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The Federal Response to Anti-Asian Racism in the United States

The Federal Response 

to Anti-Asian Racism 

in the United States

2023 STATUTORY REPORT
U.S. COMMISSION ON CIVIL RIGHTS

The U.S. Commission on Civil Rights is an independent, 

bipartisan agency established by Congress in 1957. It is 

directed to:

• Investigate complaints alleging that citizens are 

being deprived of their right to vote by reason of 

their race, color, religion, sex, age, disability, or 

national origin, or by reason of fraudulent practices.

• Study and collect information relating to 

discrimination or a denial of equal protection of 

the laws under the Constitution because of race, 

color, religion, sex, age, disability, or national 

origin, or in the administration of justice.

• Appraise federal laws and policies with respect to 

discrimination or denial of equal protection of the laws 

because of race, color, religion, sex, age, disability, 

or national origin, or in the administration of justice.

• Serve as a national clearinghouse for information 

in respect to discrimination or denial of equal 

protection of the laws because of race, color, 

religion, sex, age, disability, or national origin.

• Submit reports, findings, and recommendations 

to the President and Congress.

• Issue public service announcements 

to discourage discrimination or denial 

of equal protection of the laws.1

1 42 U.S.C. §1975a.

MEMBERS OF THE COMMISSION

Rochelle M. Garza, Chair

Victoria F. Nourse, Vice Chair

J. Christian Adams

Stephen Gilchrist

Gail L. Heriot

Mondaire Jones

Peter N. Kirsanow

Glenn D. Magpantay

Mauro Morales, Staff Director

U.S. Commission on Civil Rights

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Washington, DC 20425

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www.usccr.gov
The Federal Response to Anti-Asian

Racism in the United States

U.S. Commission on Civil Rights

2023 Statutory Enforcement Report

Issued pursuant to 42 U.S.C. § 1975a(c)
Letter of Transmittal

September 27, 2023

President Joseph R. Biden

Vice President Kamala Harris 

Speaker of the House Kevin McCarthy

President Pro Tempore of the Senate Patty Murray

On behalf of the United States Commission on Civil Rights (“the Commission”), I am honored to 

transmit our briefing report addressing Anti-Asian hate entitled, “The Federal Response to AntiAsian Racism in the United States." The full report is available on the Commission's website at 

www.usccr.gov.

Since the start of the COVID-19 pandemic, there has been a troubling amount of incidents 

stemming from anti-Asian animus, many rising to the criminal level which has caused substantial 

concerns surrounding hate crimes and discrimination against persons of Asian descent in the 

United States. As a result, this report marks the second time the Commission has examined the 

rise of anti-Asian racism and discrimination in its 65-year history.

In May 2021, the Commission urged the Administration to address anti-Asian racism and 

xenophobia, emphasizing that scapegoating Asian communities is not a new phenomenon. These 

harmful stereotypes have persisted since the 19th Century, when Asian immigrants were unjustly 

labeled the “Yellow Peril.” Media, medical journals, and government officials propagated the 

false ideas that Asians were “dirty, diseased, sinister, sexually depraved, invasive, and 

perpetually foreign.” These stereotypes have also fueled violence against Asian communities, 

such as the 1980s “Dotbusters” attacks on South Asians in New Jersey and the post-9/11 hate 

crimes in New York City, which marked one of the FBI’s highest reported hate crime numbers 

since 1992.

In October 2022, as a response to increased reports of anti-Asian hate crime and bias-motivated 

incidents, the Commission voted to investigate the federal government’s role in combating these 

incidents. This report examines three main areas: 1) national trends and data regarding the rise of 

hate incidents and hate crimes against members of Asian communities; 2) local and state law 

enforcement’s prevention and reporting practices regarding hate crimes; and 3) federal efforts 

and policies that encourage greater participation in reporting hate crime incidents, as well as 

prosecution and enforcement efforts to prevent hate crimes. 

UNITED STATES COMMISSION ON CIVIL RIGHTS

1331 Pennsylvania Ave., NW  Suite 1150  Washington, DC 

20425 www.usccr.gov
The report emphasizes the importance of not only acknowledging the issue but also taking 

concrete actions to protect the rights and well-being of Asian Americans and Pacific Islanders 

across the nation. This report is bolstered by this Commission’s specific findings and 

recommendations (agreed upon by a bi-partisan majority), that will accompany the report for the 

first time since 2019:

Findings

Data collection & reporting:

● A major impediment to understanding the severity and magnitude of hate crimes against 

persons of Asian descent is the lack of comprehensive data.

● The transition to the NIBRS data collection has been slow for some agencies: for 2021, 

the number of participating agencies within the FBI hate crime database was 11,834, 

compared to the 15,138 participating agencies for 2020 data, and many of the agencies

that have not submitted 2021 data are the largest jurisdictions.

Recommendations

Training & Partnerships:

● Prosecutors and law enforcement should vigorously investigate and prosecute hate crimes 

and harassment against Asian Americans. 

● First responders should be provided with training aimed at teaching a clear understanding 

of what constitutes a hate crime in their jurisdiction. 

Language access: 

● Federal, state, and local law enforcement agencies and victim services need to identify 

critical deficiencies in Limited English Proficient (LEP) programs for individuals who 

need language assistance.

The Commission’s research highlights the urgent need for enhanced efforts in addressing and 

preventing anti-Asian hate crimes. The Commission heard written and oral testimony from 

academic and policy experts, federal and local law enforcement officials, and members of the 

public. The Commission also sent formal requests for information to relevant federal offices at 

the U.S. Department of Justice (DOJ) and the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) and 

conducted extensive qualitative and quantitative research regarding the impact of hate crimes and 

bias-motivated incidents against Asian Americans in the U.S. during the height of the COVID-19 

pandemic. Throughout that process, we heard from experts regarding a series of findings and 

recommendations. These recommendations, while not adopted by the majority, are essential to 

address the pressing issues surrounding anti-Asian hate incidents and hate crimes.

Findings:

● The myth of the “perpetual foreigner” continues to play a role in understanding the rise of 

anti-Asian racism and discrimination during the pandemic.
● To contextualize the increased anti-Asian sentiment during the COVID-19 pandemic, it is 

important to understand the history of anti-Asian racism and the “Yellow Peril” laws.

● During the pandemic, there were several other names that were used in the media and by 

government officials to refer to COVID-19, including the “Chinese virus,” the “Kung 

flu,” and the “Wuhan virus,” potentially perpetuating negative views of Asian individuals 

and communities and leading to many Asian Americans feeling blamed for bringing 

COVID-19 to the U.S. 

Data collection & reporting:

● A major impediment to understanding the severity and magnitude of hate crimes against 

persons of Asian descent is the lack of comprehensive data. Without mandatory national 

data collection and training law enforcement on how to accurately identify and report 

hate crimes, preventing these crimes is substantially challenging.

● Hate crime victims are less likely to report incidents due to fear of retaliation, concerns 

that justice would not be served, and distrust in the criminal justice system.

● While the transition from the FBI’s UCR to NIBRS database intended to provide a more 

complete picture of hate violence across the nation, the shift has been challenging for 

many jurisdictions, and hate crime data remains incomplete.

● The transition to the NIBRS data collection has been slow for some agencies: for 2021, 

the number of participating agencies within the FBI hate crime database was 11,834, 

compared to the 15,138 participating agencies for 2020 data, and many of the agencies

that have not submitted 2021 data are the largest jurisdictions.

● In March 2023, the FBI released a Supplemental Hate Crimes Statistics report and 

showed that the number of anti-Asian reported incidents increased 167 percent from 279 

in 2020 to 746 in 2021.

● National data show that all race-based hate crimes rose by 30 percent in 2020; and 

specifically anti-Asian hate crimes increased over 70 percent in 2020. According to the 

Bureau of Justice Assistance (BJA), anti-Asian hate crimes rose 164 percent in 16 of the 

largest cities and counties in the first quarter of 2021 compared to the same period in 

2020. BJA wrote that the first quarter increases in 2021 followed a “historic surge” in 

anti-Asian hate crimes that started in 2020, with anti-Asian hate crimes increasing 149 

percent in 16 of the largest cities in 2020. Specifically, data show that the first spike of 

anti-Asian hate crimes “occurred in March and April of 2020 concurrently with a rise in 

COVID cases and negative stereotyping of Asians related to the pandemic.”

● Hate crime data are underreported by victims and by law enforcement and are less likely 

to be reported to police compared to other types of crimes, and some research suggests 

that Asian Americans may be even less likely to report discriminatory behavior when it 

occurs.

● Data show that in California, hate crimes have increased steadily since 2019, and antiAsian hate crimes rose from 89 (6.7%) in 2020 to 248 (14.1%) in 2021. In San Francisco, 
all hate crime events increased from 2020 to 2021 (from 54 to 114), and the proportion of 

anti-Asian events increased significantly, representing 16 percent of events in 2020 and 

more than half of events in 2021.

● In New York, reported hate crimes dipped in 2020 before spiking in 2021. Anti-Asian 

hate crimes rose from 31 (6.35%) in 2020 to 140 (18.11%) in 2021. In New York City, 

the number of anti-Asian hate crimes in the city was one (0.2%) in 2019, rose to 27 

(10.2%) in 2020, and rose again to 131 (25%) in 2021. 

● In the United States, 34% of the Asian American population is limited English proficient. 

The most frequently spoken languages are Chinese, Korean, Vietnamese, Tagalog, Thai, 

Khmer, Bengali, Gujarati, Hindi, and Punjabi. 

Barriers:

● Few police departments have officers fluent in Asian languages, even in metropolitan 

areas with high numbers of AAPI residents. Therefore, language barriers continue to be a 

major barrier in reporting hate incidents and hate crimes.

● A major barrier to gaining a comprehensive understanding of the magnitude of hate 

violence against Asian communities may be due to incidents not rising to the legal 

benchmark of a hate crime. Many incidents that are reported to community organizations, 

such as being spit on or called racial slurs are not accounted for in official numbers, yet 

still invoke fear in community members.

● Under the COVID-19 Hate Crimes Act, funding is provided for state and local incident 

reporting hotlines, and in May 2022, DOJ expanded their language services to be 

available in 18 of the most frequently spoken AAPI languages across the nation. 

However, at the Commission’s briefing panelists testified the local reporting hotlines, 

victim services, and law enforcement were not accessible to victims with limited English 

proficiency, possibly pointing to a discrepancy between federal and local resource 

availability. 

● The lack of hate crime prosecutions may also be a contributing factor to low reporting of 

hate crimes. Prosecution of hate crimes is difficult, even in states with comprehensive 

hate crime legislation, because there is no one legal standard to which courts have agreed, 

or because the standard to prove bias is too high.

● Most nonprofit and community resources trying to provide the public with ways to 

combat anti-Asian violence include encouraging reporting hate incidents and hate crimes 

to local law enforcement as well as to organizations collecting data, learning about the 

history of Asian American discrimination, and encouraging elected officials to pass antihate legislation. 

● For struggling communities, the grantmaking process is cumbersome and difficult to 

maneuver through. 

● The true challenge in assessing whether the federal government is doing enough to 

combat a rise in hate crimes lies in the absence of proper performance measurements.
Recommendations:

Data & Reporting:

● FBI should require local law enforcement to submit crime data, or in lieu of that, 

Congress should make submission mandatory, or consider a range of options to expand 

implementation. 

● Congress could also consider authorizing a new grant program that would provide 

funding to state and local governments to cover expenses related to transitioning to 

NIBRS, such as purchasing new software and computers, or training officers on how to 

use NIBRS.

● Federal civil rights agencies should be required to collect and report key data related to 

civil rights enforcement and the Attorney General to annually publish this data.

● DOJ should fund state and local government efforts in partnership with community 

groups to address discrimination and other hate incidents.

● Law enforcement agencies should improve data collection, requiring the tracking and 

reporting of both hate incidents and hate crimes, and ensuring reporting forms are easy to 

mark an incident or crime as a suspected hate incident or crime.

Training & Partnerships:

● The Justice Department should also provide safety training and workshops in the 

respective languages of targeted communities and expand federal funding for community 

advocacy groups fighting hate crimes.

● The Justice Department should codify the role of the language access coordinator into 

federal law to ensure that all individuals have equal access to justice and access to federal 

programs and benefits regardless of language access. 

● A written policy within a law enforcement organization can serve as a bridge between 

hate crime legislation and implementation of that law by providing officers with 

information and a standard that the agency expects them to follow.

● Prosecutors and law enforcement should engage in joint training on hate crimes and 

community engagements and law enforcement agencies may even consider 

recommending that the prosecutor’s office have a designated attorney to prosecute hate 

crimes in the community.

● Prosecutors and law enforcement should vigorously investigate and prosecute hate crimes 

and harassment against Asian Americans. 

● First responders should be provided with training aimed at teaching a clear understanding 

of what constitutes a hate crime in their jurisdiction. 

● The FBI suggests state and local officials utilize the FBI’s resources, publicity tools, 

forensic expertise, and experience in identifying and investigating hate-based motivations 

even if federal hate crime charges are not pursued.
● A public health and gender-based approach to prevent hate in public spaces needs to be 

created, including the street harassment of AAPI women and other vulnerable 

communities. 

● More investment should be given to strengthen and expand local networks so victims 

have ready access to community-based places where they can report attacks, receive 

support services, and take safety training and workshops in their own languages.

Language access: 

● Regarding language access, federal agencies need to review their compliance with Title 

VI in Executive Order 13166 and take proactive steps to address any potential violations 

to ensure that they provide language access services to individuals who need them.

● As recipients of federal finding, local law enforcement and victim services should also 

comply with Title VI in Executive Order 13166 and provide language access such as 

interpreters and bilingual officers who speak Asian languages.

● Federal, state, and local law enforcement agencies and victim services need to identify 

critical deficiencies in Limited English Proficient (LEP) programs for individuals who 

need language assistance.

● Expand reporting hotlines or in-person contact for those limited English proficiency.

● Develop a language access policy statement prohibiting discrimination based on national 

origin that grants equal access to all individuals, including those with limited English 

proficiency and promotes effective communication through interpreter services, 

document translation, and staff training.

Civil Rights Protections:

● Title II of the Civil Rights Act should be expanded to include retail stores and other 

businesses where discrimination occurs to protect employees and customers from biasbased discrimination and harassment.

● Businesses frequented by the public should be required to train employees on their 

responsibilities to customers, so that they know and understand their responsibility to 

maintain a space free from bias-based harassment and discrimination, even if perpetrated 

by other customers.

This report provides essential insights and guidance for policymakers, law enforcement agencies, 

and community organizations working towards a more inclusive and equitable society. The 

Report is divided into three chapters: 

● Chapter 1 of the report discusses relevant federal hate crime laws, provides a brief 

historical context of Asian discrimination, and presents national statistics regarding hate 

crimes and hate incidents against persons of Asian descent from 2019-2022. 
● Chapter 2 describes local law enforcement’s efforts to respond to rising hate crimes, 

evaluates reporting and prevention practices, and summarizes ongoing reporting and 

prevention challenges. 

● Chapter 3 evaluates the federal government’s role in investigating, reporting, and 

prosecuting hate crimes.

We at the Commission are pleased to share our views, informed by careful research and 

investigation as well as civil rights expertise, to help ensure that all Americans enjoy civil rights 

protections to which we are entitled.

For the Commission,

Rochelle M. Garza

Chair
Table of Contents ix

Table of Contents

Acknowledgements ...................................................................................................................... xi

Executive Summary...................................................................................................................... 1

Chapter 1: Anti-Asian Hate Crimes Introduction and Background...................................... 13

Hate Crimes and Federal Hate Crime Laws............................................................................ 15

Federal Hate Crime Laws.............................................................................................. 18

People of Asian Descent in America: Demographics............................................................... 23

Anti-Asian Laws.......................................................................................................................... 28

The Page Act.................................................................................................................... 28

Chinese Exclusion Act .................................................................................................... 29

Geary Act......................................................................................................................... 29

Immigration Act of 1917 (Barred Zone Act)................................................................ 30

The Immigration Act of 1924......................................................................................... 31

Repeal of the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1943 (Magnuson Act)................................... 33

The Immigration and Nationality Act of 1952 (The McCarran-Walter Act) ........... 33

Executive Order 9066 ..................................................................................................... 34

Alien Land Laws............................................................................................................. 35

Historical Context of Asian Disease Blaming and Asian Stereotyping .................................. 37

Coronavirus Disease 2019................................................................................................ 44

Public Discourse and COVID-19............................................................................................... 46

The Racialization of Disease ............................................................................................ 50

Data on Anti-Asian Incidents and Hate Crimes....................................................................... 56

Federal Data Collection.............................................................................................................. 65

National Data Transition.................................................................................................. 66

Underreporting of Hate Crimes........................................................................................ 71

Hate Crimes Based on Multiple Characteristics.............................................................. 76

FBI Data ........................................................................................................................... 79

Chapter 2: Local Level Responses to Anti-Asian Hate Crimes.............................................. 85

Hate Crimes at the State and Local Level .................................................................... 85

California.......................................................................................................................... 85

New York........................................................................................................................... 97

Texas............................................................................................................................... 108

Local efforts to document and prevent anti-Asian hate crimes................................. 119
x The Federal Response to Anti-Asian Racism in the United States

California........................................................................................................................ 119

New York......................................................................................................................... 125

Texas............................................................................................................................... 131

Challenges in Reporting and Prosecuting Hate Crimes............................................ 133

Increasing Law Enforcement Presence....................................................................... 137

Best Practices for Law Enforcement and Prosecutors.............................................. 141

Community and Public Policy Organizations Efforts............................................... 145

Chapter 3: Federal Enforcement and Strategies ................................................................... 149

Department of Justice................................................................................................... 149

Civil Rights Division....................................................................................................... 151

Community Relations Services........................................................................................ 160

Office for Victims of Crime ............................................................................................. 165

Office of Juvenile Justice and Delinquency Prevention ................................................. 167

U.S. Attorneys’ Office ..................................................................................................... 173

Other Federal Efforts................................................................................................... 174

Executive and Congressional Action .............................................................................. 182

Performance Efforts........................................................................................................ 189

Findings and Recommendations.............................................................................................. 195

Statement of Commissioner Adams ........................................................................................ 197

Statement of Chair Garza ........................................................................................................ 213

Statement of Commissioner Gilchrist..................................................................................... 219

Statement of Commissioner Heriot ......................................................................................... 229

Statement of Commissioner Jones........................................................................................... 257

Statement of Commissioner Magpantay................................................................................. 263

Statement of Vice Chair Victoria Nourse................................................................................ 273

Rebuttal of Commissioner Heriot............................................................................................ 277

Rebuttal of Commissioner Magpantay ................................................................................... 305

Rebuttal of Vice Chair Nourse..................................................................................................311

Appendix.................................................................................................................................... 313
Acknowledgements xi

Acknowledgements

This report was produced under the direction of and with the contribution of Dr. Marik XavierBrier, the Commission’s Office of Civil Rights Evaluation (OCRE) Director. OCRE Social 

Scientists Dr. Nicole Hewitt,* Dr. Julie Grieco, and Dr. Patricia Fletcher performed principal 

research and writing.

Commissioners and Special Assistants Alexis Fragosa, John Mashburn, Carissa Mulder, Thomas 

Simuel, Irena Vidulovic, and Stephanie Wong assisted their commissioners in reviewing the 

report. The Commission’s General Counsel David Ganz and Attorney-Advisors Sheryl Cozart and 

Pilar Velasquez McLaughlin reviewed and approved the report for legal sufficiency.

OCRE interns Chloe Chen (B.A. Graduate 2024, Brown University), Emilie Browning (B.A. 

Graduate 2023, Whitworth University), Swasti Shah (B.A. Graduate 2023, George Washington 

University), Jessica Li Sun (B.A. Graduate 2024, Dartmouth College), Emily Utendorf (J.D. 

Candidate 2024 American University Law School), and Ashleigh Austel (J.D. Candidate 2024 

American University Law School) offered valuable research assistance. Legal intern Cody Bowler 

(B.A. 2022, University of Mary Washington) also provided valuable research and 

writing assistance.

The Maryland State Advisory Committee to the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights also collected 

and provided testimony on related civil rights issues within their respective jurisdictions.

* Employee is no longer with the Commission at the time of publication.
xii The Federal Response to Anti-Asian Racism in the United States

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Executive Summary 1

Executive Summary

Throughout 2020 and 2021 incidents of growing anti-Asian sentiment and hate crimes against 

persons of Asian descent were reported across the nation.1 Between March 19, 2020 and June 30, 

2021, there were 9,081 reported hate incidents against persons of Asian descent collected by Stop 

AAPI Hate’s reporting center.

2 Verbal harassment made up the majority (63.7 percent) of these 

incidents and national trends show that 48 percent of these reported hate incidents included at least 

one hateful statement regarding anti-China and/or anti-immigrant rhetoric.3 Specifically, these 

incidents targeted individuals whose families were either from or descended from China or 

individuals from other East Asian and Southeast Asian countries who were misperceived to be 

Chinese. Since Asian stereotypes often ignore the ethnic diversity that exists within Asian 

communities, perpetrators of anti-Asian violence may see all Asians as “foreign,” “other,” or 

“threatening” regardless of whether “the person is from China, of Chinese origin, or simply looks 

Asian,” which in turn makes all Asian people vulnerable to becoming a victim of a hate crime.4In 

light of the increase in anti-Asian racism and discrimination, this report examines the rise in antiAsian hate crimes in the U.S. from 2019 through 2021 and the federal role in preventing and 

enforcing federal hate crime laws.

In its simplest terms, a hate crime is a crime that is motivated by bias.5 The FBI defines a hate 

crime as “a traditional offense like murder, arson, or vandalism with an added element of bias.”6

Federal hate crimes, also known as bias crimes, are offenses where a perpetrator willfully causes 

or attempts to cause bodily injury –– through use of fire, a dangerous weapon, or explosive device

–– to any person because of their actual or perceived race, ethnicity, national origin, religion, 

gender, gender identity, sexual orientation, or disability status.7 Federal hate crimes laws also 

prohibit bias-based damage to religious property or interference with the right to practice one’s 

religion, using force or threats of force to interfere with federally protected activities (e.g., 

1 Federal Bureau of Investigation, Supplemental Hate Crime Statistics, 2021, Mar. 2023, 

https://www.fbi.gov/news/press-releases/fbi-releases-supplemental-2021-hate-crime-statistics.

