Hate crimes bring fear to US streets

The disturbing random attacks on people of Asian descent in New York throughout the year have factored prominently in the police force's most recent hate-crime report.

Police say there was a 361 percent increase in such crimes－129 versus 28 last year－against the Asian community through Sunday. And the trends are similar in other big cities.

In New York, many of the unprovoked assaults were a result of scapegoating over the COVID-19 pandemic, with slurs and xenophobic comments often uttered.

Anti-Semitic crimes increased to 183, from 121 in 2020, and there were 85 crimes this year committed in relation to a victim's sexual orientation, up from 29 last year.

Overall, there was a 100 percent increase in hate crimes in the city against all groups through Sunday, to 503－up from 252 in 2020, the New York Police Department said on Tuesday. "What we are seeing is anti-Asian (crimes) really increasing both by percentage and the raw number," the city's police commissioner, Dermot Shea, said in an interview on the WPIX 11 network on Wednesday. "I think when you look at anti-Semitic and anti-Asian, that's over 50 percent of all of the hate crimes in New York City."

In a news briefing that day, Shea said:"Don't ever forget the victims in this and the trauma that these cases inflict not just on them and their family and people that see these acts, but the greater society."

He said the spike in hate crimes is driven by lower incarceration rates.

As for who is behind the incidents, Shea said: "It's the same old song in terms of what we're seeing. We're seeing a little bit of mental illness. We're seeing just disregard for common decency."

A Weibo user identified as Bu Huo A Feng said in a post: "Think of so many acts of genocide in history, and Chinese Americans really have to pay attention."

Hate crimes are on the rise across the US, the latest case being the fatal shooting of a 71-year-old man.

On Tuesday, Woom Sing Tse was shot multiple times and killed outside an elementary school in Chinatown in Chicago. He came to the US nearly 50 years ago from China, and worked his way up from restaurant cook to restaurant owner, the Chicago Sun-Times reported. Chicago Police Superintendent David Brown identified the shooter and charged him with first-degree murder in the death.

Rising cases

In August, the Federal Bureau of Investigation reported that hate crimes in the US rose about 6 percent last year to their highest level in 12 years, driven by attacks on black and Asian people. The number of anti-Asian hate crimes went up from 161 to 274, representing an increase of about 73 percent.

On Nov 28, a suspect the police had sought for about four months for allegedly knocking an Asian woman and her adult son down subway steps during a fatal alleged robbery attempt was arrested and charged with murder.

A nurse says she has been unable to work since a man hit her from behind with his bike's handlebars and called her anti-Asian slurs on a subway platform in New York City in November. Atsuko Obando, 54, was heading to work around 6:30 pm on Nov 27 when the suspect rammed into her back at a station in Morningside Heights, the New York Daily News reported.

When asked why he did it, the suspect laughed and said,"I got you good, you Asian f------ b----", Obando told the WABC radio station. She said she walked away, but he allegedly continued to taunt her.

On Nov 26, a 61-year-old Chinese woman was struck in the head with a large rock in Queens, leaving her in critical condition with swelling on the brain that required surgery, the CNN network reported.

Not all the incidents resulted in arrests, and social media contains numerous cellphone videos of Asian people being regularly accosted on public transit in the city.

"The data is really shocking. It reminds me just to be more careful and take care of myself because things could happen," student Shihao Ent told CBS New York.

Minlu Zhang in New York contributed to this story.