Anti-Asian Hate Crimes: Media Hysteria or Fact?

Anti-Asian hate crime has been making waves across the news recently. Is it hysteria or fact? Well, I decided to do a little research.

LA Times (Mar 5):

In a survey of police departments in 16 major U.S. cities, the Center for the Study of Hate and Extremism, a research office at Cal State San Bernardino, found a total of 122 anti-Asian hate crimes last year — a 149% increase from the 49 in 2019.

. . . The rise in anti-Asian crimes occurred as total hate crimes against all minority groups dropped 7% — from 1,845 to 1,717.

An increase from 49 to 122 or higher by 73. Is that really a significantly higher number? As a percentage sure, but is 122 really that large of a number? As a percentage, anti-Asian hate crimes increased from 2.7% (49/1,845) to 7.1% (122/1,717) of all hate crimes. 

Now, we should always try to reduce hate crimes against all groups. One of my points is rather or not all these anti-Asian hate crime media stories are verging on hysteria.

. . . A recent Pew survey found negative views of China in the U.S. to hit a nearly 20-year high.

Just a touch of pro-China propaganda there? 

. . . Many of the 2020 incidents in New York — and across the country — occurred in the early days of the pandemic, when fears ran highest.

So was this really an issue that is in the past and the news is now just catching up to it? And is this creating a current media hysteria that should have been addressed in early 2020? I do believe the media did touch on it in the early part of the pandemic, but it may be the fact that the current media focus going on now is due to the publication of this study and not a current crime wave.

. . . “In a recent analysis, we found that a quarter of the incidents we tracked included a perpetrator using language similar to Trump’s,” she said. “Things like ‘Wuhan virus,’ ‘China virus,’ ‘kung-flu’ and ‘go back to your country.’”

This would definitely seem to indicate that President Trump's language resulted in an increase level of anti-Asian hate crimes. Yet VOX (Mar 1) digs a little deeper into the data from the Center for the Study of Hate and Extremism. They highlight the breakdown by the 16 cities. 

Here's where the increases came from: 

New York City: 25 

Boston: 8
Los Angeles: 8 
Dallas: 6 
San Jose: 6 
Cleveland: 4 
Philadelphia: 4 
Denver: 3 
Houston: 3 
San Francisco: 3 
Seattle: 3 
Cincinnati: 1 
Phoenix: 1 
San Diego: 1 
Washington DC: -3

Notice how the largest increases came from Blue State cities: New York City, Boston (I've read that there are some rough areas of Boston) and Los Angeles. Can one really put the blame on President Trump? Sure, he should have been more careful with his language, but is he the driving force? Now one could argue that the two largest cities in the US are New York City and Los Angeles and so you'd expect that this is where the largest increases would occur. Yet, if Trump is to blame, wouldn't you see significant increases in Red State cities in terms of absolute numbers? True, Dallas and Cleveland are high up the list, but Houston and Cincinnati are down the list. Even Purple State city Phoenix is way down the list. To me, if there was a significant anti-Asian crime driven by President Trump, you'd see significant numerical increases in Red State cities. I don't think you can draw that conclusion from the above info.

Also, I came across this research paper from PMC (Jan 7, 2021). Though it is a recent paper, it uses data from 1992 - 2014. So it doesn't include this 2020 spike. I noticed this interesting fact that Asians are much more likely to be attacked by non-Whites than Blacks and Hispanics (go to Table 1 of the link). 

Offender Race (non-White) against Asians: 25.5% 

Offender Race (non-White) against Hispanics: 18.9% 

Offender Race (non-White) against Blacks: 1.0%

The LA Times mentions that the FBI will release more comprehensive data from 2020 in November. So perhaps it is possible that we'll see a greater spike in Red States vs Blue States. 

Is this media hysteria or fact? I guess I'm not willing to answer that question at the moment. There is a significant increase in hate crimes, but it is a relatively low numbers. For 2020, 92.9% of all hate crimes are still non-Asian. Also, the peak occurred in early 2020 and so the media might just be trying to focus hard on any current crime that is being committed against Asians now and are just over-exaggerating the situation. What I've just written seems to indicate that I feel this is hysteria. Maybe that is where I lean, but I think we need more data (especially 2021 data).

Of course, once again to emphasize, as a society our goal should be to reduce hate crimes.