2 Stop AAPI Hate is a nonprofit organization that runs the Stop AAPI Hate Reporting Center that tracks incidents of 

hate and discrimination targeting Asian Americans and Pacific Islanders. See Stop AAPI Hate, “National Report 

(through June 2021), https://stopaapihate.org/stop-aapi-hate-national-report-2/.

3

Ibid.

4 Hannah Tessler, Meera Choi, and Grace Kao, “The Anxiety of Being Asian American: Hate Crimes and Negative 

Biases During the COVID-19 Pandemic,” Nature Public Health Emergency Collection, 2020, vol. 45, no. 4, 

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7286555/; California Dep’t of Justice, Anti-Asian Hate Crime 

Events During the COVID-19 Pandemic, https://oag.ca.gov/system/files/media/anti-asian-hc-report.pdf

5 U.S. Dep’t of Justice, “Learn About Hate Crimes,” https://www.justice.gov/hatecrimes/learn-about-hatecrimes#:~:text=Hate%20Crime%3A%20At%20the%20federal,%2C%20threats%2C%20or%20property%20damage

6 See FBI, “Hate Crimes,” https://www.fbi.gov/investigate/civil-rights/hate-crimes (last accessed June 3, 2019). 

7 8 U.S.C. § 249(a); See also IACP Law Enforcement Policy Center, “Investigation of Hate Crimes,” IACP Law 

Enforcement Policy Center, Sept. 2016, p. 1, https://www.theiacp.org/sites/default/files/2018-

08/HateCrimesBinder2016v2.pdf.
2 The Federal Response to Anti-Asian Racism in the United States

education and the use of public accommodations) or interfere with access to housing because of 

bias-based motivation.8

A majority of states have passed hate crime statutes that allow for an additional penalty or sentence 

enhancement if prosecutors prove beyond a reasonable doubt that the crime was motivated by 

bias.9 These statutes vary from state to state in scope and coverage for protected groups, and 

whether the statutes mandate local law enforcement to compile hate crime statistics.10

Congress determined that hate crimes have reverberating effects, not only for the targeted 

community but also for the nation.11 The Supreme Court has held that the widespread, systemic 

effects of hate crimes are significant enough to justify the use of enhanced sentences against 

perpetrators found guilty of committing a hate crime.12 Additionally, these enhanced sentences for 

hate crimes are often seen as symbolically important because these laws have a signaling effect in 

sending a “message to society that criminal acts based upon hatred will not be tolerated.”13

Therefore, to address the gap in protection left by some states, Congress passed the Matthew 

Shepard and James Byrd Jr. Hate Crime Prevention Act in 2009, to protect victims who were 

targeted because of their actual or perceived race, color, religion, national origin, sexual 

orientation, ethnicity, gender identity, disability, or gender.14

As the Commission’s 2019 report In the Name of Hate: Examining the Federal Government’s Role 

in Responding to Hate Crimes pointed out, one of the greatest challenges to understanding the 

severity and magnitude of hate crimes is the lack of sufficient data. Many cities and states across 

the nation do not consistently report hate crime data to the FBI, thus, national databases are 

incomplete and may underreport the number of hate crimes across the U.S. The best sources of 

data are often from a combination of federal sources and reports collected by community 

organizations. Without more comprehensive and accurate data collection methods and better 

police training on how to accurately identify and report hate crimes, preventing these crimes from 

8 18 U.S.C. § 247 (Damage to Religious Property and Obstruction of Persons in the Free Exercise of Religious 

Beliefs); 18 U.S.C. § 245(b)(2) (Federally Protected Activities); 42 U.S.C. § 3631 (Fair Housing Act’s criminal 

prohibition against interference with a housing right because of bias).

9 U.S. Department of Justice, Community Oriented Policing Services, Hate Crimes: Problem-Oriented Guides for 

Police Problem-Specific Guides Series, 2013, No. 72, p. 8, https://ric-zai-inc.com/Publications/cops-p268-pub.pdf

10 Ibid. See also, Carley Lanich, Ashley Hopko, and Justin Parham, “State Hate Crime Laws Vary, Often Leaving 

Out LGBTQ Protections,” Center for Public Integrity, Sept. 5, 2018, https://publicintegrity.org/federal-politics/statehate-crime-laws-vary-often-leaving-out-lbgtq-protections/.

11 18 U.S.C. § 249.

12 Wisconsin v. Mitchell, 508 U.S. 476, 487–88 (1993) (holding that “bias-motivated crimes are more likely to 

provoke retaliatory crimes . . . and incite community unrest.”).

13 Valerie Jenness and Ryken Grattet, Making Hate a Crime: From Social Movement to Law Enforcement, 2002, 

(Russell Sage Foundation: New York), 3. 

14 18 U.S.C. § 249. 
Executive Summary 3

occurring in the first place becomes substantially more challenging.15 A more in-depth discussion 

about the multiple challenges to hate crime and incident reporting is in Chapter 1 of this report. 

In May 2021, the Commission issued a statement to President Biden expressing the need for the 

federal government to address anti-Asian racism and xenophobia.16 This statement reiterated the 

necessity for the federal government to communicate and act in a manner that demonstrates that it 

will protect all Americans, regardless of race, national origin, or other protected characteristics. 

Given the data reflecting the rise of anti-Asian sentiment, it is critical that the federal government 

plays a role to ensure that civil rights protections are upheld. 

Hate crimes are intended to strike fear in communities that are targeted by these heinous acts. Hate 

crime scholars suggest that cultural shifts like social, demographic, or political changes may be 

associated with greater levels of hate crimes.17 Others also explain that hate crimes are fueled by 

racial anxieties or social changes that are perceived as threatening (e.g., 9/11 attacks, the 

legalization of same-sex marriage, the election of President Barack Obama). These factors have 

always been a key motivator for bias-incidents and hate crimes.18 Therefore, many researchers 

posit that the nation’s fear of the COVID-19 pandemic was correlated to the increase of anti-Asian 

bias-incidents and hate crimes in 2020. 

The year 2020 brought tragedy for the global community and our nation with the onset of a 

pandemic that changed many people’s lives. The COVID-19 virus was first detected in China in 

2019 and spread rapidly across the world.19 By March 11, 2020, the World Health Organization 

15 Federal Bureau of Investigation, Interrogatory Responses to U.S. Commission on Civil Rights, Mar. 15, 2023 [on 

file]; see also, Detective Orlando Martinez, Hate Crime Coordinator, Los Angeles Police Department, Federal 

Response to Anti-Asian Racism in the United States, Mar. 24, 2023, transcript pp. 166-67 (hereinafter cited as AntiAsian Briefing); Brian Levin, Director, Center for the Study of Hate & Extremism, Written Statement for Anti-Asian 

Briefing, Mar. 24, 2023, at 11 (hereinafter Levin Statement).

16 U.S. Comm’n on Civil Rights, “U.S. Commission on Civil Rights Unanimously Issues Recommendations to 

Secure Nondiscrimination in the COVID-19 Pandemic Context, and Specifically to Address Anti-Asian Racism and 

Xenophobia,” May 11, 2021, https://www.usccr.gov/files/2021/05-11-Anti-Asian-Discrimination-2021-

Statement.pdf.

17 See e.g., Joshua D. Freilich and Steven M. Chermak, “Hate Crimes: Problem-Oriented Guides for Police ProblemSpecific Guides Series,” U.S. Department of Justice, Community Oriented Policing Services, June 2013, No. 72, at 

13, https://ric-zai-inc.com/Publications/cops-p268-pub.pdf; Robert Sternberg (ed.), The Psychology of Hate,

American Psychological Association, (2004); Jack McDevitt, Jack Levin, and Susan Bennett “Hate Crime 

Offenders: An Expanded Typology,” Journal of Social Issues, 2002, 58(2). 

18 See e.g., Jack McDevitt, Jack Levin, and Susan Bennett “Hate Crime Offenders: An Expanded Typology,” 

Journal of Social Issues, 2002, 58(2); Terrence McCoy, “‘Saviors of the white race’: Perpetrators of hate crimes see 

themselves as heroes, researchers say,” Washington Post, Oct. 31, 2018, 

https://www.washingtonpost.com/local/social-issues/saviors-of-the-white-race-perpetrators-of-hate-crimesseethemselves-as-heroes-researchers-say/2018/10/31/277a2bdc-daeb-11e8-

85df7a6b4d25cfbb_story.html?utm_term=.c215ad03671e.

19 Gianfranco Spiteri et al., “First cases of coronavirus 2019 (COVID-19) in the WHO European region, 24 January 

to 21 February 2020,” Eurosurveillance vol. 25, no. 9, Mar. 5, 2020, 

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7068164/.
4 The Federal Response to Anti-Asian Racism in the United States

(WHO) officially declared COVID-19 a global pandemic.20 The COVID-19 virus brought fear and 

anxiety to many Americans as the entire country experienced changes that caused interruptions to 

normal life and routine. The pandemic touched every aspect of life. The virus caused millions of 

deaths, untold physical suffering, and economic and social dislocation worldwide, including in the 

United States. Throughout 2020 and into 2022, social and economic uncertainty continued, and 

with it, the spread of violence. China failed to originally contain COVID-19 and the subsequent 

spread of the virus was blamed on China, and by extension, Chinese people, which includes those 

perceived to be Chinese. In the first few months of 2020, FBI Director Christopher Wray warned 

of a potential surge in hate crimes against Asian Americans amid the pandemic “based on the 

assumption that a portion of the U.S. public will associate COVID-19 with China and Asian 

American populations.”21 Data later suggested that this blaming of Chinese people for the virus 

contributed to an increase in bias-motivated incidents and hate crimes against Asian communities 

starting at the end of 2019 and through 2021.22

The act of scapegoating23 Asian communities in the U.S. is not a new phenomenon. Racist 

stereotypes of Asian Americans as carriers of disease first emerged following the influx of Asian 

immigrants in the 19th Century, which became known as the “Yellow Peril.” Notions that these 

individuals were “dirty, diseased, sinister, sexually depraved, invasive, and perpetually foreign” 

were “propagated by news outlets, medical journals, and government officials.” 24 These 

stereotypes also led to violence in modern times against Asian communities. For instance, in the 

1980s, violence against South Asians by a hate group who called themselves the “Dotbusters” 

terrorized Indian residents in New Jersey.25 Asian communities were again targeted for racialized 

violence and hate crimes following the 9/11 attacks in New York City. Following 9/11, the FBI 

reported one of the highest numbers of hate crimes since it began reporting on hate crimes 

in 1992.26

20 Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, “CDC’s Global Resources Pivot to Address COVID-19,” Feb. 8, 

2021, https://www.cdc.gov/globalhealth/resources/reports/annual/2021/global-resourcespivot.html#:~:text=On%20January%2030%2C%202020%2C%20following,COVID%2D19%20a%20global%20pan

demic.

21 Josh Margolin, “FBI warns of potential surge in hate crimes against Asian Americans amid coronavirus,” ABC 

News, Mar. 27, 2020, https://abcnews.go.com/US/fbi-warns-potential-surge-hate-crimes-asianamericans/story?id=69831920. 

22 Federal Bureau of Investigation, Supplemental Hate Crime Statistics, 2021, Mar. 2023, 

https://www.fbi.gov/news/press-releases/fbi-releases-supplemental-2021-hate-crime-statistics.

23 Scapegoating refers to “blaming an individual or group for something based on that person or group’s identity 

when the person or group is not responsible. Bias, prejudicial thinking and discriminatory acts can lead to 

scapegoating.” See ADL, “The Coronavirus Surfaces Fear, Stereotypes, and Scapegoating,” May 3, 2022, 

https://www.adl.org/resources/blog/coronavirus-surfaces-fear-stereotypes-and-scapegoating.

24 J. Gerard Power, Media Dependency, Bubonic Plague, and the Social Construction of the Chinese Other, Sage 

Journals, July 21, 2016, https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.1177/019685999501900106?journalCode=jcia.

25 Ricardo Kaulessar, “How Indians in Jersey City fought back against the terror of ‘Dotbusters’ in the 1980s,” 

North Jersey, Jan. 26, 2022, https://www.northjersey.com/story/news/new-jersey/2022/01/26/indians-jersey-city-njattacks-1980-s/6397092001/.

26 FBI, UCR, Hate Crimes 2001, at 5, https://ucr.fbi.gov/hate-crime/2001.
Executive Summary 5

Research also shows that the U.S. witnessed a similar rise in anti-Asian sentiment following the 

2003 severe acute respiratory syndrome (SARS) outbreak. While the SARS outbreak was not as 

widespread or deadly as COVID-19, reports at that time showed public responses of fear and 

distrust towards Asian Americans that led to many negative implications – socially, politically, 

and economically.27

Blaming a disease on a particular community or population is known as the racialization of 

disease.28 This phenomenon has led to thousands of reports by Asian Americans (regardless of 

ethnicity) being physically assaulted, spat/coughed on, verbally assaulted with racial slurs, and 

barred from business establishments. 29 Additionally, reports also found that nearly half (49 

percent) of Asian Americans and Pacific Islanders nationwide have experienced discrimination or 

unfair treatment that may have violated their civil rights.30

At the beginning of the pandemic, in March 2020, Stop AAPI Hate, a national coalition of AAPI 

(Asian American and Pacific Islanders) advocacy organizations and academics, created a website 

to track hate incidents. Within the first month of launching, the organization received 1,497 reports 

from around the nation.31 The majority of these incidents were cases of verbal harassment (69.8 

percent), most commonly at places of business (43 percent), women were harassed 2.3 times more 

often than men.32 Reports to Stop AAPI Hate came from 45 states and the District of Columbia; 

California and New York had the highest overall number of reported incidents, constituting over 

58 percent of all reports.33 Between March 20, 2020, and December 31, 2021, Stop AAPI Hate 

collected reports of 10,905 incidents; of those, 4,632 occurred in 2020 (42.5 percent) and 6,273 in 

2021 (57.5 percent).

34 While the majority of these reported incidents did not meet the legal 

definition of a hate crime, these incidents caused widespread fear and anxiety among Asian 

communities during the pandemic.35

27 See e.g., Justin A. Chen, Emily Zhang, and Cindy H. Liu, “Potential Impact of COVID-19–Related Racial 

Discrimination on the Health of Asian Americans,” American Journal of Public Health COVID-19, vol. 110, no. 11, 

Nov. 2020, https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7542280/pdf/AJPH.2020.305858.pdf.

28 Austin Mardon, Fatima Arshad Syed, Faried Nasir, Yvette Mae Morte and Catherine Mardon, The Racialization 

of Coronavirus and Hate Crimes, Chapter 4, in Historical Cases of Racialized Disease, 2020, Golden Meteorite 

Press.

29 Aggie J. Yellow Horse, Russell Jeung, and Ronae Matriano, “Stop AAPI Hate National Report,” Mar. 1, 2022, 

https://stopaapihate.org/wp-content/uploads/2022/03/22-SAH-NationalReport-3.1.22-v9.pdf.

30 Stop AAPI Hate, Righting Wrongs: How Civil Rights Can Protect Asian Americans & Pacific Islanders Against 

Racism, May 2023, p. 8, https://stopaapihate.org/wp-content/uploads/2023/05/23-SAH-CivilRightsReport.pdf.

31 Russell Jeung, Incidents of Coronavirus-related Discrimination, A Report for A3PCON and CAA, Apr. 23, 2020, 

https://www.asianpacificpolicyandplanningcouncil.org/wpcontent/uploads/STOP_AAPI_HATE_MONTHLY_REPORT_4_23_20.pdf.

32 Ibid.

33 Ibid.

34 Aggie J. Yellow Horse, Russell Jeung, Ronae Matriano, “Stop AAPI Hate: National Report, 3/19/20-12/31/21”, 

Mar. 22, 2022, https://stopaapihate.org/wp-content/uploads/2022/03/22-SAH-NationalReport-3.1.22-v9.pdf.

35 Hannah Tessler, Meera Choi, and Grace Kao, “The Anxiety of Being Asian American: Hate Crimes and Negative 

Biases During the COVID-19 Pandemic,” American Journal of Criminal Justice, vol. 45, no. 4, 2020, 
6 The Federal Response to Anti-Asian Racism in the United States

Research indicates a correlation between the rise in anti-Asian violence during the COVID-19 

pandemic and the language utilized by politicians and the media during the initial outbreak.36

Discourse about the virus led to the stigmatization of Asian communities and perpetuated the 

notion that China was–– and by extension, Chinese people –– were responsible for the spread of 

COVID-19. For example, some members of the Trump Administration referred to COVID-19 as 

the “Wuhan Virus,” “Chinese Virus,” and “Kung Flu.”37 The rise in violence and bias-motivated 

attacks on Asian communities in many ways mirrors the increase of racist anti-Asian sentiments 

seen during the time of the “Yellow Peril” in the 19th Century due in part to Asian Americans being 

seen as “perpetual foreigners” and as the “physical embodiment of foreignness and disease.”

38

In response to increased reports of anti-Asian hate crime and bias-motivated incidents in October 

2022, the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights (Commission) voted to investigate the federal 

government’s role in combating these crimes. This is the second time the Commission has 

examined the rise of anti-Asian racism and discrimination in its 65-year history.39 This report 

examines three main areas: 1) national trends and data regarding the rise of hate incidents and 

hate crimes against members of Asian communities; 2) local and state law enforcement’s 

prevention and reporting practices regarding hate crimes; and 3) federal efforts and policies that 

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7286555/; Angela Glover, Shannon Harper, and Lynn Langton, 

“Anti-Asian Hate Crime During the COVID-19 Pandemic: Exploring the Reproduction of Inequality,” American 

Journal of Criminal Justice, 2020, vol. 45, no. 4, https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/32837171/; Dominique 

Marangoni-Simonsen, “A Forgotten History: How the Asian American Workforce Cultivated Monterey County’s 

Agricultural Industry, Despite National Anti-Asian Rhetoric,” Hastings Environmental Law Journal, 2021, vol. 27, 

no. 1, 

https://repository.uchastings.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1595&context=hastings_environmental_law_journal; 

Grace Kim and Tanvi Shah, “When Perceptions Are Fragile But Also Enduring: An Asian American Reflection on 

COVID-19,” Journal of Humanistic Psychology, Sept. 2020, vol. 60, no. 5,

https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/epub/10.1177/0022167820937485.

36 Sean Darling-Hammond, Eli Michaels, Amani Allen, David Chae, Marilyn Thomas, Thu Nguyen, Mahasin 

Mujahid, and Rucker Johnson, “After ‘The China Virus’ Went Viral: Racially Charged Coronavirus Coverage and 

Trends in Bias Against Asian Americans,” Health Education and Behavior, Sept. 2020, vol. 47, no. 6,

https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.1177/1090198120957949; Hyunyi Cho, Wenbo Li, Julie Cannon, Rachel 

Lopez, and Chi (Chuck) Song, “Testing three explanations for stigmatization of people of Asian descent during 

COVID-19: maladaptive coping, biased media use, or racial prejudice?” Ethnicity & Health, Oct. 2020, vol. 26, 

https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/13557858.2020.1830035.

37 Yao Li and Harvey Nicholson, “When ‘model minorities’ become ‘yellow peril’ – Othering and the racialization 

of Asian Americans in the COVID-19 pandemic,” Sociology Compass, Feb. 2021, vol. 15, no. 2, 

https://compass.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/epdf/10.1111/soc4.12849; Angela Glover, Shannon Harper, and Lynn 

Langton, “Anti-Asian Hate Crime During the COVID-19 Pandemic: Exploring the Reproduction of Inequality,” 

American Journal of Criminal Justice, 2020, vol. 45, no. 4, https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/32837171/; Tyler Reny 

and Matt Baretto, “Xenophobia in the Time of Pandemic: Othering, anti-Asian Attitudes, and COVID-19,” Politics, 

Groups, and Identities, May 2020, vol. 10, no. 2, 

https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/21565503.2020.1769693?journalCode=rpgi20.

38 Hannah Tessler, Meera Choi, and Grace Kao, “The Anxiety of Being Asian American: Hate Crimes and Negative 

Biases During the COVID-19 Pandemic,” American Journal of Criminal Justice, vol. 45, no. 4, 2020, 

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7286555/.

39 See U.S. Commission on Civil Rights, Civil Rights Issues Facing Asian Americans in the 1990s, Feb. 1992, 

https://www.ojp.gov/pdffiles1/Digitization/135906NCJRS.pdf.
Executive Summary 7

encourage greater participation in reporting hate crime incidents, as well as prosecution and 

enforcement efforts to prevent hate crimes. 

On March 24, 2023, the Commission held a briefing in which it received written and oral testimony 

from academic and policy experts, federal and local law enforcement officials, and members of 

the public. The Commission also sent formal requests for information to relevant federal offices

at the U.S. Department of Justice (DOJ) and the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) and 

conducted extensive qualitative and quantitative research regarding the impact of hate crimes 

and bias-motivated incidents against Asian Americans in the U.S. during the height of the COVID19 pandemic.

In addition to examining hate crimes on the national level, three states were selected for analysis 

in this report: California, New York, and Texas. These states were selected because they have the 

largest Asian communities in the continental U.S., respectively,

40 and all experienced an increase 

in hate incidents during the pandemic. In California, the proportion of anti-Asian bias-motivated 

incidents more than doubled from 2020 to 2021 (from 6.7 percent to 14.1 percent), while the actual 

number of incidents almost tripled in the same time span (from 89 in 2020 to 248 in 2021).41 A 

large study by Stop AAPI Hate, examining incidents at a national level from March 19, 2020 to 

December 31, 2021, found that the largest share (38 percent) of incidents occurred in California.42

A California-specific report by Stop AAPI Hate found that 63 percent of the state’s incidents were 

reported by women.43 Like incidents at the state level, the proportion of anti-Asian incidents in 

San Francisco also increased significantly, representing 16 percent of bias-motivated incidents in 

2020 and 52 percent of bias-motivated incidents in 2021.44

In New York, there was a clear uptick in anti-Asian hate crime incidents from 2019 through 2021. 

