vaccinated people in Washington State have gotten Covid” which sounds scary. However, those one-hundred victims came out of a pool of 1.2 million vaccinated people in Washington. With context, the story was that less than .01% of vaccinated people in Washington later got Covid, which is reassuring, not scary. Processing numbers into data is essential!
Second, actions are easier to assess than intent. If I walk past you and don’t greet you on the street, was I angry at you, preoccupied, inconsiderate, unaware, near-sighted or some combination of all of the above. You can easily assess the fact that I did not greet you, but the cause becomes a matter of great conjecture, and I myself may not be able to answer “why?”.
You may have seen the claims of a great increase in the number of anti-Asian (sometimes referred to as anti-Asian/Pacific Islander, hence AAPI) hate incidents. Activists and the media tie the phenomenon back to the Trump administration and his blaming China for the Coronavirus pandemic in 2019. Let’s dig into the numbers (hint). The first point to understand is that the FBI has not published its 2020 crime data, so there is no single, national, data-set for hate crimes. Here is the last FBI graph:
The data are low, and hit an all-time low in 2015 before starting a gradual rise. The FBI data is not comprehensive, as law enforcement elements participate voluntarily, but it does cover more than fifteen thousand organizations representing over three-hundred million Americans.
In the absence of 2020 FBI data, what numbers do we have? The numbers cited in most major media reporting come from StopAAPIHate. Here’s the pull quote from their website: “In response to the alarming escalation in xenophobia and bigotry resulting from the COVID-19 pandemic, the Asian Pacific Planning and Policy Council (A3PCON), Chinese for Affirmative Action (CAA), and the Asian American Studies Department of San Francisco State University launched the Stop AAPI Hate reporting center on March 19, 2020.” I’ll set aside the question of using data from a group which set out under the assumption of an “alarming escalation” and just show their results here:
There are several potential issues here. The numbers come from the sixteen largest US cities, so we have an urban skew to the data. The numbers are very small: eleven cities had incident totals in the single digits, and four reported no incidents in 2019, meaning the data could go nowhere but up. The overwhelming number (eighty-eight of one hundred twenty-two) of hate crimes happened in just six cities: New York, Los Angeles, Boston, Seattle, San Francisco, and San Jose.
StopAAPIHate has other issues. Among the numbers it uses to buttress its claim of increasing hate crimes are: Google Search terms, slurs on Twitter, and any claim that China is possibly responsible for the coronavirus. The last one would make much of the planet guilty of anti-Asian hate crimes, including most of Asia. StopAAPIHate does not acknowledge other explanations or causations (e.g., the non-representative nature of Twitter, or the use of Google search to explain unfamilar words).
It is interesting to note that overall hate crimes declined by seven per cent in 2020, while anti-Asian hate crimes rose by one-hundred forty-nine per cent. It is also relevant to note that anti-Asian hate crimes account for only seven per cent of all hate crimes, and the following groups had more reported victims of hate crimes in 2019: blacks, whites (!), Hispanics, Jews, Muslims, Gays, and LBQT+. On top of that, there is the issue of attributing crimes based solely on the race of the victims. The Anti Defamation League (ADL) discovered a huge increase in anti-Semitic attacks back in 2017 when it included thousands of false, phone-bomb threats (to Jewish Community Centers and schools) conducted by an American-Israeli Jewish student. Still, the purported rise in anti-Asian hate crimes demands attention, even if the numbers are small both in absolute and relative terms. So let’s dig into the phenomenon further. We know who the victims are, but who are the perpetrators and what are the crimes?
According to the New York Times, the NYPD does have data about the identity of perpetrators in 2020. Of the 20 anti-Asian hate crimes in which arrests were made, eleven arrested were black, five were Hispanic, two were Black Hispanic, and two were white. This tracks with the FBI’s 2019 hate crimes data, and it tracks with anecdotal reporting of 2020 and 2021 incidents. And the Times has noted that so many of the perpetrators of these alleged hate crimes are either homeless, mentally ill, or both.
As to the crimes, the vast majority of hate crimes (against all victims) were verbal intimidation/simple assault (eighty percent) or vandalism (seventy-five percent). StopAAPIHate has added the category of “shunning/avoidance” which accounted for twenty percent of its reports.
I will spare my friends a long litany of specific events, categorized as hate crimes by activists and the media, which failed to be so upon further scrutiny. A large number are simple robberies or assaults where no evidence of hate, except for the ethnicity of the victim, was ever introduced. Some attacks do include language which supports a hateful intent, but when the perpetrator is mentally ill, can we rely on their words?
So are all these incidents wrong? No. The most famous ones do not stand up to scrutiny, but there was a trend towards slightly increasing anti-Asian hate incidents going back for four years. Is the trend overblown by activists and the media? Probably.
I have little doubt more people are making more hateful statements today than yesterday. One need only check social media to confirm it. The social fabric in the States is wearing thin, and people are increasingly escalating encounters. Those with whom you disagree are not just wrong, they’re evil, why, maybe even Nazis! If someone looks askance at you, they might be “dissin'” you, and you don’t have to put up with that in 2021, do you? Activists talk about “getting in people’s faces” and even small disagreements become political battlegrounds. The other day in the States, my dear wife made the mistake of asking a woman (at a public park) whether she had lost her face mask; the woman’s response assumed my wife was attacking her for not wearing one, when actually my wife had just found a mask, and the rest of that woman’s family was wearing masks, so she thought she was about to do a good deed. Not in this day and age.
Long ago, I was a daily runner, which meant I ended up running in places like aboard a ship in Kattegat, on the rolling plains of Kansas, in smoggy Budapest and uber-urban Tokyo. In three of those locations, the sight of a lanky, six foot-plus white guy running around merited just odd looks. It was only in the States where I had cars on rural roads cross the centerline toward me, strangers toss trash at me, or carloads of teenagers hang out the windows and swear at me. And that was back in the well-meaning twentieth century! So do I believe there is more hatred now? Sure.
Is there an epidemic of specifically anti-Asian hate? Probably not. And can the increase be tied to former President Trump? Only if you believe in a secretive cabal of New Yorkers, Californians, Blacks, Hispanics and even Asians waiting to follow his lead. No, there is something deeper going on here, and I promise to cover that in the near future.