Anti-Asian hate crimes have gotten more media attention recently, due to the nature of current circumstances with COVID-19 and the surge in Asian hate crimes. Although it is hard to blame any part of this on any side of the media, it is important to remain aware of current situations harming any community in America and educate ourselves about how to protect our fellow Americans.

To investigate, I attempted to find statistics to better gauge how much Asian hate crimes have risen from 2019-2021, and I found one report from the Center for the Study of Hate and Extremism that indicates that Asian hate crimes have risen 145% from 2019 to 2020, while overall hate crimes have lowered 6%. They gathered the statistics by taking 16 of America’s largest cities and comparing reported hate crimes from 2019 to 2020. I was still worried that these stats might be biased, so the FBI was the next stop to find data on Asian hate.

Individually, many police departments report their crime statistics to the FBI; however, some crimes either do not get reported as hate crimes by police, or they just don’t get reported at all, making the data inaccurate. A former University of North Carolina basketball player named Kenny Ma was attacked in 2019, but the FBI had no record of this attack, meaning it had not been filed as a hate crime. The hate crimes data is just inherently flawed because not every police department has to report on these statistics and there isn’t a consistent reporting method across the US (Lawfare).

Regardless of the statistics, the violence that Asian-Americans are facing today in America is unacceptable no matter how you see it. When a man opened fire in three Georgia spas killing 8 people, 6 of them being Asian, it is easily understood why people are afraid to even walk outside. Though the suspect has not said that this was a hate crime, the fact is that he opened fire in places known to have Asian workers. Robert Aaron Long, the shooter, is being charged with four counts of murder and an aggravated assault charge (11Alive).

Asian-Americans need protection and we need to do our best to support the Asian community in this time. If one community is hurting, then we all hurt. As soon as we recognize the problem we need to address it. We need to be better as a nation and do better by our people.
Here’s how you can help and stay updated on Asian hate: https://stopaapihate.org/