New York experienced five anti-Asian hate crimes in 2019, followed by 31 in 2020, which 

according to New York State’s Department of Criminal Justice Services, was the highest number 

reported since reliable and complete hate crime reporting began in 2010.45 However, 2021 saw an 

even larger increase, with 140 anti-Asian hate crimes.46

40 Office of Minority Health, “Profile: Asian Americans,” U.S. Dep’t of Health and Human Services, 

https://minorityhealth.hhs.gov/omh/browse.aspx?lvl=3&lvlid=63.

41 California OpenJustice Data Portal, https://openjustice.doj.ca.gov/data (accessed Dec. 14, 2022).

42 Stop AAPI Hate, National Report (Through December 31, 2021), Mar. 4, 2022, https://stopaapihate.org/wpcontent/uploads/2022/03/22-SAH-NationalReport-3.1.22-v9.pdf.

43 Stop AAPI Hate, California State Policy Recommendations to Address AAPI Hate: A Starting Point for Taking 

Action, Oct. 13, 2021, https://drive.google.com/file/d/1uPFwB0ZbOoQnVs0FXPrlfTkIK3LLM41Y/view.

44 Ibid.

45 New York State Division of Criminal Justice Services, “Hate Crime in New York State 2020 Annual Report,” 

Sept. 2021, https://www.criminaljustice.ny.gov/crimnet/ojsa/FINAL2020-Domestic-Homicide-Report12-21.pdf; 

Personal correspondence with New York Division of Criminal Justice Services, Mar. 21, 2023.

46 New York State Division of Criminal Justice Services, “Hate Crime in New York State 2021 Annual Report, 

https://www.criminaljustice.ny.gov/crimnet/ojsa/hate-crime-in-nys-2021-annual-report.pdf. 
8 The Federal Response to Anti-Asian Racism in the United States

The proportion of anti-Asian bias-motivated incidents in New York increased from less than 1

percent of bias-motivated incidents in 2019, to more than 6 percent in 2020, and to more than 18 

percent in 2021.47 In New York City, the data also showed that the number of anti-Asian hate 

crimes were increasing through 2020 and 2021. For instance, the number of anti-Asian hate crimes 

in the city was one (1) in 2019, rose to 27 in 2020, and rose again to 131 in 2021. By December 

2021, the New York Police Department (NYPD) reported that incidents targeting Asian residents 

rose by 361 percent from the previous year.48

However, this notable uptick might still undercount anti-Asian hate crimes. Some Asian New 

Yorkers did not report incidents to the police due to a lack of trust that their concerns would be 

properly addressed because of the lack of hate crime charges, prosecutions, and convictions 

following these incidents. 49 The Asian American Bar Association of New York (AABANY) 

analyzed 233 anti-Asian hate crimes in New York City from the first three quarters of 2021 and 

found that only seven led to hate crime convictions.50 Further discussion regarding the data and 

challenges in prosecuting hate crimes is included in Chapter 2 of this report. 

According to the Texas Department of Public Safety, the proportion of hate crimes that were 

motivated by anti-Asian bias was 1 percent in 2019, rose to 2.3 percent in 2020, and rose slightly 

again to 2.5 percent in 2021. Due to a low number of reported hate crimes overall, Houston did 

not see a noticeable increase in official anti-Asian hate crimes during the examined years. With

zero reported anti-Asian incidents in 2019, the city experienced an increase in the proportion of 

these crimes in 2020, at either 4.7 percent in the FBI data or 2.3 percent in the Texas Department 

of Public Safety data.51 Discrepancies between these two sources highlight some of the reporting 

issues between federal and state or local databases, which makes understanding the magnitude of 

hate crimes difficult. However, both sources show low numbers of hate crimes generally as well 

as hate crimes motivated by anti-Asian bias, which scholars posit reflects the underreported nature 

of these crimes rather than an accurate account of the number of hate crimes.

47 Note: the NYPD uses the same definition for hate crimes and bias incidents: “A bias incident is any offense or 

unlawful act that is motivated in whole or substantial part by a person’s, a group’s or a place’s identification with a 

particular race, color, religion, ethnicity, gender, age, disability, ancestry, national origin, or sexual orientation 

(including gay, lesbian, bisexual, and transgender) as determined by the commanding officer of the Hate Crime Task 

Force.” New York State, “Hate Crimes by County and Bias Type: Beginning 2010, https://data.ny.gov/PublicSafety/Hate-Crimes-by-County-and-Bias-Type-Beginning-2010/6xda-q7ev (accessed Feb. 15, 2023).

48 Kimmy Yam, “NYPD reports 361 percent increase in anti-Asian hate crimes since last year,” NBC News, Dec. 10, 

2021, https://www.nbcnews.com/news/asian-america/nypd-reports-361-percent-increase-anti-asian-hate-crimes-lastyear-rcna8427.

49 Nicole Hong and Jonah E. Bromwich, “Asian-Americans Are Being Attacked. Why Are Hate Crime Charges So 

Rare?” The New York Times, Mar. 18, 2021, https://www.nytimes.com/2021/03/18/nyregion/asian-hate-crimes.html.

50 Asian American Bar Association of New York, Endless Tide: The Continuing Struggle to Overcome Anti-Asian 

Hate in New York, May 2022, 

https://cdn.ymaws.com/www.aabany.org/resource/resmgr/aavtf/Endless_Tide_Report_2022_FIN.pdf.

51 Federal Bureau of Investigation, “Crime Data Explorer,” https://crime-data-explorer.app.cloud.gov/pages/home

(as of Dec. 31, 2022); Texas Department of Public Safety, Summary of Hate Crime Detail for Each ORI – All 

Agencies, https://txucr.nibrs.com/Report/HateCrime.
Executive Summary 9

In California, hate crime numbers during the pandemic also vary depending on the source

examined. For instance, the FBI’s Crime Data Explorer (CDE) site reports that 73 incidents 

occurred in 2021, while the California DOJ reports 1,763 incidents.52 This large discrepancy is due 

to the number of agencies reporting to the FBI changing from year to year. For example, in 2020, 

732 of the 740 law enforcement agencies in the state provided data, whereas in 2021, the FBI only 

received data from 15 agencies in California.53 This is likely due to the requirement that agencies 

transition their reporting statistics to the National Incident-Based Reporting System (NIBRS) from 

the FBI’s Uniform Crime Reporting (UCR) system starting in January 2021.54

Data collected from New York in 2021 show that the FBI reported a much lower number of biasmotivated incidents than the state itself. This discrepancy is likely due to agencies failing to report

hate crimes to the FBI through its NIBRS database.

55 In 2020, 559 of the 595 law enforcement 

agencies in the state provided data. In 2021, the FBI only received data from only 124 agencies in 

the state.56 Texas did not see a drop in reporting to the FBI in 2021 yet did report fewer hate crime 

incidents than New York and California.57

While the transition to the NIBRS reporting database was intended to provide a more complete 

picture of crime across the nation, the change has been challenging for many jurisdictions and hate 

crime data remains incomplete. In response to the Commission’s interrogatory requests, the FBI 

informed the Commission that because many law enforcement agencies were not able to submit 

their hate crime data to NIBRS, participation across the country was down by 22 percent for 

2021.58 There are also potential issues in the way police departments determined whether or not a 

crime was motivated by bias and subsequently, and the way police departments reported that 

information to federal authorities. In 2020, nearly 25 percent of large cities did not report any hate 

crimes.59 This likely reflects an issue with reporting, as it is “a statistical near-impossibility” that 

none of those cities experienced a single hate crime in that year.60 Additionally, local and state 

numbers may differ from federal numbers due to definitional issues.61

52 Federal Bureau of Investigation, “Crime Data Explorer,” 

https://cde.ucr.cjis.gov/LATEST/webapp/#/pages/explorer/crime/hate-crime.

53 Ibid.

54 Federal Bureau of Investigation Interrogatory Responses to the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights, Mar. 15, 2023, 

pp. 3-4, [on file]; see also infra notes 434-444 (national data transition).

55 See infra notes 434-444 (discussing national data transition); see also, Federal Bureau of Investigation 

Interrogatory Responses to the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights, Mar. 15, 2023, pp. 3-4 [on file].

56 Federal Bureau of Investigation, “Crime Data Explorer,” 

https://cde.ucr.cjis.gov/LATEST/webapp/#/pages/explorer/crime/hate-crime.

57 U.S. Commission on Civil Rights, In the Name of Hate: Examining the Federal Government’s Role in Responding 

to Hate Crimes, Nov. 2019, pp. 179, https://www.usccr.gov/files/pubs/2019/11-13-In-the-Name-of-Hate.pdf.

58 Federal Bureau of Investigation, Interrogatory Responses to the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights, Mar. 15, 2023, 

pp. 3-4 [on file].

59 Beatrice Jin, “Biden signed a new hate crimes law – but there’s a big flaw,” Politico, May 20, 2021, 

https://www.politico.com/interactives/2021/state-hate-crime-laws/.

60 Ibid. 

61 See infra notes 845-849.
10 The Federal Response to Anti-Asian Racism in the United States

The federal government also has a significant role in enforcing constitutional protections and 

safeguarding individuals from hate crimes. The Department of Justice (DOJ) states that “[o]f all 

crimes, hate crimes are [the] most likely to create or exacerbate tensions, which can trigger larger 

community-wide racial conflict, civil disturbances, and even riots.”62 In May 2020, in a joint letter 

to the Justice Department, 16 Senators asked the Civil Rights Division to inform Congress of the 

steps the agency has taken to respond to the rise of discrimination, harassment, and hate crimes 

against Asian communities.63 Following that letter on March 23, 2021, Senator Mazie K. Hirono 

introduced the COVID-19 Hate Crimes Act,64 and Senator Richard Blumenthal introduced the

Khalid Jabara and Heather Heyer National Opposition to Hate, Assault, and Threats Equality Act 

of 2021 (Jabara-Heyer NO HATE Act) on April 13, 2021.65 Both bills were passed and President 

Biden signed them into law as part of one joint bill on May 21, 2021.

66 The legislation calls on the 

DOJ to implement several programs and initiatives to combat anti-Asian hate crimes. Some of 

these include expediting the review of hate crime cases, collecting and disaggregating data based 

on distinctive characteristics (e.g., race and national origin), expanding educational and outreach 

programs, establishing state-run hotlines, setting up state and local government grants, conducting 

law enforcement activities and crime reduction programs to prevent, address, and respond to 

hate crimes.67

On the first anniversary of the enactment of the Jabara-Heyer NO HATE Act, the DOJ announced 

a series of actions to deter and confront bias incidents.68 These actions included issuing new 

guidance in partnership with the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) to raise 

awareness of hate crimes during the COVID-19 pandemic, 69 releasing grant solicitations for 

programs to create state-run hotlines, and the creation of an Anti-Hate Crimes Resource 

Coordinator and a Language Access Coordinator.70 The Act also requested effective responses 

from various DOJ divisions, sought to identify resources for the victims and their communities, 

and wanted to build cooperation from community organizations to combat hate crimes.71 On the 

second anniversary of the enactment of the COVID-19 Hate Crimes Act and the Jabara-Heyer NO 

62 U.S. Dep’t of Justice, Community Relations Service, Hate Crime: The Violence of Intolerance, Dec. 2001, ¶4, 

https://www.justice.gov/archive/crs/pubs/crs_pub_hate_crime_bulletin_1201.htm. 

63 United State Senate, Letter to U.S. Department of Justice, May 20, 2020, 

https://www.hirono.senate.gov/imo/media/doc/Letter%20to%20DOJ%20re%20anti-AAPI%20discrimination.pdf

64 34 U.S.C. Chapter 305 or 34 U.S.C. §§ 30501-30507.

65 Id.

66 Id.

67 Id.

68 Department of Justice, Office of Public Affairs, Justice Department Announces New Initiatives to Address and 

Prevent Hate Crimes and Hate Incidents, Friday, May 29, 2022, https://www.justice.gov/opa/pr/justice-departmentannounces-new-initiatives-address-and-prevent-hate-crimes-and-hate.

69 Ibid.

70 Ibid.

71 U.S. Department of Justice: Combatting Hate Crimes, https://www.justice.gov/opa/pressrelease/file/1428666/download.
Executive Summary 11

HATE Act, the DOJ published a fact sheet outlining its efforts to increase resources to deter and 

combat hate crimes and incidents.72

Despite these efforts, many politicians and Asian American community organizations have called 

for a more effective response from the federal government.73 Some of these responses included

developing resources that provide the public with ways to combat anti-Asian violence. Another 

strategy encouraged broader reporting of hate incidents and hate crimes to local law enforcement 

and assurance that information is communicated to the various organizations who collect 

hate crime data.74 Other strategies included programs to educate the public about the history of 

Asian American discrimination, and to encourage elected officials to pass anti-hate legislation in 

their state.

75

Community stakeholders and experts have called for increasing language access to reduce barriers 

in reporting hate crimes, hate incidents, and possible civil rights discrimination,76 as authorized in 

the COVID-19 Hate Crimes Act of 2021.77 Additionally, community groups have expressed a need 

for improved data collection and a standardized and codified understanding of hate incidents to 

further prevent anti-Asian hate crimes. 78 For instance, John Yang, President and Executive 

Director of Asian Americans Advancing Justice (AAJC) testified that:

Recognizing that comprehensive data are an essential part of understanding, responding to, 

and preventing hate crimes, Advancing Justice has joined with fellow civil rights advocates 

to urge the Justice Department and the FBI to make greater efforts to swiftly and effectively 

complete the transition to NIBRS, which we believe will yield more accurate data in time. 

72 Dep’t of Justice, “Fact Sheet: Justice Department Efforts to Combat Hate Crimes,” May 20, 2023, 

https://www.justice.gov/hatecrimes/spotlight/combating-hate-crimes.

73 See e.g., Rui Kaneya, “After a spike in anti-Asian hate crimes, the government response stalls,” The Center for 

Public Integrity, Dec. 10, 2021, https://publicintegrity.org/inside-publici/newsletters/watchdog-newsletter/spikeanti-asian-hate-crimes-response-stalls/; Seashia Vang, “U.S. Government Should Better Combat Anti-Asian 

Racism,” Human Rights Watch, Apr. 17, 2020, https://www.hrw.org/news/2020/04/17/us-government-shouldbetter-combat-anti-asian-racism.

74 Tiffany Liu, “Texas ranks 4th in anti-Asian incidents; how to stop the hate,” WFAA, Mar. 23, 2021, 

https://www.wfaa.com/article/news/local/texas/texas-ranks-4th-in-anti-asian-racist-incidents-how-to-stop-the-aapihate/287-6f10e1f8-64c4-4434-8be3-71fca2eb8a3e; Vignesh Ramachandran, “What you can do to fight violence and 

racism against Asian Americans,” PBS, Mar. 18, 2021, https://www.pbs.org/newshour/nation/what-you-can-do-tofight-violence-and-racism-against-asian-americans.

75 Tiffany Liu, “Texas ranks 4th in anti-Asian incidents; how to stop the hate,” WFAA, Mar. 23, 2021, 

https://www.wfaa.com/article/news/local/texas/texas-ranks-4th-in-anti-asian-racist-incidents-how-to-stop-the-aapihate/287-6f10e1f8-64c4-4434-8be3-71fca2eb8a3e; Vignesh Ramachandran, “What you can do to fight violence and 

racism against Asian Americans,” PBS, Mar. 18, 2021, https://www.pbs.org/newshour/nation/what-you-can-do-tofight-violence-and-racism-against-asian-americans.

76 Stop AAPI Hate, Righting Wrongs: How Civil Rights Can Protect Asian Americans and Pacific Islanders Against 

Racism, May 2023, p. 19, https://stopaapihate.org/wp-content/uploads/2023/05/23-SAH-CivilRightsReport.pdf.

77 S.937 – (COVID-19 Hate Crimes Act), https://www.congress.gov/117/plaws/publ13/PLAW-117publ13.pdf.

78 Stop AAPI Hate, Righting Wrongs: How Civil Rights Can Protect Asian Americans and Pacific Islanders Against 

Racism, May 2023, p. 19, https://stopaapihate.org/wp-content/uploads/2023/05/23-SAH-CivilRightsReport.pdf.
12 The Federal Response to Anti-Asian Racism in the United States

We continue to advocate for improved reporting and data collection, including exploring 

making reporting to the FBI by law enforcement mandatory.79

Fully preventing and eradicating hate violence against targeted communities may not be possible. 

However, developing effective strategies to respond to these crimes, reducing reporting barriers, 

and expanding data collection can build trust between law enforcement and communities who feel 

threatened. Additionally, recognizing the significance of hate crimes and the pain they cause to 

communities is critical to raise awareness of the problem and develop effective local, state, and 

federal responses that can help police and prosecutors better understand where and how such 

incidents occur. While this report specifically focuses on hate crimes directed towards Asian 

Americans during the COVID-19 pandemic, hate crimes are not exclusive to the Asian American 

population and affect many minority and marginalized populations. Developing effective laws 

and responses to hate violence by law enforcement officials can send a message to all targeted 

communities that these actions are not condoned. Kamala Harris, the first Asian American Vice 

President, stated: 

This violence – it did not come from nowhere, and none of this is new. In my life, my lived 

experience, I have seen how hate can pervade our communities. I have seen how hate can 

impede our progress. And I have seen how people uniting against hate can strengthen our 

country. Here’s the truth: Racism exists in America. Xenophobia exists in America, 

antisemitism, Islamophobia, homophobia, transphobia – it all exists. And so, the work to 

address injustice wherever it exists remains the work ahead.80 

This report is divided into three chapters. Chapter 1 of the report discusses relevant federal hate 

crime laws, provides a brief historical context of Asian discrimination, and presents national 

statistics regarding hate crimes and hate incidents against persons of Asian descent from 2019-

2022. Chapter 2 describes local law enforcement’s efforts to respond to rising hate crimes, 

evaluates reporting and prevention practices, and summarizes ongoing reporting and prevention 

challenges. Chapter 3 evaluates the federal government’s role in investigating, reporting, and 

prosecuting hate crimes. The report concludes with the Commissioners’ findings and

recommendations based upon the research.

79 John Yang, President and Executive Director, Asian Americans Advancing Justice, Written Statement for AntiAsian Briefing, Mar. 24, 2023, at 11 (hereinafter Yang Statement).

80 Barbara Sprunt, “Here’s What The New Hate Crimes Law Aims To Do As Attacks On Asian Americans Rise,” 

NPR, May 20, 2021, https://www.npr.org/2021/05/20/998599775/biden-to-sign-the-covid-19-hate-crimes-bill-asanti-asian-american-attacks-rise.
Anti-Asian Hate Crimes Introduction and Background 13

Chapter 1: Anti-Asian Hate Crimes Introduction and Background

The year 2020 will stand out as a significant year in the lives of people all around the world.

81 Not 

only was it the start of a new decade, but it was also the year a global pandemic infected millions 

of people and resulted in the loss of millions of lives.82 The pandemic swept through the nation

and all over the world, it was a crisis that touched every aspect of life. At the time of writing this 

report, there have been 1,137,164 COVID-related deaths in the U.S.83

The first signs of the novel coronavirus, which later became known as COVID-19, were detected 

in Wuhan, China in late 2019.84 The pandemic first emerged in China with its supposed origin in 

“wet markets.”

85 This resulted in stereotypes, racism, and xenophobia towards Chinese people or 

people perceived to be Chinese.

86 As the virus spread, so did discrimination, fear, and violence

towards many members of Asian communities.

87 This discrimination manifested in various types 

of bias-motivated incidents including harassment, racial slurs, and shunning, as well as violent 

actions such as battery, assault, vandalism, and murder. Research shows that hate crimes against 

Asian Americans increased 149 percent in 2020 across 18 cities.

88 This increase in anti-Asian 

sentiment and violence during the pandemic was not the first time that persons of Asian descent 

have been scapegoated for bringing disease to the United States.

89 Nor was it the first time Asian 

Americans experienced racism in America.90

Research suggests that there are strong correlations between the media and government officials’ 

use of racialized language to describe the COVID-19 virus, such as referring to the virus as the 

“Chinese Virus” and “Kung Flu,” which likely may have contributed to the rise in hate incidents 

and hate crimes throughout 2020 and 2021. 91 Civil rights and Asian American advocacy 

81 Reid Wilson,” Why 2020 really was the worst year ever,” The Hill, December 27, 2020, 

https://thehill.com/homenews/state-watch/531279-why-2020-really-was-the-worst-year-ever/.

82 World Health Organization, “WHO Coronavirus (COVID-19) Dashboard, https://covid19.who.int/.

83 CDC, Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, National Center for Health Statistics, COVID-19 Death Data, 

https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/covid19/mortality-overview.htm (accessed July. 13, 2023).

84 Ibid.

85 Dyani Lewis, Max Kozlov, and Mariana Lenharo, “COVID-origins data from Wuhan market published: what 

scientists think,” Nature, vol. 616 (2023), https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-023-00998-y.

86 Joshua Cho, “Why It’s Wrong (and Racist) to Blame Covid-19 on Chinese ‘Wet Markets’,” Fair, May 7, 2020, 

https://fair.org/home/why-its-wrong-and-racist-to-blame-covid-19-on-chinese-wet-markets/.

87 Eleanor Cummins, “The New Coronavirus is Not an Excuse to Be Racist,” The Verge, Feb. 4, 2020, 

https://www.theverge.com/2020/2/4/21121358/coronavirus-racism-social-media-east-asian-chinese-xenophobia.

88 Fact Sheet: Anti-Asian Prejudice March 2021, Center for the Study of Hate & Extremism, CSUSB, Mar. 21, 

2021, https://www.csusb.edu/sites/default/files/FACT%20SHEET-%20AntiAsian%20Hate%202020%20rev%203.21.21.pdf.

89 See supra notes 339-372 (discussing historical context of Asian disease blaming and stereotyping).

90 See supra notes 156-229 (discussing Anti-Asian laws).

91 Tyler Reny and Matt Barreto, “Xenophobia in the time of the pandemic: othering, anti-Asian attitudes, and 

COVID-19,” Politics, Groups, and Identities, vol. 10, no. 2, May 2020, 

https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/21565503.2020.1769693?journalCode=rpgi20; Sungil Han, Jordan 

Riddell, and Alex Piquero, “Anti-Asian American Hate Crimes Spike During the Early Stages of the COVID-19 
14 The Federal Response to Anti-Asian Racism in the United States

organizations argue that these terms fanned the flames of division and stoked racist stereotypes, 

which resulted in an increase in anti-Asian incidents, violence, and hate crimes.92 As such, this 

report examines the rise in anti-Asian hate crimes in the U.S. during the pandemic and the federal 

role in preventing and enforcing federal hate crime laws.

Pandemic,” Journal of Interpersonal Violence, vol. 38, no. 3-4, Feb. 2023, 

https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/35657278/.

92 See e.g., Kimmy Yam, “Trump Can't Claim 'Kung Flu' Doesn't Affect Asian Americans in this Climate, Experts 

Say,” NBC News, June 22, 2020, https://www.nbcnews.com/news/asian-america/trump-can-t-claim-kung-flu-doesnt-affect-asian-n1231812.
Anti-Asian Hate Crimes Introduction and Background 15

Hate Crimes and Federal Hate Crime Laws

At the federal level, a hate crime is “a crime motivated by bias against race, color, religion, national 

origin, sexual orientation, gender, gender identity, or disability.” 93 These crimes include any 

violent crime, such as assault, murder, arson, vandalism, or threats, that is committed based upon 

the victim’s actual or perceived identity characteristics.94 In its simplest terms, a hate crime is a 

crime whose motivation is based on bias. 95 Comparatively, hate incidents are acts that are 

motivated by prejudice and bias, but do not elevate to the level of a crime.96 These can include 

incidents such as:

• Name calling; using a racial, ethnic, or other slurs to identify someone; or using degrading 

language;

• Insults;

• Displaying hate material on your own property;

• Posting hate material that does not result in property damage;

• Distribution of materials with hate messages in public places.97

The U.S. Constitution allows for hate speech as long as it does not interfere with the civil rights of 

others. This speech, while not rising to the level of a crime, can still be hurtful, offensive, and 

cause fear and anxiety for those being targeted. However, if this speech starts to threaten a person 

or property, it may become a hate crime.

Hate Crimes Coordinator for the Los Angeles Police Department, Detective Orlando Martinez,

explained:

Legally, there is no such thing as a hate incident and the vast majority of police departments 

across the country, over 99 percent, will not complete a hate incident report. They show 

up, tell the victim who has just [] had one of the worst days of their lives, [it’s] free speech, 

[it’s protected by the] First Amendment, and they drive away. My department and others 

are some of the few that do take it, but it is not a common thing. The federal agencies do 

not take hate incident reports.

98

93 U.S. Dep’t of Justice, “Learn About Hate Crimes,” https://www.justice.gov/hatecrimes/learn-about-hatecrimes#:~:text=Hate%20Crime%3A%20At%20the%20federal,%2C%20threats%2C%20or%20property%20damage

; see also, 18 U.S.C. § 249.

94 Ibid.

95 Ibid.

96 Ibid.

97 Danville, California, “What is the Difference Between a Hate Crime and a Hate Incident?” 

https://www.danville.ca.gov/965/What-is-the-Difference-Between-a-Hate-Cr; Oregon Department of Justice, 

“What’s the Difference between a Hate or Bias Crime and a Bias Incident?” https://www.doj.state.or.us/oregondepartment-of-justice/civil-rights/bias-and-hate/whats-the-difference-between-a-hate-or-bias-crime-and-a-biasincident/. 

98 Martinez Testimony, pp.146-47.
16 The Federal Response to Anti-Asian Racism in the United States

Hate crime laws provide penalty enhancements for crimes motivated by the categories of race, 

color, national origin, religion, sexual orientation, gender, gender identity, and disability.99 Federal 

hate crime laws also prohibit damage to religious property or interference with an individual’s 

right to practice their religion, as well as the use of force or threats of force to interfere with other 

federally protected activities, such as access to education, housing, and/or public accommodations 

due to bias motivations.

100 Under the First Amendment, hate crime laws cannot prosecute 

individuals for expressing their thoughts or beliefs, even if these beliefs are inaccurate, hurtful, or 

offensive.101 Constitutional protections, however, do not protect against committing a crime.

Fifteen states, and the District of Columbia, have adopted laws protecting against crimes based on 

the federal bias categories listed above.

102 Those states are Connecticut, Delaware, Georgia, 

Hawaii, Massachusetts, Nevada, New Hampshire, New Jersey, New Mexico, New York, Oregon, 

Utah, Vermont, Virginia, and Washington.103 In contrast, South Carolina and Wyoming do not 

have hate crimes laws for any protected categories. However, as of March 2023, House Bill 3014,

known as the “Clementa C. Pinckney Hate Crimes Act,” is currently residing in the South Carolina

House legislature.104 Arkansas has a hate crime law, but its law does not refer to specific categories 

such as race/color, national origin, sexual orientation, gender/sex, gender identity or disability.105

Table 1 below shows which of the seven categories are included in each state’s laws as it relates 

to federal hate crimes laws.

99 U.S. Dep’t of Justice, “Learn About Hate Crimes,” https://www.justice.gov/hatecrimes/learn-about-hatecrimes#:~:text=Hate%20Crime%3A%20At%20the%20federal,%2C%20threats%2C%20or%20property%20damag.

100 18 U.S.C. § 247 (Damage to Religious Property and Obstruction of Persons in the Free Exercise of Religious 

Beliefs); 18 U.S.C. § 245(b)(2) (Federally Protected Activities); 42 U.S.C. § 3631 (Fair Housing Act’s criminal 

prohibition against interference with housing rights because of bias).

101 U.S. Const. amend. I.

102 Federal Laws and Policies, The United States Department of Justice, https://www.justice.gov/hatecrimes/lawsand-policies#:~:text=The%20Shepard%20Byrd%20Act%20is,sexual%20orientation%20or%20gender%20identity.

103 Federal Laws and Policies, The United States Department of Justice, https://www.justice.gov/hatecrimes/lawsand-policies#:~:text=The%20Shepard%20Byrd%20Act%20is,sexual%20orientation%20or%20gender%20identity.

104 H. 3014 (Clementa C. Pinckney Hate Crimes Act), South Carolina General Assembly, 125th Session (2023-

2024), https://www.scstatehouse.gov/sess125_2023-2024/bills/3014.htm.

105 ARK. CODE § 5-4-405; Arkansas Governor Signs Stripped-down Hate Crimes Measure, AP News, Apr. 14, 

2021, https://apnews.com/article/arkansas-legislature-legislation-crime-little-rock37f54a4dcc1a2fb3ddd3a74543828a37.
Anti-Asian Hate Crimes Introduction and Background 17

Table 1 Categories Included in Federal Hate Crimes Law in Each State

KEY: Yes No ◯

State Race/Color National

Origin

Religion Sexual

Orientation

Gender/

Sex

Gender

Identity

Disability

Alabama ◯ ◯ ◯ 

Alaska ◯ ◯ 

Arizona ◯ 

Arkansas ◯ ◯ ◯ ◯ ◯ ◯

California ◯ 

Colorado ◯ ◯ 

Connecticut 

Delaware 

District of 

Columbia

 

Florida ◯ ◯ 

Georgia 

Hawaii 

Idaho ◯ ◯ ◯ ◯

Illinois ◯ 

Indiana ◯ ◯ 

Iowa ◯ 

Kansas ◯ ◯ 

Kentucky ◯ ◯ ◯

Louisiana ◯ 

Maine ◯ 

Maryland ◯ 

Massachusetts 

Michigan ◯ ◯ ◯

Minnesota ◯ 

Mississippi ◯ ◯ ◯

Missouri ◯ 

Montana ◯ ◯ ◯ ◯

Nebraska ◯ 

Nevada 

New Hampshire 

New Jersey 

New Mexico 

New York 

North Carolina ◯ ◯ ◯
18 The Federal Response to Anti-Asian Racism in the United States

State Race/Color National

Origin

Religion Sexual

Orientation

Gender/

Sex

Gender

Identity

Disability

North Dakota ◯ ◯ ◯

Ohio ◯ ◯ ◯

Oklahoma ◯ ◯ ◯ 

Oregon 

Pennsylvania ◯ ◯ ◯ ◯

Rhode Island ◯ 

South Carolina ◯ ◯ ◯ ◯ ◯ ◯ ◯

South Dakota ◯ ◯ ◯ ◯

Tennessee ◯ 

Texas ◯ 

Utah 

Vermont 

Virginia 

Washington 

West Virginia ◯ ◯ ◯

Wisconsin ◯ ◯ 

Wyoming ◯ ◯ ◯ ◯ ◯ ◯ ◯

Updated October 14, 2022. It should be noted that state laws may also include additional types of bias not listed on 

the chart.

Source: U.S. Dep’t of Justice, “Federal Laws and Policies,” https://www.justice.gov/hatecrimes/laws-andpolicies#:~:text=The%20Shepard%20Byrd%20Act%20is,sexual%20orientation%20or%20gender%20identity.

Federal Hate Crime Laws

There are several hate crimes laws, statutes, and executive orders that have been enacted by the 

federal government. 

The Violent Interference with Federally Protected Rights was passed in 1968 with Title I of the 

Civil Rights Act of 1968, which enacted 18 U.S.C. § 245(b)(2).106 The statute makes it unlawful 

to injure, intimidate, or interfere with any person participating in any federally protected activities 

based on a person’s race, color, religion, or national origin.107 Those federally protected activities 

include:

• Enrolling in or attending a public school or public college;

• Participating in or enjoying a benefit, service, program, privilege, facility, or activity 

administered by any state or local government; 

• Applying for or enjoying employment by any U.S. agency; 

• Serving as a juror in a state court;

106 The United States Department of Justice, Hate Crime Laws, https://www.justice.gov/crt/hate-crime-laws.

107 18 U.S.C. § 245, https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/18/245.
Anti-Asian Hate Crimes Introduction and Background 19

• Traveling in or using a facility of interstate commerce; 

• Using any vehicle, terminal, or facility of any common carrier by motor, rail, water, or 

air; or

• Enjoying the goods, services, facilities, privileges of any inn, hotel, motel, or other 

establishment which provides lodging to transient guests; any restaurant, cafeteria, 

lunchroom, lunch counter, soda fountain, or other facility which serves the public; any 

gasoline station, motion picture house, theater, concert hall, sports arena, stadium, any 

other place of exhibition or entertainment which serves the public; or any establishment 

which serves the public.108

The Criminal Interference with Right to Fair Housing Act109 prohibits the use or the threat to 

use force to interfere with housing rights of any person because of race, color, religion, sex, 

national origin, disability, or familial status.110 When the law was enacted in 1968, it included the 

victim’s race, color, religion, sex, or national origin; in 1988 it was amended to include familial 

status and disability.111

The Conspiracy Against Rights Act112 prohibits two or more persons from conspiring to injure, 

threaten, or intimidate a person in any state, territory, or district in the free exercise or enjoyment 

of any right or privilege secured to the individual by the U.S. Constitution or the laws of the U.S.113

The Hate Crime Statistics Act,

114 enacted in 1990115 and amended in 2010,116 requires the Attorney 

General to “acquire data, for each calendar year, about crimes that manifest evidence of prejudice 

based on race, gender and gender identity, religion, disability, sexual orientation, or ethnicity, 

including where appropriate the crimes of murder; non-negligent manslaughter; forcible rape; 

aggravated assault; simple assault; intimidation; arson; and destruction, damage or vandalism 

of property.”117

108 Id.

109 42 U.S.C. § 3631, Violations; Penalties, https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/42/3631.

110 Id.; The United States Department of Justice, Federal Laws and Policies, Federal Hate Crimes Laws, 

https://www.justice.gov/crt/hate-crime-laws.

111 The United States Department of Justice, Federal Laws and Policies, Federal Hate Crimes Laws, 

https://www.justice.gov/crt/hate-crime-laws.

112 18 U.S.C. § 241

113 Id.; The United States Department of Justice, Federal Laws and Policies, Federal Hate Crimes Laws, 

https://www.justice.gov/hatecrimes/laws-and-policies.

114 28 U.S.C. § 534.

115 Hate Crimes Statistic Act, Pub. L. 101-275, 104 Stat. 140 (codified at 28 U.S.C. § 534), 

https://www.gpo.gov/fdsys/pkg/STATUTE-104/pdf/STATUTE-104-Pg140.pdf.

116 Hate Crime Statistics Act as Amended, 28 U.S.C. § 534, https://ucr.fbi.gov/hate-crime/2010/resources/hatecrime-2010-hate-crime-statistics-act.pdf.

117 Id.
20 The Federal Response to Anti-Asian Racism in the United States

The Church Arson Prevention Act of 1996,

118 enacted by Congress in 1996, 119 prohibits the 

intentional defacement, damage, or destruction of any religious real property because of the 

religious nature of that property, or because of the race, color, or ethnic characteristics of any 

individual associated with that religious property.120 This act also criminalizes the intentional 

obstruction of a person’s free exercise of religious beliefs by force or threat of force.121

The Matthew Shepard and James Byrd Jr. Hate Crimes Prevention Act122 (HCPA) was signed into 

law in 2009 and was the first statute to permit the federal criminal prosecution of hate crimes 

motivated by the victim’s perceived or actual sexual orientation or gender identity.123 Under 18 

U.S.C. §249, hate crimes represent offenses involving the actual or perceived race, color, religion, 

national origin, gender, sexual orientation, gender identity, or disability of the victim. 124 The 

statute indicates that “[w]hoever willfully causes bodily injury to someone or, through using a 

firearm, a dangerous weapon, or an explosive or incendiary device, attempts to cause bodily injury 

to anyone because of the actual or perceived”125 bias category “shall be fined and imprisoned for 

up to ten years or life in prison if death results or the offense includes kidnapping, aggravated 

sexual abuse or an attempt to kill.”126

A key aspect of the HCPA statute is the use of the term “actual or perceived” because “it extends 

the definition of a hate crime to protect victims who are perceived to have a protected characteristic, 

even if the assailant is mistaken.” 127 For instance, Detective Orlando Martinez, hate crime 

coordinator for the LAPD, testified that his department has “many cases where a victim was 

mistaken for having a protected characteristic when they don’t or [possess] a different protected 

characteristic, but it doesn’t matter what the victim thinks. It matters what the suspect thought.”128

Therefore, in the case of the COVID-19 pandemic, if an individual is assaulted based on the 

perception that they are Chinese, the assailant would still be charged with a hate crime, regardless 

of the actual ethnicity of the victim.

118 18 U.S.C. § 247.

119 Church Arson Prevention Act of 1996, Pub. L. 104–155, 110 Stat. 1392 (codified at, 18 U.S.C. § 247), 

https://www.govinfo.gov/content/pkg/PLAW-104publ155/pdf/PLAW-104publ155.pdf.

120 Id.

121 Id.

122 Matthew Shepard and James Byrd, Jr. Hate Crimes Prevention Act of 2009, Pub. L. No. 111-84, §§ 4701-4713, 

123 Stat. 2835, 2835-2845 (2009) (codified at 18 U.S.C. § 249) [hereinafter 18 U.S.C. § 249].

123 The United States Department of Justice, “Laws and Policies, Federal Hate Crime Laws,”

https://www.justice.gov/hatecrimes/laws-andpolicies#:~:text=The%20Shepard%20Byrd%20Act%20is,sexual%20orientation%20or%20gender%20identity.

124 18 U.S.C. § 249.

125 18 U.S.C. § 249 (a)(1).

126 18 U.S.C. § 249 (a)(1)(B). 

127 18 U.S.C. § 249 (a)(1); Eisner Gorin, “Hate Crimes, Federal Hate Crime Laws,” 18 U.S. Code § 249, 

https://www.thefederalcriminalattorneys.com/federal-hate-crimes [emphasis added].

128 Martinez Testimony, p. 145.
Anti-Asian Hate Crimes Introduction and Background 21

Most recently, Congress proposed the Khalid Jabara and Heather Heyer National Opposition to 

Hate, Assault, and Threats to Equality Act of 2021, also known as the Jabara-Heyer NO HATE 

Act of 2021 or the COVID-19 Hate Crimes Act.

129

The Jabara-Heyer NO HATE Act of 2021:

• Establishes grants for states to create state-run hate crime reporting hotlines. It also 

authorizes grants for states and local governments to implement the National IncidentBased Reporting System and to conduct law enforcement activities or crime reduction 

programs to prevent, address, or respond to hate crimes;

• Authorizes additional penalties for hate crime offenses;

• For an individual convicted of a hate crime offense and placed on supervised release, 

the [act] allows a court to order that the individual participate in educational classes or 

community service as a condition of supervised release.130

Due to the rise in hate crimes and violence against Asian Americans and Pacific Islanders (AAPI)

in 2020 following the COVID-19 pandemic,131 Congress passed and the President signed the NO 

HATE Act, which “facilitates the expedited review of COVID-19 hate crimes.”132 Under the Act, 

the Attorney General shall designate an officer or employee of the Department of Justice (DOJ) to 

be responsible for facilitating an expedited review of hate crimes and reports of any such crime to 

federal, state, local, and tribal law enforcement agencies.133

Additionally, the Attorney General shall issue guidance on how to:

1) establish online reporting of hate crimes or incidents, and to have online reporting that is 

equally effective for people with disabilities as for people without disabilities available in 

multiple languages as determined by the Attorney General;

2) collect data disaggregated by the protected characteristics described in Section 249 of Title 

18, United States Code; and

3) expand public education campaigns aimed at raising awareness of hate crimes and reaching 

victims. The education campaigns should be equally effective for people with disabilities 

as for people without disabilities.134

In an effort to further address the increase in anti-Asian hate crimes, on January 26, 2021, President 

Biden issued “The Memorandum Condemning and Combating Racism, Xenophobia, and 

Intolerance Against Asian Americans and Pacific Islanders in the United States,” which formally

acknowledges that during the COVID-19 pandemic, Asian American and Pacific Islander persons 

129 34 U.S.C. Chapter 305 or 34 U.S.C. §§ 30501-30507.

130 Id.

131 Id.

132 Id.

133 Id.

134 COVID-19 Hate Crimes Act, Pub.L. No: 117-13, 135 Stat. 265 (Codified at 34 U.S.C. § 30501 note).
22 The Federal Response to Anti-Asian Racism in the United States

were targets of inflammatory and racist rhetoric. 135 In addition, the memorandum states the

“Federal Government must recognize that it has played a role in furthering these xenophobic 

sentiments through the actions of political leaders, including references to the COVID-19 

pandemic by the geographic location of its origin.”

136

The memorandum sets forth: 

1) a declaration against racism, xenophobia, and intolerance concerning persons of AAPI 

descent; 

2) guidance describing best practices for advancing cultural competency, language access, 

and sensitivity towards Asian Americans and Pacific Islanders; and 

3) calls to expand the collection of data and public reporting regarding hate incidents against 

such individuals.137

For a more detailed discussion regarding the role of the federal government in preventing hate 

crimes and enforcing hate crimes laws, see Chapter 3 of this report.

135 Memorandum of President of the United States, Jan. 26, 2021, 86 F.R. 7485; Memorandum Condemning and 

Combating Racism, Xenophobia, and Intolerance Against Asian Americans and Pacific Islanders in the United 

States. The White House. Executive Office of the President. (January 26, 2021). 

https://www.whitehouse.gov/briefing-room/presidential-actions/2021/01/26/memorandum-condemning-andcombating-racism-xenophobia-and-intolerance-against-asian-americans-and-pacific-islanders-in-the-united-states/.

136 Id.

137 Memorandum of President of the United States, Jan. 26, 2021, 86 F.R. 7485; Memorandum Condemning and 

Combating Racism, Xenophobia, and Intolerance Against Asian Americans and Pacific Islanders in the United 

States. The White House. Executive Office of the President. (January 26, 2021). 

https://www.whitehouse.gov/briefing-room/presidential-actions/2021/01/26/memorandum-condemning-andcombating-racism-xenophobia-and-intolerance-against-asian-americans-and-pacific-islanders-in-the-united-states/.
Anti-Asian Hate Crimes Introduction and Background 23

People of Asian Descent in America: Demographics

The U.S. Census Bureau (Census) defines Asian as “a person having origins in any of the original 

peoples of the Far East, Southeast Asia, or the Indian subcontinent including, for example, 

Cambodia, China, India, Japan, Korea, Malaysia, Pakistan, the Philippine Islands, Thailand, and 

Vietnam.”138 Based on Census estimates, the U.S. population in 2020, 2021, and 2022 consisted 

of 331.4 million, 332.0 million and 333.3 million people, respectively.139 Those who reported 

being solely of Asian descent (i.e., Asian alone) account for approximately 6.3 percent of the 

population.140 In 2020, 2021, and 2022, there were approximately 20.21 million, 20.25 million, 

and 20.33 million people who self-identified as being of solely Asian descent in the U.S.141 In 

contrast, as of July 2022, White alone, not Hispanic/Latino represent 58.9 percent; Hispanic or 

Latino alone represent 19.1 percent; Black alone represent 13.6 percent; American Indian and 

Alaska Natives alone represent 1.3 percent; and Native Hawaiian and other Pacific Islander alone

represent less than one percent (0.3 percent) of the population.142

In the U.S., people of Asian descent are not a single monolithic group.143 They come from the 

diverse Asian diaspora.144 The six largest Asian populations in the U.S. include:

• Chinese (excluding Taiwanese): 4,151,009 persons;

• Asian Indians: 4,143,134 persons;

• Filipinos: 2,884,210 persons;

• Vietnamese: 1,852,906 persons;

• Koreans: 1,477,325 persons; and

• Japanese: 768,985 persons.145

Other less populous Asian groups include individuals of Pakistani-descent: 500,159; Hmongdescent: 532,135; Cambodian-descent: 259,525; Thai-descent: 204,150; and Taiwanese-descent: 

138 The United States Census Bureau, About the Topic of Race, 

https://www.census.gov/topics/population/race/about.html#:~:text=Asian%20%E2%80%93%20A%20person%20ha

ving%20origins,Islands%2C%20Thailand%2C%20and%20Vietnam.

139 United States Census Bureau, Quick Facts, (as of July 1, 2022), 

https://www.census.gov/quickfacts/fact/table/US/RHI425221.

140 Ibid.

141 The United States Census Bureau adheres to the 1997 Office of Management and Budget (OMB) standards on 

race and ethnicity in classifying responses to the race question. The United States Census Bureau, About the Topic 

of Race, 

https://www.census.gov/topics/population/race/about.html#:~:text=Asian%20%E2%80%93%20A%20person%20ha

ving%20origins,Islands%2C%20Thailand%2C%20and%20Vietnam.

142 United States Census Bureau, Quick Facts, (as of July 1, 2022), 

https://www.census.gov/quickfacts/fact/table/US/RHI425221.

143 Abby Budiman and Neil Ruiz, “Key facts About Asian Origin Groups in the U.S.,” Pew Research Center, April 

29, 2021, https://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2021/04/29/key-facts-about-asian-origin-groups-in-the-u-s/.

144 United States Census Bureau, “Broad Diversity of Asian, Native Hawaiian, Pacific Islander Population,”

https://www.census.gov/library/stories/2022/05/aanhpi-population-diverse-geographically-dispersed.html.

145 Ibid.
24 The Federal Response to Anti-Asian Racism in the United States

194,263 (see Figures 1 and 2). The six largest Asian ethnic groups (i.e., Chinese, Asian Indians, 

Filipinos, Vietnamese, Koreans, and Japanese) comprised 85 percent of the Asian population in 

the U.S. in 2019. 146 Asian people of Chinese-origin are the largest group of Asian origin

individuals in the U.S.147 They comprise 24 percent of the Asian population, which amounts to 5.4 

million people.148

Figure 1 Asian Alone Population in the U.S.

146 United States Census Bureau, “Broad Diversity of Asian, Native Hawaiian, Pacific Islander Population,”

https://www.census.gov/library/stories/2022/05/aanhpi-population-diverse-geographically-dispersed.html.

147 Abby Budiman and Neil Ruiz, Key facts About Asian Origin Groups in the U.S., Pew Research Center, April 29, 

2021, https://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2021/04/29/key-facts-about-asian-origin-groups-in-the-u-s/.

148 United States Census Bureau, “Broad Diversity of Asian, Native Hawaiian, Pacific Islander Population,”

https://www.census.gov/library/stories/2022/05/aanhpi-population-diverse-geographically-dispersed.html.
Anti-Asian Hate Crimes Introduction and Background 25

Figure 2 Six Largest Asian Origin Groups in the U.S.

Source: Abby Budiman and Neil Ruiz, Key facts about Asian Americans, a diverse and growing population, Apr.

29, 2021, https://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2021/04/29/key-facts-about-asianamericans/#:~:text=Chinese%20Americans%20are%20the%20largest,(or%204.2%20million%20people).

According to the Census, in 2019, the 10 states with the largest Asian populations were California, 

New York, Texas, New Jersey, Illinois, Washington, Florida, Virginia, Hawaii, and

Massachusetts, respectively (see Figure 3).149

Figure 3 Map of 10 states with the largest Asian populations

Source: Profile: Asian Americans, U.S. Department of Health and Human Services Office of Minority Health, 

https://minorityhealth.hhs.gov/omh/browse.aspx?lvl=3&lvlid=63.

149 U.S. Department of Health and Human Services Office of Minority Health, “Profile: Asian Americans,”

https://minorityhealth.hhs.gov/omh/browse.aspx?lvl=3&lvlid=63.
26 The Federal Response to Anti-Asian Racism in the United States

Both California and New York are states with large Asian populations of Chinese origin (see 

Figure 4).150 Although Texas has a large Indian population, together those of Vietnamese and 

Chinese origin make-up a larger segment of the Texas population (see Table 2).151

More than half (57 percent) of Asian Americans were born in another country.152 In 2019, 95 

percent of U.S.-born Asian people reported being “proficient” in English.153 In contrast, 57 percent 

of foreign-born Asians reported being “proficient” in English. Being proficient in English was 

defined as speaking “only English” or speaking English “very well.”154

150 Abby Budiman and Neil Ruiz, “Key facts About Asian Origin Groups in the U.S.,” Pew Research Center, Apr.

29, 2021, https://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2021/04/29/key-facts-about-asian-origin-groups-in-the-u-s/.

151 Three largest Asian origin groups by state, 2019, Key Facts About Asian Origin Groups in the U.S., Pew 

Research Center, April 29, 2021, https://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2021/04/29/key-facts-about-asian-origingroups-in-the-u-s/ft_2021-04-29_asianorigins_03a/.

152 Abby Budiman and Neil G. Ruiz, “Key Facts about Asian Americans, a Diverse and Growing Population,” Pew 

Research Center, Apr. 28, 2021, https://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2021/04/29/key-facts-about-asianamericans/.

153 Ibid.

154 Ibid.
Anti-Asian Hate Crimes Introduction and Background 27

Figure 4 Map of largest Asian origin group in each state

Source: Abby Budiman and Neil Ruiz, Key facts About Asian Origin Groups in the U.S., Pew Research Center, April 

29, 2021, https://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2021/04/29/key-facts-about-asian-origin-groups-in-the-u-s/.

Table 2 Three largest Asian origin groups by state in 2019

State Largest Asian Origin 

Group (percent of state 

population)

Second Largest Asian 

Origin Group (percent 

of state population)

Third Largest Asian 

Origin Group (percent 

of state population)

California Chinese (27) Filipino (24) Indian (13)

New York Chinese (41) Indian (22) Filipino (8)

Texas Indian (28) Vietnamese (18) Chinese (15)

New Jersey Indian (42) Chinese (19) Filipino (14)

Washington Chinese (23) Filipino (19) Indian (16)

Florida Indian (25) Filipino (20) Chinese (17)

Virginia Indian (24) Filipino (16) Chinese (14)

Hawaii Filipino (39) Japanese (30) Chinese (18)

Massachusetts Chinese (36) Indian (24) Vietnamese (10)

Texas Indian (28) Vietnamese (18) Chinese (15)

Source: Three largest Asian origin groups by state, 2019, Key Facts About Asian Origin Groups in the U.S., Pew 

Research Center, April 29, 2021, https://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2021/04/29/key-facts-about-asian-origingroups-in-the-u-s/ft_2021-04-29_asianorigins_03a/.
28 The Federal Response to Anti-Asian Racism in the United States

Anti-Asian Laws

People of Asian descent have been living in the U.S. for centuries. As with many marginalized 

communities, Asian communities have faced a long history of discrimination in the United States. 

To contextualize the increase anti-Asian sentiment during the COVID-19 pandemic, it is important 

to understand the history of anti-Asian racism and “Yellow Peril” laws.155

The first major migration of Asian immigrants to the U.S. occurred in the 19th century.156 From 

1875 to 1965, the federal government enacted several laws that infringed on the rights of people 

of Asian descent living in the U.S., as well as imposed immigration limits from China, Japan, and 

other Asian countries.157 These laws included the Page Act of 1875,158 the Chinese Exclusion Act 

of 1882,159 the Geary Act of 1892,160 the Immigration Act of 1917161 and 1924162, the Repeal of 

the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1943,163 the Immigration Nationality Act of 1952,164 and Executive 

Order 9066.165 Some states also imposed limitations against people of Asian descent that were 

codified into state laws, such as the Alien Land Laws.166

The Page Act

The Page Act of 1875 was the first federal law to restrict immigration to the U.S. based on race or 

national origin.167 Specifically, this law was intended to limit the number of Chinese women

allowed to immigrate to the United States.168 While the law “prohibited the importation of unfree 

155 Russell Jeung, Ph.D., Professor, Asian American Studies, San Francisco State University, testimony, The Federal 

Response to Anti-Asian Racism in the United States Briefing Before the U.S. Comm’n on Civil Rights, Washington, 

DC, Mar. 4, 2023, transcript, p. 25 (hereinafter cited as Anti-Asian Racism Briefing).

156 History.com Editors, “Asian American Milestones: Timeline,” Mar. 22, 2021, 

https://www.history.com/topics/immigration/asian-american-timeline.

157 See e.g., Asia Society, “Asian Americans Then and Now: Linking Past to Present,” 

https://asiasociety.org/education/asian-americans-then-and-now; D’Vera Cohn, “How U.S. Immigration laws and 

rules have changed throughout history,” Pew Research Center, Sept. 30, 2015, https://www.pewresearch.org/facttank/2015/09/30/how-u-s-immigration-laws-and-rules-have-changed-through-history/. 

158 Page Act of 1875, Ch. 141, 18 Stat. 477 (repealed 1974).

159 Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882, Ch. 126, 22 Stat. 58 (repealed 1943).

160 The Geary Act of 1892, Ch. 60, 27 Stat. 25 (repealed 1943).

161 Immigration Act of 1917, Ch. 29, 39 Stat. 874

162 Immigration Act of 1924, Ch. 190, 43 Stat. 153 

163 Repeal of the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1943, Pub. L. 78-199, 57 Stat. 600

164 Immigration Nationality Act of 1952, Pub. L. 82-414, 66 Stat. 163

165 Exec. Order No. 9066, 7 Fed. Reg. 1407 (Feb. 19, 1942).

166 Keith Aoki, “No Right to Own?: The Early Twentieth-Century ‘Alien Land Laws’ As A Prelude to Internment,” 

Boston College Third World Law Journal, vol. 19, no.1, 1998, http://nationalaglawcenter.org/wpcontent/uploads/assets/bibarticles/aoki_right.pdf.

167 Page Act of 1875, Ch. 141, 18 Stat. 477 (repealed 1974).

168 Id.
Anti-Asian Hate Crimes Introduction and Background 29

laborers and women brought for ‘immoral purposes,’”

169 historians maintain that this law was 

enacted based upon misogynist and racist stereotypes about Chinese women’s sexuality:

170

Americans often assumed that all Chinese immigrant women were prostitutes. This fallacy 

became an excuse to keep Chinese women from coming to the United States. Americans 

feared that female Chinese immigrants would corrupt society, marry white men, and have 

mixed-race children, resulting in an increased non-white population. Politicians were 

hesitant to restrict the immigration of Chinese men because businesses profited from their 

cheap labor, so they focused their attention on keeping out Chinese women. The goal was 

to limit the size of the Chinese population in America by preventing Chinese men from 

bringing their families to the United States or starting new ones.171

Chinese Exclusion Act

The Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882 served as the most extreme version of immigration restrictions 

during its time.172 It established a ten-year immigration ban on Chinese laborers immigrating to 

the U.S. For those Chinese laborers already settled in America, the law required papers for re-entry 

into the country.173 The law also allowed Congress to refuse state and federal courts the right to 

grant citizenship to Chinese resident aliens, but it gave both authoritative bodies the ability to 

deport them.174 Although the Exclusion Act expired in 1892, it was extended 10 more years 

through the Geary Act.175

Geary Act

The Geary Act of 1892 extended the Chinese Exclusion Act into the 20th century. 176 It 

implemented requirements for certificates of residence for people of Chinese descent. 177

169 Page Law (1875), Immigration History, https://immigrationhistory.org/item/page-act/.

170 Virginia Loh-Hagan, Jing Kwoh, Jayson Chang, and Pat Kwoh, “Excluded From History: The Page Act of 

1875,” Social Education, vol. 86, no. 2, 2022, https://www.socialstudies.org/system/files/2022-04/SE-86022273.pdf; 

Shoba Sivaprasad Wadhia and Margaret Hu, “Decitizenizing Asian Pacific American Women,” 93 Colorado Law 

Rev. 2022, https://elibrary.law.psu.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1459&context=fac_works; New York Historical 

Society, “Page Act, 1875,” https://wams.nyhistory.org/industry-and-empire/expansion-and-empire/page-act-1875/.

171 New York Historical Society, “Page Act, 1875,” https://wams.nyhistory.org/industry-and-empire/expansion-andempire/page-act-1875/.

172 Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882, Ch. 126, 22 Stat. 58 (repealed 1943); Chinese Exclusion Act, Record Group 

No.11. (1882), National Archives, https://www.archives.gov/milestone-documents/chinese-exclusion-act. 

173 Chinese Exclusion Act, Record Group No.11. (1882), National Archives, https://www.archives.gov/milestonedocuments/chinese-exclusion-act.

174 Ibid.

175 Ibid.

176 The Geary Act of 1892, Ch. 60, 27 Stat. 25 (repealed 1943); Chinese Exclusion Act, Record Group No.11. 

(1882), National Archives, https://www.archives.gov/milestone-documents/chinese-exclusion-act.

177 The Geary Act of 1892, Ch. 60, Sec. 6.
30 The Federal Response to Anti-Asian Racism in the United States

Previously, this documentation was only necessary for re-entry into the United States.178 The 

Geary Act, however, called for a certificate of residency to prove the legality and the already 

established homestead for people of Chinese descent.179 Without this documentation, people of 

Chinese descent were subject to deportation. 180 The government required people of Chinese 

descent to obtain a certificate within one year of the legislation’s enactment.181 If an individual did 

not obtain the certificate, then they had to establish “by at least one credible white witness, that he 

was a resident of the United States at the time of the passage of this act.”182

Immigration Act of 1917 (Barred Zone Act)

The Immigration Act of 1917, known also as the Asiatic Barred Zone Act, prohibited persons from 

the Asiatic Barred Zone from entering the United States.

183 The Asiatic Barred Zone, which 

was defined in the Immigration Act of 1917, included persons who were “natives of an area 

including, roughly, the East Indies, Western China, French Indochina, Siam, Burma, India, Bhutan, 

Nepal, Eastern Afghanistan, Turkestan, the Kirghis Steppe, and southeastern portion of the 

Arabian Peninsula.”184

The Barred Zone Act required the passage of a literacy test. It excluded from admission “[a]ll 

aliens over sixteen years of age, physically capable of reading, who cannot read the English 

language, or some other language or dialect, including Hebrew or Yiddish...”.

185 An exception to 

the literacy test was made for those who were able to prove that they were immigrating to the U.S. 

in order to “avoid religious persecution” in their last country of permanent residence.186

178 Chinese Exclusion Act, Record Group No.11. (1882), National Archives, https://www.archives.gov/milestonedocuments/chinese-exclusion-act.

179 Ibid.

180 Chinese Exclusion Act, Record Group No.11. (1882), National Archives, https://www.archives.gov/milestonedocuments/chinese-exclusion-act.

181 Text of the Geary Act of 1892 (Extends Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882 for Ten Years), Fifty-Second Congress, 

Session I. 1892. Chapter 60. An Act to Prohibit the Coming of Chinese Persons into the United States, 

https://loveman.sdsu.edu/docs/1892GearyAct.pdf.

182 Ibid.

183 Immigration Act of 1917, Ch. 29, 39 Stat. 874.

184 Marian L. Smith, Race, Nationality, and Reality, National Archives, Summer 2002, Vol 34, No. 2, 

https://www.archives.gov/publications/prologue/2002/summer/immigration-law-1#nt27; see Immigration Act of 

1917, Ch. 29, 39 Stat. 876.

185 Immigration Act of 1917, Ch. 29, 39 Stat. 877; Immigration Act of 1917 (Barred Zone Act), Immigration 

History, https://immigrationhistory.org/item/1917-barred-zone-act/.

186 Ibid.
Anti-Asian Hate Crimes Introduction and Background 31

The Immigration Act of 1924

The Immigration Act of 1924 (also known as the Johnson-Reed Act) imposed a more extreme 

immigration quota compared to that of the Geary Act.187 It “created a permanent quota system 

based on ‘national origin.’”188 The Immigration Act of 1924 “limited the number of immigrants 

that could be admitted to the U.S. to two percent of the total number of individuals from each 

nationality that resided in the U.S. in 1890.”189 It allowed no more than a maximum of 150,000 

total immigrants per year;

190 however, it prohibited all Japanese immigration to the United 

States.191 The Immigration Act of 1924 was not lifted until 1952.

192

The “national origins” quotas imposed by this act were enforced by a system of “remote 

control.”193 It required the U.S. consulate or embassy closest to the applicant’s home abroad to 

evaluate the visa application and award permission prior to entry into the United States. This 

ensured that “the hereditary stuff out of which future immigrants were made would have to be 

compatible racially with American ideals.”194 The quota system based on 2 percent of the 1890 

census population favored Europeans from the North and West who were considered to be 

of “higher intelligence” and provided “the best material for American citizenship” (see Table 3).

This quota system remained the primary principle determining admissibility to the United States 

until 1965.195

187 Immigration Act of 1924, Ch. 190, 43 Stat. 153; The Immigration Act of 1924, History, Art & Archives, United 

States House of Representatives, Historical Highlights, April 12, 1924, https://history.house.gov/HistoricalHighlights/1901-1950/The-Immigration-Act-of-1924/.

188 Ibid.

189 The Immigration Act of 1924, History, Art & Archives, United States House of Representatives, Historical 

Highlights, April 12, 1924, https://history.house.gov/Historical-Highlights/1901-1950/The-Immigration-Act-of1924/.

190 Immigration Act of 1924, Ch. 190, Sec. 11(b), 43 Stat. 153.

191 The Immigration Act of 1924, History, Art & Archives, United States House of Representatives, Historical 

Highlights, April 12, 1924, https://history.house.gov/Historical-Highlights/1901-1950/The-Immigration-Act-of1924/.

192 Ibid.

193 Ibid.

194 Ibid.

195 Ibid.
32 The Federal Response to Anti-Asian Racism in the United States

Source: The Immigration Act of 1924 (Johnson-Reed Act), Immigration History, 

https://immigrationhistory.org/item/1924-immigration-act-johnson-reed-act/.

Table 3 Immigration Quota Based on National Origin (1929)
Anti-Asian Hate Crimes Introduction and Background 33

Repeal of the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1943 (Magnuson Act)

Due to the alliance formed with China during World War II, the U.S. could no longer ignore the 

Chinese Exclusion Act.196 Although the Repeal of the Chinese Exclusion Act, which was also 

known as the Magnuson Act, abolished the exclusion and deportation of Chinese immigrants, it 

continued to impose very low annual immigration quotas.197 The Act allowed about 105 Chinese 

immigrants per year into the U.S.198 This law was passed due to the U.S. government’s concerns 

about Chinese persons entering the country via passage from other countries.199 To assuage this 

possibility, the Chinese Exclusion Repeal Act made it so Chinese persons immigrating to the U.S. 

“from anywhere in the world would be counted against the Chinese quota, even if they had never 

been to China or had never held Chinese nationality.”200

The Immigration and Nationality Act of 1952 (The McCarran-Walter Act)

The Immigration Nationality Act of 1952201 (also known as the McCarran-Walter Act) was passed 

to end exclusions against Asian immigrants, however, it upheld the national origins quota system 

established by the Immigration Act of 1924.202 This new law therefore abolished race-based quota 

systems and introduced “a system of preferences based on skill sets and family reunification.”203

However, historians argue that this law:

created symbolic opportunities for Asian immigration, though in reality it continued to 

discriminate against them. The law repealed the last of the existing measures to exclude 

Asian immigration, allotted each Asian nation a minimum quota of 100 visas each year, 

and eliminated laws preventing Asians from becoming naturalized citizens.204

The national origin system favored Northern and Western Europeans by distributing 85 percent of 

immigration quotas to countries in that region, while Asian countries received significantly 

fewer.205 President Truman believed that Congress’ decision to “maintain the national origins 

quota system and to establish racially constructed quotas for Asian nations” was discriminatory 

196 Repeal of the Chinese Exclusion Act, 1943, United States of America Department of State, Office of the 

Historian, Milestones: 1937–1945, https://history.state.gov/milestones/1937-1945/chinese-exclusion-act-repeal.

197 Repeal of the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1943, Pub. L. 78-199, 57 Stat. 600.

198 Repeal of the Chinese Exclusion Act, 1943, United States of America Department of State, Office of the 

Historian, Milestones: 1937–1945, https://history.state.gov/milestones/1937-1945/chinese-exclusion-act-repeal

199 Macaulay Honors College, “1943—Magnuson Act is passed,” 

https://macaulay.cuny.edu/seminars/brooks10/node/313/index.html.

200 Repeal of the Chinese Exclusion Act, 1943, United States of America Department of State, Office of the 

Historian, Milestones: 1937–1945, https://history.state.gov/milestones/1937-1945/chinese-exclusion-act-repeal.

201 Immigration Nationality Act of 1952, Pub. L. 82-414, 66 Stat. 163.

202 The Immigration and Nationality Act of 1952 (The McCarran-Walter Act), U.S. Department of State Archives, 

https://2001-2009.state.gov/r/pa/ho/time/cwr/87719.htm.

203 Ibid.

204 Ibid.

205 Ibid.; Immigration History, “Immigration and Nationality Act of 1952" (The McCarran-Walter Act), 

https://immigrationhistory.org/item/immigration-and-nationality-act-the-mccarran-walter-act/.
34 The Federal Response to Anti-Asian Racism in the United States

and the law was vetoed. 206 However, Congress overturned Truman’s veto and the law was 

passed.207 Therefore, this law technically ended the racial quota restrictions on citizenship, while 

it actually expanded discriminatory national origin quotas that continued to limit Asian 

immigration to the U.S. for decades to come.

208

Executive Order 9066

Executive Order 9066 was issued by President Franklin Roosevelt on February 19, 1942.209 The 

order authorized the forced removal of any persons “deemed a threat to national security from the 

West Coast to ‘relocation centers’ further inland.”210 After the attack on Pearl Harbor in 1941, 

lobbyists pressured Congress and the President to remove persons of Japanese descent (both 

foreign-born and American citizens) from the West Coast.211 Officials with the Department of 

Justice cited “constitutional and ethical objections” to the removal, but the U.S. Army carried out 

the order.212 This resulted in the establishment of Japanese internment camps, where Japanese 

Americans and Japanese foreign nationals were incarcerated during World War II.

The U.S. Army forcibly took approximately 122,000 Japanese men, women, and children to 

“assembly centers” and then later moved them to “internment camps.”213 These internment camps 

were located in remote areas of Wyoming, California, Utah, Arizona, Colorado, Idaho, and 

Arkansas and were isolated, fenced, and guarded.214 More than half of the persons detained (about 

70,000) were American citizens who lost their personal liberties, homes, and property.215

In 1988, with the passage of the Civil Liberties Act, the federal government formally 

acknowledged the injustice of the internment of citizens and permanent resident aliens of Japanese 

ancestry.216 The law declared “a grave injustice was done to citizens and permanent resident aliens 

of Japanese ancestry by the evacuation, relocation, and internment of civilians during World War 

206 The Immigration and Nationality Act of 1952 (The McCarran-Walter Act), U.S. Department of State Archives, 

https://2001-2009.state.gov/r/pa/ho/time/cwr/87719.htm.

207 Ibid.

208 The Immigration and Nationality Act of 1952 (The McCarran-Walter Act), U.S. Department of State Archives, 

https://2001-2009.state.gov/r/pa/ho/time/cwr/87719.htm; Immigration History, “Immigration and Nationality Act of 

1952 (The McCarran-Walter Act), https://immigrationhistory.org/item/immigration-and-nationality-act-themccarran-walter-act/.

209 Exec. Order No. 9066, 7 Fed. Reg. 1407 (Feb. 19, 1942).

210 Executive Order 9066: Resulting in Japanese-American Incarceration (1942), National Archives, 

https://www.archives.gov/milestone-documents/executive-order-9066.

211 Ibid.

212 Ibid.

213 Executive Order 9066: Resulting in Japanese-American Incarceration (1942), National Archives, Milestone 

Documents, https://www.archives.gov/milestone-documents/executive-order-9066.

214 Id.

215 Id.

216 The Civil Liberties Act of 1987, Publ. L. No. 100-383, 102 Stat. 903, 1988, (Codified at 50 USC app. 1989), 

https://www.congress.gov/bill/100th-congress/house-bill/442.
Anti-Asian Hate Crimes Introduction and Background 35

II.” 217 It provided an official governmental apology to every surviving Japanese American 

incarcerated because of Executive Order 9066 and acknowledged that Executive Order 9066 was 

“motivated by racial prejudice, wartime hysteria, and a failure of political leadership.”

218 Moreover, 

the law granted legal redress (i.e., money given for causing harm or loss to another person) in the 

amount of $20,000.

219

Alien Land Laws

Prior to 1952, “Alien Land Laws” were legal attempts by states to prevent people of Asian ancestry

(and other immigrants who were deemed as “non-desirable”) from owning land and property in 

the U.S.220 There were fifteen states that enacted these Alien Land Laws: Arizona, Arkansas, 

California, Florida, Idaho, Louisiana, Minnesota, Montana, Nebraska, New Mexico, Oregon, 

Texas, Utah, Washington, and Wyoming.221 These same states, which implemented alien land laws 

or had restrictions against immigrants, made certain Asian foreign nationals ineligible for 

citizenship; and consequently, property ownership.222 In 1948, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that 

provisions of California’s Alien Law of 1913 and 1920 violated the 14th Amendment’s Equal 

Protection clause.223 The entire law was subsequently overturned by the California Supreme Court 

in 1952.224

Immigration and Nationality Act of 1965

On October 3, 1965, the Immigration and Nationality Act of 1965 was signed into law by President 

Lyndon B. Johnson.225 The law ended the limitation of immigration based on national origin,

abolished the use of the federal quota system, and eliminated legally discrimination against Asian

immigrants and those outside of western Europe.226 In the 1950s, more than half of all immigrants 

to the U.S. were European, by comparison, immigrants from Asian countries represented 6 percent 

217 Id.

218 Id.

219 Id.

220 Bruce A. Castleman, “California’s Alien Land Laws,” Western Legal History, vol. 7, no. 1, 1994, 

https://heinonline.org/HOL/Page?collection=journals&handle=hein.journals/wlehist7&id=33&men_tab=srchresults.

221 Equal Justice Initiative, “California Law Prohibits Asian Immigrants from Owning Land,” May 3, 1913, 

https://calendar.eji.org/racial-injustice/may/3.

222 See e.g., Nicole Grant, “White Supremacy and the Alien Land Laws of Washington State,” Seattle Civil Rights & 

Labor History Project, University of Washington, https://depts.washington.edu/civilr/alien_land_laws.htm.

223 See Oyama v. California, 332 U.S. 633 (1948) (provisions of the California Alien Land Laws violated the 14th

Amendment’s Equal Protection clause). 

224 See Fujii v. State of California, 38 Cal. 2d 718, 242 P.2d 617.

225 Immigration and Nationality Act of 1965, Pub. L. 89-236, 79 Stat. 911 (Codified at 8 U.S.C. Ch. 12); 

Immigration and Nationality Act of 1965, United States House of Representatives, History, Art, & Archives, 

Historical Highlights, Oct. 3, 1965, https://history.house.gov/Historical-Highlights/1951-2000/Immigration-andNationality-Act-of-1965/.

226 Immigration and Nationality Act of 1965, Pub. L. 89-236, 79 Stat. 911 (Codified at 8 U.S.C. Ch. 12).
36 The Federal Response to Anti-Asian Racism in the United States

of the immigration population.227 Conversely, in the 1990s, the immigration population among 

those of European descent was lower compared to those of Asian descent (16 percent228 and 31 

percent,229 respectively).

227 Id.

228 Id.

229 U.S. Immigration Since 1965, History.com Editors, Mar. 5, 2010, 

https://www.history.com/topics/immigration/us-immigration-since-1965.
Anti-Asian Hate Crimes Introduction and Background 37

Historical Context of Asian Disease Blaming and Asian Stereotyping

The passage of anti-Asian laws, which limited Asian immigration because people of Asian descent

were perceived as being racially incompatible with American ideals,230 was also accompanied by

a proliferation of stereotypes about Asian communities. Various stereotypes of Asian Americans 

have persisted into modern times and have contributed to the anti-Asian sentiment and biasmotivated attacks experienced during the COVID-19 pandemic.

231

One early stereotype against Asian people was viewing them as “pollutants,” or that their existence 

in the U.S. was an alien presence that threatened to pollute to the White populace. 232 This 

stereotype also set out the notion that Asian Americans were “forever foreigners” who were 

unassimilable into American culture or ideals.233

Another stereotype was the “coolie,” which referred to the Chinese immigrant worker as racially 

segregated into a state of subordination that provided cheap labor.

234 The coolie was portrayed as 

unfree and servile, and was perceived as a threat to the White working man and his family.235 This 

stereotype became popular in the U.S. in the mid-19th century, especially during the construction 

of the railroads, which benefited from the exploitation of cheap Chinese labor.236 Companies like 

the Central Pacific Railroad Company signed laborers –– who were predominantly Asian –– into 

multi-year contracts and “because the workers would labor for low wages and live in substandard 

living conditions, the word ‘coolie’ became a derogatory code for ‘Asian’ (both East and South) 

in the United States.”237

230 The Immigration Act of 1924 (Johnson-Reed Act), Immigration History, 

https://immigrationhistory.org/item/1924-immigration-act-johnson-reed-act/.

231 Jordan Daley, Natalie Gallagher, and Galen Bodenhausen, “The Pandemic and the ‘Perpetual Foreigner’: How 

Threats Posted by the COVID-19 Pandemic Relate to Stereotyping of Asian Americans,” Frontiers in Psychology, 

vol. 13, Feb. 2022, https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fpsyg.2022.821891/full; Sean Darling-Hammond, 

Eli Michaels, Amani Allen, David Chae, Mahasin Mujahid, Thu Nguyen, and Rucker Johnson, “After ‘China Virus’ 

Went Viral: Racially Charged Coronavirus Coverage and Trends in Bias Against Asian Americans,” Health 

Education and Behavior, vol. 47, no. 6, 2020, https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/pdf/10.1177/1090198120957949; 

Angela Gover, Shannon Harper, and Lynn Langton, “Anti-Asian Hate Crime During the COVID-19 Pandemic: 

Exploring the Reproduction of Inequality,” American Journal of Criminal Justice, vol. 45, July 2020, 

https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s12103-020-09545-1.

232 Robert G. Lee, “Orientals: Asian Americans in Popular Culture,” Temple University Press, Philadelphia. (1999).

233 Yao Li and Harvey Nicholson, Jr., “When ‘model minorities’ become ‘yellow peril’ – Othering and the 

racialization of Asian Americans in the COVID-19 pandemic,” Social Compass, vol. 15, no. 2, Feb. 2021, 

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7995194/. 

234 Jane Junn, “From Coolie to Model Minority: U.S. Immigration Policy and the Construction of Racial Identity,” 

Du Bois Review, vol. 4, no. 2, 2007, 

http://pscourses.ucsd.edu/ps108/7%20Immigrant%20Integration%20in%20US/Junn%202007-

%20From%20coolie%20to%20model%20minority.pdf.

235 Robert G. Lee, “Orientals: Asian Americans in Popular Culture,” Temple University Press, Philadelphia, (1999).

236 Ibid.

237 Lakshmi Gandhi, “A History of Indentured Labor Gives ‘Coolie’ Its Sting,” NPR, Nov. 25, 2013, 

https://www.npr.org/sections/codeswitch/2013/11/25/247166284/a-history-of-indentured-labor-gives-coolie-its-
38 The Federal Response to Anti-Asian Racism in the United States

Another prominent stereotype was that Asian immigration represented “yellow peril,” reflecting

national unease due to a growing Asian population that was viewed as a direct threat to the White 

race and western civilization.238 This stereotype promoted the idea of Asian people as “dishonest, 

diseased invaders, viewed as culturally and politically inferior to Whites, and framed as a great 

threat to Whites.”239

The 1960s and 1970s saw a shift of Asian stereotypes with the onset of the “model minority” myth,

which imagines all people of Asian descent as a “successful case of ethnic assimilation.”240 This 

stereotype often focuses on some Asian groups’ high educational attainment and socioeconomic 

status, and specifically focuses on these successes as being indicative of “Asian culture.” 241

Though sometimes understood as a positive preconception, the model minority stereotype erases 

lived experiences and collapses members of heterogenous groups into an inauthentic, Pan-Asian 

caricature.242 This image could then also be held up to and used against Black Americans and 

Latino Americans as “a model for nonmilitant, nonpolitical upward mobility.”243 This stereotype 

can also stoke racial divisions between Asian Americans and other communities of color and leads 

to “discounting structural and cumulative disadvantages that other minority communities face and 

to denigrate other racial minorities as ‘problem’ minorities.”244

sting; Jane Junn, “From Coolie to Model Minority: U.S. Immigration Policy and the Construction of Racial 

Identity,” Du Bois Review, vol. 4, no. 2, 2007, 

http://pscourses.ucsd.edu/ps108/7%20Immigrant%20Integration%20in%20US/Junn%202007-

%20From%20coolie%20to%20model%20minority.pdf.

238 John Kuo Wei Tchen and Dylan Yeats, Yellow Peril: 19th

-Century Scapegoating, AAWW.org, Mar. 5, 2014, 

https://aaww.org/yellow-peril-scapegoating/.

239 Yao Li and Harvey Nicholson, Jr., “When ‘model minorities’ become ‘yellow peril’ – Othering and the 

racialization of Asian Americans in the COVID-19 pandemic,” Social Compass, vol. 15, no. 2, Feb. 2021, 

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7995194/; Stephen Del Visco, “Yellow peril, red scare: race and 

communism in National Review,” The Mechanisms of Racialization Beyond the Black/White Binary, Routledge, 

2019.

240 Yao Li and Harvey L. Nicholson Jr., “When “Model Minorities” Become “Yellow Peril”—Othering and the 

Racialization of Asian Americans in the COVID-19 Pandemic,” Sociology Compass, Jan. 2021, 

https://doi.org/10.1111/soc4.12849Ci; Viet Thanh Nguyen, “Asian Americans Are Still Caught in the Trap of the 

‘Model Minority’ Stereotype. And It Creates Inequality for All,” Time, June 26, 2020, 

https://time.com/5859206/anti-asian-racism-america/.

241 Yao Li and Harvey L. Nicholson Jr., “When “Model Minorities” Become “Yellow Peril”—Othering and the 

Racialization of Asian Americans in the COVID-19 Pandemic,” Sociology Compass, Jan. 2021, 

https://doi.org/10.1111/soc4.12849Ci; Min Zhou, “Are Asian Americans becoming ‘white’?” Contexts, vol. 3, no. 1, 

2004, https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/pdf/10.1525/ctx.2004.3.1.29.

242 Robert G. Lee, “Orientals: Asian Americans in Popular Culture,” Temple University Press, Philadelphia (1999).

243 Ibid.; see also, Yuko Kawai, “Stereotyping Asian Americans: The Dialectic of the Model Minority and the 

Yellow Peril,” Howard Journal of Communications, vol. 16, no. 2, 2005, 

https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/10646170590948974?role=button&needAccess=true&journalCode=u

hjc20; Frieda Wong and Richard Halgin, “The ‘Model Minority’: Bane or Blessing for Asian Americans,” Journal 

of Multicultural Counseling and Development, vol. 34, no. 1, Jan. 2006, 

https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.1002/j.2161-1912.2006.tb00025.x.

244 Yao Li and Harvey L. Nicholson Jr., “When ‘Model Minorities’ Become ‘Yellow Peril’”—Othering and the 

Racialization of Asian Americans in the COVID-19 Pandemic,” Sociology Compass, Jan. 2021, 

https://doi.org/10.1111/soc4.12849Ci.
Anti-Asian Hate Crimes Introduction and Background 39

Asian stereotypes have also been reinforced through discriminatory and exclusionary policies.245

The perception and sentiment of these stereotypes is that Asian Americans are a threat 

to the U.S. and “perpetual foreigners,” to American life which promotes anti-Asian prejudice 

and xenophobia. 246 Michael Yaki, former commissioner to the U.S. Commission on Civil 

Rights testified: 

There is something that has been unique about our American experience, about the 

experience of Asian Americans in this country in which somehow, we are always seen as 

the other. We are always seen as having our loyalty questioned, where we are sent en masse 

into the desert and other hellholes during World War II because, out of all of the 

nationalities, out of all of the ethnicities in this country, many of whom had relatives, or 

cousins, or whatever fighting against us on the other side in the axis, only the ones who 

looked or had my kind of surname were put into camps in this country. Somehow or 

another, it’s our loyalty that’s always been questioned. It’s our commitment to this country 

that’s always been put at doubt.247

These stereotypes and negative views of Asian people have persisted for decades and have 

contributed to the rise of anti-Asian hate violence that these communities experienced during the 

COVID-19 pandemic.248

The Intersection of Hate Crimes and Asian Stereotypes

Hate crimes against Asian Americans in the U.S. is not a new phenomenon. In 1885, in Rock 

Springs, Wyoming, 28 Chinese workers were killed in what is known as the Rock Springs 

Massacre. 249 The attack was perpetrated by 150 White miners, who were “outraged by the 

245 See supra notes 156-229 (discussion of anti-Asian immigration laws); Angela Gover, Shannon Harper, and Lynn 

Langton, “Anti-Asian Hate Crime During the COVID-19 Pandemic: Exploring the Reproduction of Inequality,” 

American Journal of Criminal Justice, vol. 45, July 2020, https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s12103-020-

09545-1.

246 Jordan Daley, Natalie Gallagher, and Galen Bodenhausen, “The Pandemic and the ‘Perpetual Foreigner’: How 

Threats Posted by the COVID-19 Pandemic Relate to Stereotyping of Asian Americans,” Frontiers in Psychology, 

vol. 13, Feb. 2022, https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fpsyg.2022.821891/full; Sean Darling-Hammond, 

Eli Michaels, Amani Allen, David Chae, Mahasin Mujahid, Thu Nguyen, and Rucker Johnson, “After ‘China Virus’ 

Went Viral: Racially Charged Coronavirus Coverage and Trends in Bias Against Asian Americans,” Health 

Education and Behavior, vol. 47, no. 6, 2020, https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/pdf/10.1177/1090198120957949.

247 Yaki Testimony, pp. 156-57.

248 Jordan Daley, Natalie Gallagher, and Galen Bodenhausen, “The Pandemic and the ‘Perpetual Foreigner’: How 

Threats Posted by the COVID-19 Pandemic Relate to Stereotyping of Asian Americans,” Frontiers in Psychology, 

vol. 13, Feb. 2022, https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fpsyg.2022.821891/full; Sean Darling-Hammond, 

Eli Michaels, Amani Allen, David Chae, Mahasin Mujahid, Thu Nguyen, and Rucker Johnson, “After ‘China Virus’ 

Went Viral: Racially Charged Coronavirus Coverage and Trends in Bias Against Asian Americans,” Health 

Education and Behavior, vol. 47, no. 6, 2020, https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/pdf/10.1177/1090198120957949.

249 Library of Congress, “Rock Springs Massacre: Topics Chronicling America,” https://guides.loc.gov/chroniclingamerica-rock-springs-massacre; History, “Chinese Miners are Massacred in Wyoming Territory,” History.com 

Editors, Nov. 16, 2009, https://www.history.com/this-day-in-history/whites-massacre-chinese-in-wyoming-territory.
40 The Federal Response to Anti-Asian Racism in the United States

company[’s] decision to allow Chinese miners to work the richest coal seams.”250 A mob of White 

miners attacked the town’s Chinatown neighborhood killing 28 Chinese miners, wounding 15 

others, and driving several hundred Chinese residents out of the town.251 No legal action was ever 

taken against any of the participants.252 Law enforcement failed to arrest the perpetrators and not 

one attacker was prosecuted at the state or federal level.

253 However, the Union Pacific Coal Mine 

fired 45 of the White miners who were involved in the massacre.254 This heinous act not only 

demonstrated how extreme anti-Asian bias was at the time and the perceived threat that Asians 

workers posed to the White working man and his family; but also, the lack of legal action that 

followed the murders demonstrated the systematic devaluing of Asian American lives in the U.S.

Another significant hate crime event occurred in 1982, when Vincent Chin was beaten to death by 

two White autoworkers in a racially motivated incident in Detroit.255 During this time period, the 

U.S. auto industry was collapsing, and Japanese carmakers were on the rise.256 Mr. Chin’s killers 

were angered by the loss of American jobs due to the rising importation of Japanese vehicles and 

attacked Mr. Chin because they believed he was Japanese.

257 However, Mr. Chin was Chinese, not 

Japanese.

258 An eyewitness overheard one of the attackers using an obscenity and telling Mr. Chin 

that it was “because of [Chin]” that people like him were out of work. 259 This hate crime 

demonstrates the consequences of the dangerous stereotype of Asian Americans as “cheap labor 

threatening the White working class.” 260 The killers, Ronald Ebens and Michael Nitz, were 

arrested, but neither received any prison time for their actions.261 Rather, they were sentenced to 

probation and had to pay a fine of roughly $3,000.

262

In August 1999, a self-professed white supremacist, Buford Furrow, murdered Joseph Santos Ileto, 

a Filipino American postal worker.263 Furrow shot and killed Ileto during his mail route. Furrow 

250 Ibid.

251 Ibid.

252 Ibid.

253 Library of Congress, “Rock Springs Massacre: Topics Chronicling America,” https://guides.loc.gov/chroniclingamerica-rock-springs-massacre; History, “Chinese Miners are Massacred in Wyoming Territory,” History.com 

Editors, Nov. 16, 2009, https://www.history.com/this-day-in-history/whites-massacre-chinese-in-wyoming-territory.

254 Ibid.

255 Mitch Smith, “Decades After Infamous Beating Death, Recent Attacks Haunt Asian Americans,” The New York 

Times, June 16, 2022, https://www.nytimes.com/2022/06/16/us/vincent-chin-anti-asian-attack-detroit.html. 

256 Ibid.

257 Wynne Davis, “Vincent Chin Was Killed 40 Years Ago. Here's Why His Case Continues to Resonate,” NPR, 

June 19, 2022, https://www.npr.org/2022/06/19/1106118117/vincent-chin-aapi-hate-incidents.

258 Ibid.

259 Mitch Smith, Decades After Infamous Beating Death, Recent Attacks Haunt Asian Americans, The New York 

Times, June 16, 2022, https://www.nytimes.com/2022/06/16/us/vincent-chin-anti-asian-attack-detroit.html.

260 Robert G. Lee, Orientals: Asian Americans in Popular Culture, Temple University Press, Philadelphia, (1999).

261 Ibid.

262 Mitch Smith, “Decades After Infamous Beating Death, Recent Attacks Haunt Asian Americans,” The New York 

Times, June 16, 2022, https://www.nytimes.com/2022/06/16/us/vincent-chin-anti-asian-attack-detroit.html.

263 Stewart Kwoh, “A Family Educates to Prevent Hate Crimes: The Case of Joseph Ileto,” in Untold Civil Rights 

Stories: Asian Americans Speak Out for Justice, Asian Americans Advancing Justice and UCLA Asian American 

Studies Center, https://archive.advancingjustice-la.org/sites/default/files/UCRS%206_Joseph_Ileto_story%20r2.pdf.
Anti-Asian Hate Crimes Introduction and Background 41

later confessed that he killed Ileto because “he looked Latino or Asian and because he was a federal 

employee. Furrow also stated that Joseph’s racial background and employment with the 

government made him a good ‘target of opportunity.’”264 A few hours later, Furrow fired shots 

into a playground at a Jewish Community Center, wounding several children and an employee. 

Furrow was indicted on hate crime charges and convicted of two life sentences without possibility 

of parole, 110 years in prison, and payment of $690,292 in restitution.265

In August 2006, an attack on two Chinese teenagers in Queens, New York brought attention to 

racial and xenophobic tensions between White residents and Chinese and Korean immigrants.266

Susan Seinfeld, district manager of a community board for the neighborhood, explained “‘[t]here’s 

an undercurrent of suspicion of the new immigrant –– what are they doing, what are they building, 

what are they putting in that store?’”267 One of the assailants, Kevin Brown, pled guilty to seconddegree assault as a hate crime and third-degree assault as a hate crime and was sentenced to threeand-a-half years in state prison and two-and-a-half years post-release supervision. Paul Heavey, 

the other perpetrator, was sentenced to five years of probation and 75 hours of community service 

and was ordered to offer a formal apology in court to the two Asian men he assaulted.268

More recently, in March 2021, Robert Long went on a shooting rampage at three Atlanta area spas, 

killing eight people.269 Long claimed that he had a “sexual addiction” and tried to eliminate his 

“temptation” by targeting the massage parlors as a form of vengeance.270 One survivor of the 

shootings recalled the shooter saying that he would “kill all Asians.”271 Of the eight victims, seven 

were women and six were Asian.272 Long was sentenced to life in prison without parole, plus an 

additional 35 years.273 Both the FBI and Cherokee County’s District Attorney’s office investigated 

264 Ibid., 3.

265 Ibid., 7.

266 Michelle O’Donnell, “Accusations of a Hate Crime Expose Tensions,” New York Times, Aug. 15, 2006, 

https://www.nytimes.com/2006/08/15/nyregion/15hate.html.

267 Ibid.

268 Gazette, “Bias Attack Participant Apologies in Court,” Queens Gazette, May 23, 2007, 

https://www.qgazette.com/articles/bias-attack-participant-apologizes-in-court/.

269 Richard Fausset, Nicholas Bogel-Burroughs, and Marie Fazio, “8 Dead in Atlanta Spa Shootings, With Fears of 

Anti-Asian Bias,” The New York Times, Mar. 17, 2021, https://www.nytimes.com/live/2021/03/17/us/shootingatlanta-acworth.

270 Ibid; Meredith Deliso, “Suspect in Atlanta Spa Shootings Seeking to Avoid Death Row,” ABC News, Apr. 20, 

2022, https://abcnews.go.com/US/suspect-atlanta-spa-shootings-seeking-avoid-deathrow/story?id=84196035#:~:text=He%20was%20sentenced%20to%20life,of%20murder%2C%20among%20other%

20charges.

271 Nelson Oliveira, “Atlanta Shootings Increase Fear in Asian American Communities as #StopAsianHate Trends 

on Social Media,” Daily News, Mar. 17, 2021, https://www.nydailynews.com/news/national/ny-asian-americancommunities-mourn-victims-atlanta-shootings-20210317-kgygtdndhjhyhkcoo4vuokhlay-story.html.

272 Richard Fausset, Nicholas Bogel-Burroughs, and Marie Fazio, “8 Dead in Atlanta Spa Shootings, With Fears of 

Anti-Asian Bias,” The New York Times, Mar. 17, 2021, https://www.nytimes.com/live/2021/03/17/us/shootingatlanta-acworth.

273 Meredith Deliso, “Suspect in Atlanta Spa Shootings Seeking to Avoid Death Row,” ABC News, Apr 20, 2022, 

https://abcnews.go.com/US/suspect-atlanta-spa-shootings-seeking-avoid-deathrow/story?id=84196035#:~:text=He%20was%20sentenced%20to%20life,of%20murder%2C%20among%20other%

20charges.
42 The Federal Response to Anti-Asian Racism in the United States

whether to designate the shootings as a hate crime, but determined not to add that enhancement to 

Long’s charges.274 Long’s sentence was part of a plea agreement whereby he “admitted to all 

charges in Cherokee County, including malice murder, felony murder, attempt to commit murder 

and aggravated assault.”275 While this was a heinous act regardless of the victims’ race, it also 

demonstrates an inextricable link to racism and misogyny against Asian women as well the 

longstanding perception of Asian women as “figures of forbidden desire” and exemplifies the harm 

caused by these stereotypes.

276

Additionally, in a 2022 study by the National Asian Pacific American Women’s Forum 

(NAPAWF), the survey found that nearly three in four (74 percent) of Asian American, Native 

Hawaiian, and Pacific Islander (AANHPI) women reported experiencing racism and/or 

discrimination over the past 12 months, and 40 percent reported experiencing sexual 

harassment.277 Regarding public safety, over half (51 percent) of East Asian respondents reported 

they felt less safe than at the beginning of the pandemic, which was almost 20 points higher than 

other AANHPI subgroups.278

Hate incidents and hate crimes have impacted many Asian communities, and not solely people of

East Asian descent. Manjusha Kulkarni, executive director of AAPI Equity Alliance and cofounder of Stop AAPI Hate, testified to the Commission that the rise of hate incidents have also 

impacted Southeast Asian and South Asian communities.

279 According to a 2021 survey, 20 

percent of South Asian people have also experienced hate incidents.280 As with many hate crimes 

and incidents, these events do not garner national attention, but some of the most devastating 

examples from this century include a 2021 shooting in Indianapolis that resulted in the death of 

four Sikh Americans, the murder of seven Sikh Americans in Oak Creek, Wisconsin in 2012, and 

the murder of three South Asian people directly following 9/11.281

The myth of the “perpetual foreigner” continues to impact the rise of anti-Asian racism and 

discrimination during the pandemic. For instance, at a briefing before the Massachusetts State 

Advisory Committee to the Commission, Ani Vong, a daughter of Cambodian survivors of the 

274 Christian Boone and Chelsea Prince, “‘Swift justice’: Spa shooter Gets 4 Consecutive Life Sentences in 

Cherokee Plea Deal,” The Atlanta Journal-Constitution, July 27, 2021, https://www.ajc.com/news/crime/breakingcherokee-prosecutor-announces-plea-deal-in-spa-shootings/R5JEDHK5KRFJRGQO4KP5D3WEFI/.

275 Kate Brumback, “Man Pleads Guilty to 4 Asian Spa Killings, Sentenced to Life,” APNews.com, July 28, 2021, 

https://apnews.com/article/shootings-georgia-massage-business-shootings-4c9d611102b25b49b8bfee276278c472.

276 Robert G. Lee, Orientals: Asian Americans in Popular Culture, Temple University Press, Philadelphia. (1999).

277 National Asian Pacific American Women’s Forum, “The State of Safety for Asian American and Pacific Islander 

Women in the U.S.,” Mar. 2022, https://www.napawf.org/assets/download/napawf-state-of-safety-report.pdf.

278 Ibid.

279 Manjusha Kulkarni, Executive Director of AAPI Equity Alliance and co-founder for Stop AAPI Hate, testimony, 

Anti-Asian Racism Briefing, p. 98.

280 Aggie Yellow Horse, Russell Jeung, and Ronae Matriano, “Stop AAPI Hate National Report, 03/19/2020 –

9/30/2021,” Nov. 2021, https://stopaapihate.org/wp-content/uploads/2021/11/21-SAH-NationalReport2-v2.pdf.

281 Kulkarni Testimony, Anti-Asian Racism Briefing Transcript, p. 98.
Anti-Asian Hate Crimes Introduction and Background 43

Khmer Rouge and whose father was beaten to death by White men in a traffic dispute when she 

was a child explained: 

I am afraid. We have always been afraid ... I’ve been called a chink, a gook... I’ve been 

spat on... I’ve been asked if I understand English or can read English ... I’ve been told to 

go back to my country countless times, but this is this is my country. I’ve been here since 

I was two months old... But I am not White American, so I will always be treated as a 

foreigner in my own country.282

Additionally, in a 2021 survey, researchers found that approximately one in four (27 percent) 

Asian Americans reported experiencing a hate incident, and more than two-thirds (64 percent) 

reported being asked: “where they’re really from.”283 The survey also found that Asian Americans 

were highly likely to be asked whether they spoke English or to “Americanize” their names (45 

and 20 percent, respectively).284 Another study that surveyed White individuals about “perceived 

Americanness” found that respondents consistently perceived Asian people as less American, 

compared to Black or other White people. 285 The study’s authors also found that “White 

participants who blamed China for the pandemic were also more likely to apply the perpetual 

foreigner stereotype to Asian Americans.”286

The historical evidence of Asian Americans’ experience of prejudice and racism in the U.S. is 

irrefutable. 287 These stereotypes have influenced non-Asian perceptions of persons of Asian 

descent. These biases and stereotypes have been destructive to those whom they are being applied, 

as well as to those who apply them. Moreover, the intersection of racism within the narrative of a 

global pandemic has amplified the health crisis with respects to the spread of disease and the spread 

of anti-Asian prejudice and discrimination.

282 Ani Vong, “Hate Crimes Against Asian American Pacific Islander Communities in Massachusetts,” Aug. 2021, 

p. 8, https://www.usccr.gov/files/2021-10/ma-sac-aapi-hate-crimes.pdf.

283 Niala Boodhoo, “Poll: 1 out of 4 Asian Americans has experienced a hate incident,” Axios, Mar. 30, 2021, 

https://www.axios.com/2021/03/30/poll-1-in-4-asian-americans-experience-hate-incident.

284 Ibid.

285 Jordan Daley, Natalie Gallagher, and Galen Bodenhausen, “The Pandemic and the ‘Perpetual Foreigner’: How 

Threats Posted by the COVID-19 Pandemic Relate to Stereotyping of Asian Americans,” Frontiers in Psychology, 

vol. 13, Feb. 2022, https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fpsyg.2022.821891/full.

286 Ibid.; see also, Sean Darling-Hammond, Eli Michaels, Amani Allen, David Chae, Mahasin Mujahid, Thu 

Nguyen, and Rucker Johnson, “After ‘China Virus’ Went Viral: Racially Charged Coronavirus Coverage and 

Trends in Bias Against Asian Americans,” Health Education and Behavior, vol. 47, no. 6, 2020, 

https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/pdf/10.1177/1090198120957949

287 See supra 156-229 (Anti-Asian Laws and Historical Racism Against Asians).
44 The Federal Response to Anti-Asian Racism in the United States

Coronavirus Disease 2019

We live in an interconnected world,288 and global travel is easier now than at any other time in 

history.289 In the 21st century, it takes roughly 50 hours to fly around the world on a commercial 

plane;

290 and this increase in travel has also allowed pathogens to spread more quickly and easily 

across the globe.291 Epidemiologists estimate that it takes about 36 hours for a pathogen like the 

Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome Coronavirus 2 (the virus that caused COVID-19) to spread.292

The combination of increased transnational travel, lack of communication, and a slow public health 

response resulted in the COVID-19 virus becoming a global pandemic.293

As of April 10, 2023, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) reported 1,124,816

COVID-related deaths in the U.S.;

294 and global deaths related to the virus reached 6,893,190.295

At the publication of this report, it has been four years since the start of the COVID-19 pandemic.

Important dates regarding the pandemic’s timeline and the response efforts include:

• December 31, 2019, the World Health Organization’s (WHO) Country Office in China was 

informed of several cases of a pneumonia of unknown cause in Wuhan, China.

• January 1, 2020, the Huanan Seafood Wholesale Market in Wuhan was closed as it was 

identified as the location of the initial cases.296

288 Diane Boudreau, Melissa McDaniel, et al., "The Global Network," National Geographic, Resource Library, 

https://education.nationalgeographic.org/resource/global-network.

289 Maya Kachroo-Levine, “What Travel Looked Like Through the Decades,” Travel and Leisure, July 20, 2021, 

https://www.travelandleisure.com/travel-tips/what-travel-looked-like-decades.

290 Sachindra Karki, “How Long Does It Take to Fly Around the World?,” Aviation Nepal, Nov. 21, 2021, 

https://www.aviationnepal.com/how-long-does-it-take-to-fly-around-theworld/#:~:text=An%20average%20commercial%20jetliner%20has,trip%20across%20the%20world%2C%20howev

er%2C.

291 U.S. Global Leadership Coalition, “COVID-19: Defeating a Global Pandemic,” 2022, 

https://www.usglc.org/coronavirus/?gclid=EAIaIQobChMIoaX4mYH3-

wIVROHICh14RQEJEAAYAiAAEgIHOPD_BwE.

292 Ibid.

293 U.S. Global Leadership Coalition, “COVID-19: Defeating a Global Pandemic,” 2022, 

https://www.usglc.org/coronavirus/?gclid=EAIaIQobChMIoaX4mYH3-

wIVROHICh14RQEJEAAYAiAAEgIHOPD_BwE; David J. Sencer CDC Museum, CDC Museum COVID-19 

Timeline, https://www.cdc.gov/museum/timeline/covid19.html.

294 CDC, Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, National Center for Health Statistics, COVID-19 Death Data, 

https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/covid19/mortality-overview.htm (accessed Apr. 10, 2023).

295 World Health Organization, WHO Coronavirus (COVID-19) Dashboard, 

https://covid19.who.int/#:~:text=Globally%2C%20as%20of%205%3A36pm,6%2C621%2C060%20deaths%2C%20

reported%20to%20WHO.

296 In January 2020, WHO stated that evidence suggested the origins of the SARS-CoV-2 virus originated from a 

market in Wuhan. As of the writing of this report, however, data regarding the origins of the SARS-CoV-2 virus are 

still inconclusive. See e.g., Committee on Oversight and Accountability, “COVID Origins Hearing Wrap Up: Facts, 

Science, Evidence Point to a Wuhan Lab Leak,” Mar. 8, 2023, https://oversight.house.gov/release/covid-originshearing-wrap-up-facts-science-evidence-point-to-a-wuhan-lab-leak%EF%BF%BC/; Dyani Lewis, Max Kozlov, and 

Mariana Lenharo, “COVID-origins data from Wuhan market published: what scientists think,” Nature, vol. 616 

(2023), https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-023-00998-y.
Anti-Asian Hate Crimes Introduction and Background 45

• January 3, 2020, China informed the WHO that it identified over 40 cases of pneumonia 

of unknown etiology.

• January 10, 2020, the WHO announced the outbreak in Wuhan, China was caused by a 

novel coronavirus.

• January 19, 2020, laboratory-confirmed cases of SARS-CoV-2 reported in China, 

Thailand, Japan, and the Republic of Korea (278 cases, 2 cases, 1 case, and 

1 case, respectively).

• January 23, 2020, Wuhan, China placed under lockdown due to the outbreak.

• February 11, 2020, the WHO announced the official name for the disease causing the 

outbreak as the Coronavirus Disease 2019, which was abbreviated as COVID-19.

• March 11, 2020, the WHO declared COVID-19 a pandemic after being identified in 114 

countries, with more than 118,000 cases, and causing 4,291 deaths.

• March 13, 2020, the President of the United States declared a nationwide emergency due 

to COVID-19.

• March 15, 2020, in the U.S., states implemented shutdowns to prevent the spread of 

COVID-19.

• March 28, 2020, the White House extended social distancing measures to prevent the 

spread of COVID-19.

• April 3, 2020, the CDC announced mask wearing guidelines. It recommends all people 

wear a mask when outside of their home.

• April 10, 2020, the U.S. had the most reported cases and deaths of COVID-19 than any 

other country. It had more than 500,000 cases and over 18,600 deaths, respectively. 

Additionally, New York State had more reported confirmed cases (159,937) than Spain 

(153,000), Italy (143,000), or China (82,000).297

In an effort to stop the spread of the disease from entering the U.S., a number of actions were 

taken. On January 17, 2020, the CDC began screening passengers for symptoms of COVID-19 on 

direct and connecting flights from Wuhan, China to San Francisco, New York City, and Los 

Angeles.298 Additionally, in February 2020, all persons on the Diamond Princess cruise ship were 

quarantined off the coast of Japan due to the high number of people testing positive for COVID19.299 The passengers and crew members were prevented from returning to the U.S. for at least 14 

days after they left the cruise ship. On March 14, 2020, the CDC issued a “no sail order” for all 

cruise ships sailing in waters over which the U.S. holds jurisdiction.300 In March 2020, President

Trump declared an additional travel ban on non-U.S. citizens traveling from 26 European countries 

due to COVID-19.301

297 David J. Sencer, “CDC Museum COVID-19 Timeline,” https://www.cdc.gov/museum/timeline/covid19.html.

298 Ibid.

299 Ibid.

300 Ibid.

301 Ibid.
46 The Federal Response to Anti-Asian Racism in the United States

Public Discourse and COVID-19

During the pandemic, the media and some government officials used several other names to refer 

to COVID-19. For instance, it was sometimes referred to as the “Chinese virus,”

302 the “Kung 

flu,”

303 and the “Wuhan virus,”304 by some members in the Trump Administration. When asked 

about this behavior, former President Trump said he used the name the “Chinese virus” because it 

originated in China. 305 Specifically, he said he used the name to “combat a disinformation 

campaign promoted by Beijing officials that the American military was the source of the 

outbreak.” 306 However, these terms were widely criticized as being racist and potentially 

perpetuating negative views of Asian individuals and communities.307

Russell Jeung, a professor of Asian American Studies at San Francisco State University, explained 

how the rhetoric and framing of the virus impacted the Asian community. He testified that:

When politicians used the term Chinese virus, it really did two things—it racialized the 

virus, so it made it Chinese, and it stigmatized the people, so Chinese people were the ones 

carrying the disease. That association with the Chinese – that the virus was Chinese and 

[that] Chinese [people] had the virus really did go viral on social media, and that’s been 

correlated with anti-Asian hate.308

Although President Trump did not see his language as biased, others warned against using such 

language. For example, WHO advised against the use of terms that link the virus to China to avoid 

stigmatization in response to the use of such words.

309 Executive director of WHO’s emergencies 

program, Mike Ryan, stated that “viruses know no borders and they don’t care about a person’s

ethnicity, the color of a person’s skin or how much money a person has in the bank.”310

302 Dan Mangan, “Trump Defends Calling Coronavirus ‘Chinese virus’ — ‘It’s Not Racist At All’,” CNBC, Mar 18 

2020, https://www.cnbc.com/2020/03/18/coronavirus-criticism-trump-defends-saying-chinese-virus.html.

303 Colby Itkowitz, “Trump Again Uses Racially Insensitive Term to Describe Coronavirus,” The Washington Post, 

June 23, 2020, https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/trump-again-uses-kung-flu-to-describecoronavirus/2020/06/23/0ab5a8d8-b5a9-11ea-aca5-ebb63d27e1ff_story.html.

304 Dan Mangan, “Trump Defends Calling Coronavirus ‘Chinese virus’ — ‘It’s Not Racist At All’,” CNBC, Mar 18 

2020, https://www.cnbc.com/2020/03/18/coronavirus-criticism-trump-defends-saying-chinese-virus.html.

305 Katie Rogers, Lara Jakes and Ana Swanson, “Trump Defends Using ‘Chinese Virus’ Label, Ignoring Growing 

Criticism,” The New York Times, Mar 18, 2020, https://www.nytimes.com/2020/03/18/us/politics/china-virus.html.

306 Ibid.

307 Ibid.

308 Jeung Testimony, Anti-Asian Racism Briefing Transcript, p. 45. 

309 Guardian Staff, “Donald Trump Calls Covid-19 'Kung Flu' at Tulsa rally,” The Guardian, June 20, 2020, 

https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2020/jun/20/trump-covid-19-kung-flu-racist-language .

310 Dawn Kopecki, “WHO officials warn US President Trump against calling coronavirus ‘the Chinese virus’,” 

CNBC, Mar. 18, 2020, https://www.cnbc.com/2020/03/18/who-officials-warn-us-president-trump-against-callingcoronavirus-the-chinese-virus.html.
Anti-Asian Hate Crimes Introduction and Background 47

CDC director, Dr. Robert Redfield, who served from 2018 until early 2021, agreed it was “wrong 

and inappropriate to call [it] the Chinese coronavirus.”311 In 2015, the WHO issued best practices 

for the naming of diseases, stating that geographic locations should not be used in disease names 

because this can “provoke a backlash against members of particular religious or ethnic 

communities, create unjustified barriers to travel, commerce and trade... This can have serious 

consequences for peoples’ lives and livelihoods.”312 Similarly, civil rights and Asian American 

advocacy groups asserted that such words can have harmful consequences and can inspire racism 

and violence against Asian Americans and persons of Asian descent.

313

Although President Trump’s aid expressed that this verbiage was an indictment against China 

rather than against Asian Americans, many Asian American advocacy groups saw this language 

as racist and concerning for multiple reasons.314 For instance, this type of language continues to 

perpetuate the notion of people of Asian descent, including Asian Americans, as a monolith and 

erases the diversity of Asian communities.

315 Moreover, the civil rights nonprofit Asian Americans 

Advancing Justice-Chicago expressed that given the amount of loss and suffering caused by the 

pandemic, such language could incite violence and xenophobic scapegoating.316 Cynthia Choi, coexecutive director with Chinese for Affirmative Action and co-founder of Stop AAPI Hate, 

testified that in the week after President Trump first tweeted about a “Chinese virus,” Twitter 

hashtags expressing anti-Asian sentiment increased 174 times.317

Additionally, the scapegoating of Asian Americans during the COVID-19 pandemic was not the 

first instance of Asian persons being blamed for spreading diseases. For example, “[d]uring disease 

outbreaks in the 19th and 20th centuries, Chinese immigrants in San Francisco were depicted as 

harbingers of infection, placed under racist quarantines, and denied access to health care.”318 In 

cities with large Chinese communities, such as San Francisco, residents were forced to live in 

overcrowded areas with unsanitary conditions, which makes the spread of diseases easier and more 

311 Dan Mangan, “Trump Defends Calling Coronavirus ‘Chinese virus’ — ‘It’s Not Racist At All’,” CNBC, Mar. 18 

2020, https://www.cnbc.com/2020/03/18/coronavirus-criticism-trump-defends-saying-chinese-virus.html.

312 The World Health Organization, WHO issues best practices for naming new human infectious diseases, May 8, 

2015, https://www.who.int/news/item/08-05-2015-who-issues-best-practices-for-naming-new-human-infectiousdiseases; American Society for Microbiology, Why Scientists Should Not Name Diseases Based On Location, May 

12, 2021, https://asm.org/Articles/2021/May/Why-Scientists-Should-Not-Name-Diseases-After-Plac; Katie Rogers, 

Lara Jakes and Ana Swanson, “Trump Defends Using ‘Chinese Virus’ Label, Ignoring Growing Criticism,” The 

New York Times, Mar. 18, 2020, https://www.nytimes.com/2020/03/18/us/politics/china-virus.html.

313 Kimmy Yam, “Trump Can't Claim 'Kung Flu' Doesn't Affect Asian Americans in this Climate, Experts Say,”

NBC News, June 22, 2020, https://www.nbcnews.com/news/asian-america/trump-can-t-claim-kung-flu-doesn-taffect-asian-n1231812.

314 Ibid.

315 Ibid.

316 Ibid.

317 Choi Testimony, Anti-Asian Racism Briefing Transcript, p. 71.

318 Harmeet Kaur, “Early Chinese Americans Were Blamed for Diseases and Denied Health Care. So They Built 

Their Own Hospital,” CNN, Apr. 12, 2021, https://www.cnn.com/2021/04/12/us/chinese-hospital-sf-chinatowndisease-outbreaks-trnd/index.html.
48 The Federal Response to Anti-Asian Racism in the United States

prevalent.319 Laureen Hom, assistant professor of political science at California State Polytechnic 

University, explained that at that time leading theories about disease contagion were that they were 

spread by breathing “bad air.” Therefore, Chinese communities were blamed as the source of 

diseases and “they were neglected by mainstream institutions and that fed into how they were 

blamed for these diseases.”320

In March 1900, a Chinese owner of a lumberyard died of bubonic plague in the Chinese quarter of 

San Francisco.321 Authorities immediately cordoned off the 15-block neighborhood, quarantining 

about 25,000 Chinese residents and closing businesses owned by people who were not White.322

Homes in the Chinese-immigrant community “were ransacked, belongings were burned in an 

effort to fumigate the area, and the city’s anti-infection posse looted shops and took 

sledgehammersto windows.”323 Moreover, White residentsin San Francisco were allowed to leave 

the quarantine area, because the public did not believe White people could get the disease.324 The 

mayor at that time stated that the quarantine was necessary because Chinese people were a 

“constant threat to public health.”325 Due to the pushback from the community, the city’s Board of 

Health lifted the quarantine.326 However, a few months later, another quarantine was implemented 

in San Francisco’s Chinatown after more Chinese Americans died of the bubonic plague.327 The 

Board of Health again quarantined the neighborhood and added barbed wire to partition off the 

area and stationed over 100 police officers to patrol the area.

328 The San Francisco Chronicle 

reported that “in the careful discrimination in fixing the line of embargo, not one Caucasian doing 

business on the outer rim of the alleged infected district is affected .... Their Asiatic neighbors, 

however, are imprisoned within the lines.”329 Editors of the San Francisco Call newspaper stoked 

anti-Chinese sentiment writing:

319 Ibid.

320 Ibid.

321 Alicia Lee, “The Dark and Complex History of Quarantine Goes Back to the Middle Ages,” CNN, Mar. 4, 2020, 

https://www.cnn.com/2020/03/04/us/coronavirus-quarantine-word-history-trnd/index.html.

322 Ibid.

323 Olivia B. Waxman, “San Francisco’s Response to Bubonic Plague in 1900 Shows the Dark Roots of Anti-Asian 

Hate,” Time, May 24, 2022, https://time.com/6180443/bubonic-plague-anti-asian-hate-covid-19/.

324 Harmeet Kaur, “Early Chinese Americans Were Blamed for Diseases and Denied Health Care. So They Built 

Their Own Hospital,” CNN, Apr. 12, 2021, https://www.cnn.com/2021/04/12/us/chinese-hospital-sf-chinatowndisease-outbreaks-trnd/index.html; Wayne Au, “'I Don’t Like China or Chinese People Because They Started This 

Quarantine,” Rethinking Schools, vol. 34, no. 4, 2020, https://rethinkingschools.org/articles/i-dont-like-china-orchinese-people-because-they-started-this-quarantine/.

325 Wayne Au, “I Don’t Like China or Chinese People Because They Started This Quarantine,” Rethinking Schools,

vol. 34, no. 4, 2020, https://rethinkingschools.org/articles/i-dont-like-china-or-chinese-people-because-they-startedthis-quarantine/.

326 Ibid.

327 Ibid.

328 Ibid.

329 Ibid.; see also, Charles McClain, “Of Medicine, Race, and American Law: The Bubonic Plague Outbreak of 

1900,” Law & Social Inquiry, vol. 13, no. 3, 1988, https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/law-and-socialinquiry/article/abs/of-medicine-race-and-american-law-the-bubonic-plague-outbreak-of1900/6A9F353445E979A0C422DBB72E6D5BF1. 
Anti-Asian Hate Crimes Introduction and Background 49

In no city in the civilized world is there a slum more foul or more menacing than that which 

now threatens us with the Asiatic plague.... So long as it stands so long will there be a 

menace of the appearance in San Francisco of every form of disease, plague, and pestilence 

which Asiatic filth and vice generate. The only way to get rid of that menace is to eradicate 

Chinatown from the city .... Clear the foul spot from San Francisco and give the debris to 

the flames.330

Chinese leaders petitioned the court claiming the actions taken by the city were racist, and the 

court ruled that partitioning off the entire Chinatown neighborhood was “unreasonable, unjust, and 

oppressive.”331 The Honorable Circuit Judge Morrow ruling on the case specifically stated that the 

quarantine was the “administration of law ‘with an evil eye and an unequal hand’” and ruled that 

it violated the Fourteenth Amendment, thereby lifting the quarantine.332

As with these historical cases of disease pandemics, inconsistent messaging from government 

leaders and public health officials about a disease can have widespread and harmful effects, 

particularly when messaging is targeting a specific group or community.

333 Public health experts 

acknowledge that the world has experienced a growing number of pandemics, for example, SARS 

in 2003, H1N1 Flu in 2009, Ebola in 2014, Zika virus in 2016, and now COVID-19 in 2019. 

“Although concerns about such pandemics have escalated, government preparation for the current 

public health crisis has often been haphazard and largely insufficient due largely to confusion, 

instability, misinformation, and poor planning, which have led to serious mistakes in responding 

to the COVID-19 pandemic.” 334 As John Yang, president and executive director of Asian 

Americans Advancing Justice (AAJC) testified in his written statement, “[t]he experience of antiAsian racism is not new to people of Asian descent living in the U.S. History demonstrates that 

our communities have been scapegoated during earlier pandemics, during periods of economic 

insecurity, and in the name of national security.” 335 Specifically regarding the COVID-19 

messaging, the Trump Administration used biased language in referring to the virus (e.g., the 

“kung flu”) on social media, in speeches, and at rallies;336 thereby linking the virus to Chinese 

330 Ibid.

331 See Jew Ho v. Williamson, 103 F. 10 (C.C.D.Cal.1900).

332 Id., ¶ 24. 

333 See e.g., Do Kyun David Kim and Gary Kreps, “An Analysis of Government Communication in the United 

States During the COVID-19 Pandemic: Recommendations for Effective Government Health Risk 

Communication,” World Med Health Policy, vol. 12, no. 4, Dec. 2020, 

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7461274/.

334 Ibid.

335 Yang Statement, at 6. 

336 See e.g., Michele Goodwin and Erwin Chemerinsky, “The Trump Administration: Immigration, Racism, and 

COVID-19,” 169 Pennsylvania Law Rev. Jan. 2021, chromeextension://efaidnbmnnnibpcajpcglclefindmkaj/https://scholarship.law.upenn.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=9722

&context=penn_law_review; Nathan Kar Ming Chan, Jae Yeon Kim, and Vivien Leung, “COVID-19 and Asian 

Americans: How Elite Messaging and Social Exclusion Shape Partisan Attitudes,” Perspectives on Politics, vol. 20, 

no. 2, Dec. 2021, https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/perspectives-on-politics/article/covid19-and-asianamericans-how-elite-messaging-and-social-exclusion-shape-partisan-
50 The Federal Response to Anti-Asian Racism in the United States

Americans and stoking racist sentiments that contributed to the rise of anti-Asian hate crimes 

during 2020 and 2021.

337 Russell Jeung, professor of Asian American Studies at San Francisco 

State University, testified that political rhetoric inflamed fear and animosity toward Asian 

Americans, and that “social media circulated posts and messages that scapegoated Chinese for the 

pandemic and circulated conspiracy theories.”338 

The Racialization of Disease 

When “then-President Donald Trump referred to the coronavirus as ‘the Chinese virus,’ ––

subsequently, many Asian Americans said they were blamed for bringing COVID-19 to the 

U.S.,”339 which racialized the disease. Mardon et. al (2020) argued that this framing is significant 

because when diseases are racialized that “race [is] not seen as part of the state. [They are the 

one’s] who threaten [the state] in some way that gets blamed for disease.”340 Similarly, the World 

Health Organization “warns against associating diseases with specific locations, to prevent stigma 

and backlash.”341 At the Commission’s briefing, Jeung testified about this backlash, describing an 

incident that he stated was “sadly, is all too common.”342 He stated:

[I]t’s not necessarily an issue of a hate crime but one of racial harassment where a woman 

–– customer –– was denied access at her pharmacy. The perpetrator, using yellow peril 

rhetoric, not only saw her as being a disease-carrying, threatening person of color, but 

instead stated that she was the infection, that our racialized bodies themselves were the 

defiling elements to the United States. And so, he told her to go home, we don’t want you 

here. And you could see the traumatizing result, this person was in shock, and cried and 

left, saying no one came to help, she left isolated, marginalized. And I think that’s the 

experience of the Asian American community at this moment, one of collective racial 

trauma....

But the racism we’re seeing now have particular sources, Asian Americans face a sort of a 

unique set of factors that lead to racism against us. Clearly, people were afraid of COVID19 because of the disease, but the political rhetoric and social media today really did 

attitudes/CEC59253B8C36744BDD6DDC66284098C; Alana Wise, “White House Defends Trump’s Use of Racist 

Term to Describe Coronavirus,” NPR, June 22, 2020, https://www.npr.org/2020/06/22/881810671/white-housedefends-trumps-use-of-racist-term-to-describe-coronavirus.

337 See infra Table 8 and Table 9 (data on anti-Asian incidents and hate crimes).

338 Russell Jeung, Professor of Asian American Studies, San Francisco State University, Written Statement for The 

Federal Response to Anti-Asian Racism in the United States Briefing before the U.S. Comm’n on Civil Rights, Mar. 

24, 2023, at 6 (hereinafter Jeung Statement). 

339 Christina Zdanowicz, We Asked Asian Americans about Their Experiences with Hate. The Responses Were 

Heartbreaking, CNN, Mar. 19, 2021, https://www.cnn.com/2021/03/19/us/asian-american-hate-pandemictrnd/index.html.

340 Austin Mardon, Fatima Arshad Syed, Faried Nasir, Yvette Mae Morte and Catherine Mardon, The Racialization 

of Coronavirus and Hate Crimes, Chapter 4, Historical Cases of Racialized Disease, 2020, Golden Meteorite Press.

341 Nina Strochlic, America’s Long History of Scapegoating its Asian Citizens, National Geographic, Sept. 2, 2020, 

https://www.nationalgeographic.com/history/article/asian-american-racism-covid.

342 Jeung Testimony, Anti-Asian Racism Briefing Transcript, p. 11.
Anti-Asian Hate Crimes Introduction and Background 51

exacerbate the issue. When politicians used the term Chinese virus, it really did two things 

-- it racialized the virus, so it made it Chinese, and it stigmatized the people, so Chinese 

people were the ones carrying the disease. That association that the [] virus was Chinese 

and [that the] Chinese had the virus really did go viral on social media, and that’s been 

correlated with anti-Asian hate.343

Research suggests that language can contribute to prejudicial beliefs, and at times, discriminatory 

actions. For instance, between March 16 and March 30, 2020, President Trump used the words

“Chinese virus” more than 20 times.344 Over this same period, more than 100 hate incidents were 

collected by the Stop AAPI Hate website.345 Brian Levin, director of the Center for the Study of 

Hate & Extremism explained that “Presidential statements have correlated both to increases and 

decreases in hate crimes.”

346 Levin maintains that “[i]t is notable that on March 23, when President 

Trump refrained from ethnic terms relating to the virus for a day and spoke of tolerance, there 

were no anti-Asian hate crimes in NYC in what otherwise was a historically bad month for 

hate crime.”347

Research suggests there is a relationship between racialized language targeting certain groups by 

elites and public sentiment.

348 For example, Newman et al. (2021) found that “in the absence of 

prejudiced elite speech, prejudiced citizens constrain the expression of their prejudice.” 349 In 

contrast, “in the presence of prejudiced elite speech –– particularly when it is tacitly condoned by 

343 Jeung Testimony, Anti-Asian Racism Briefing, Transcript, pp. 11-13.

344 C. Aujean Lee and John C. Arroyo, “A Typology of Local and State Government Responses to Racism: A Case 

of Anti-Asian Hate in the COVID-19 Pandemic,,” Journal of Planning Education and Research, Mar. 31, 2022, 

https://doi.org/10.1177/0739456X221084592.

345 The Stop AAPI website was launched as a coalition between AAPI Equity Alliance (AAPI Equity), Chinese for 

Affirmative Action (CAA), and the Asian American Studies Department of San Francisco State University on 

March 19, 2020. The coalition tracks and responds to incidents of hate, violence, harassment, discrimination, 

shunning, and child bullying against Asian Americans and Pacific Islanders in the United States. See Stop AAPI 

Hate, “About,” https://stopaapihate.org/about/ (accessed Feb. 10, 2023); Aggie Yellow Horse, Russell Jeung,

Richard Lim, Boaz Tang, Megan Im, Lauryn Higashiyama, Layla Schweng, and Ronae Matriano, Mikayla Chen,

“Stop AAPI Hate National Report, 03/19/2020 – 12/31/202, Mar. 1, 2022, https://stopaapihate.org/national-reportthrough-december-31-2021/.6/30/2021, Aug. 2021, https://stopaapihate.org/wp-content/uploads/2021/08/StopAAPI-Hate-Report-National-v2-210830.pdf.

346 Amy Sherman, “Hate Crimes Against Asian Americans: What the Numbers Show, and Don’t,” Austin American 

Statesman, Mar. 22, 2021, https://www.statesman.com/story/news/2021/03/22/politifact-spike-hate-crimesincidents-targeting-asian-americans/4782199001/; see also, Center for the Study of Hate & Extremism, “Fact Sheet: 

Anti-Asian Prejudice March 2021,” CSUSB, Mar. 21, 2021, 

https://www.csusb.edu/sites/default/files/FACT%20SHEET-%20AntiAsian%20Hate%202020%20rev%203.21.21.pdf.

347 Ibid.

348 Benjamin Newman, Jennifer L. Merolla, Sono Shah, Danielle Casarez Lemi, Loren Collingwood, and S. Karthick 

Ramakrishnan, “The Trump Effect: An Experimental Investigation of the Emboldening Effect of Racially 

Inflammatory Elite Communication,” British Journal of Political Science, 2021, 

https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/british-journal-of-political-science/article/trump-effect-an-experimentalinvestigation-of-the-emboldening-effect-of-racially-inflammatory-elitecommunication/0335108B8E4AF36CBFFA1E45816C6143.

349 Ibid.
52 The Federal Response to Anti-Asian Racism in the United States

other elites – ...the prejudiced are emboldened to both express and act upon their prejudices.”350

The researchers concluded that exposure to racist elite speech increased the likelihood of an 

individual acting on their prejudices and engaging in discriminatory interpersonal acts.351

Over the past decade, the relationship between social media and bias-motivated incidents and hate 

crimes has become more apparent.352 Researchers have shown that social media can have a strong 

influence on shaping people’s beliefs and actions, and can serve as a primary source of influence 

in instilling discriminatory attitudes toward people in marginalized groups.353 Further, research 

suggests that social media has directly contributed to the rise of bias-incidents, racist and 

xenophobic beliefs, and discriminatory behavior during the COVID-19 pandemic.354

Croucher et al. (2020) analyzed possible links between prejudice toward Asian Americans during 

the COVID-19 pandemic and social media users in the U.S. revealed that intergroup threats355

could lead to discrimination.356 The authors found that social media users who perceived biased 

information on social media about Asian people and COVID-19 was accurate and fair were more 

likely to believe that Chinese Americans could pose realistic threats (i.e., threats to physical and 

material well-being) and symbolic threats (i.e., threats to morals, values, and beliefs).357 A study

by Bing He et al. (2021) also found a link between social media and the increase in anti-Asian 

sentiment during COVID-19.358 The researchers found that the presence of anti-Asian hate speech 

on Twitter surpassed counter-hate messages during the height of the pandemic, giving the overall 

350 Ibid.

351 Benjamin Newman, Jennifer L. Merolla, Sono Shah, Danielle Casarez Lemi, Loren Collingwood, and S. Karthick 

Ramakrishnan, “The Trump Effect: An Experimental Investigation of the Emboldening Effect of Racially 

Inflammatory Elite Communication,” British Journal of Political Science, 2021, 

https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/british-journal-of-political-science/article/trump-effect-an-experimentalinvestigation-of-the-emboldening-effect-of-racially-inflammatory-elitecommunication/0335108B8E4AF36CBFFA1E45816C6143.

352 U.S. Commission on Civil Rights, In the Name of Hate: Examining the Federal Government’s Role in 

Responding to Hate Crimes, Nov. 2019, https://www.usccr.gov/files/pubs/2019/11-13-In-the-Name-of-Hate.pdf.

353 Theresa Davidson and Lee Farquhar, “Prejudice and Social Media: Attitudes Towards Illegal Immigrants, 

Refugees, and Transgender People,” In D. Nicole Farris, D’Lane Compton, and Andrea Herrera, (eds.), Gender, 

Sexuality and Race in the Digital Age, Springer 2020.

354 Nan Yu, Shuya Pan, Chia-chen Yang, Jiun-Yi Tsai, “Exploring the Role of Media Sources on COVID-19 Related 

Discrimination Experiences and Concerns Among Asian People in the United States: Cros-Sectional Survey Study,” 

Journal of Medical Internet Research, Nov. 2020, https://www.jmir.org/2020/11/e21684/PDF.

355 Intergroup threat theory is experienced when members of one group perceive that members of another group are 

in a position to cause them harm. See Walter Stehan, Oscar Ybarra, and Kimberly Rios Morrison, “Intergroup threat 

theory,” In T.D. Nelson (ed.) Handbook of prejudice, stereotyping, and discrimination, pp. 43-53, Psychology Press, 

2009, https://psycnet.apa.org/record/2008-09974-003.

356 Stephen Croucher, Thao Nguyen, and Diyako Rahmani, “Prejudice Toward Asian Americans in the Covid-19 

Pandemic: The Effects of Social Media Use in the United States,” Frontiers in Communication, June 2020, vol. 5, 

https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fcomm.2020.00039/full.

357 Ibid.

358 Bing He, Caleb Ziems, Sandeep Soni, Naren Ramakrishnan, Diyi Yang, and Srijan Kumar, “Racism is a Virus: 

Anti-Asian Hate and Counterspeech in Social Media during the Covid-19 Crisis,” Association for Computing 

Machinery, 2021, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2005.12423.pdf. 
Anti-Asian Hate Crimes Introduction and Background 53

impression that there were more anti-Asian sentiment than support for Asian communities.359

Taken together, exposure to these types of messages contributed to Asian people in the U.S. 

suffering from heightened fears and anxiety about discrimination during the height of 

the pandemic.360

In another study, Yulin Hswen et al. (2020) examined the association of certain hashtags with antiAsian sentiment on Twitter from March 9-23, 2020, the week before and the week after President 

Trump tweeted with the phrase “China Virus.” The study found that:

One fifth (19.7%) of the 495,289 hashtags with #covid19 showed anti-Asian sentiment, 

compared with half (50.4%) of the 777,852 hashtags with #chinesevirus. When comparing 

the week before March 16, 2020, to the week after, there was a significantly greater 

increase in anti-Asian hashtags associated with #chinesevirus compared with #covid19.361

The study found that individuals who utilized the #ChineseVirus hashtag were more likely to also 

include overtly racist hashtags compared to those who used the #Covid19 hashtag.

362 The study’s 

authors concluded that “these results may be a proxy of growth in anti-Asian sentiment that was 

not prevalent as before. Using racial terms associated with a disease can result in the perpetuation 

of further stigmatization of racial groups.”363

On a whole, these studies do not suggest that President Trump’s discourse about the pandemic had 

a causal relationship to the increase in anti-Asian discrimination and violence; however, the 

literature does draw strong correlations between the widespread use of negative public discourse

throughout the pandemic and the increased likelihood of bias-motivated incidents against Asian 

communities.

364 Researchers from the University of California explain that the usage of biased 

359 Bing He, Caleb Ziems, Sandeep Soni, Naren Ramakrishnan, Diyi Yang, and Srijan Kumar, “Racism is a Virus: 

Anti-Asian Hate and Counterspeech in Social Media during the Covid-19 Crisis,” Association for Computing 

Machinery, 2021, https://arxiv.org/pdf/2005.12423.pdf. 

360 Nan Yu, Shuya Pan, Chia-chen Yang, Jiun-Yi Tsai, “Exploring the Role of Media Sources on COVID-19 Related 

Discrimination Experiences and Concerns Among Asian People in the United States: Cros-Sectional Survey Study,” 

Journal of Medical Internet Research, Nov. 2020, https://www.jmir.org/2020/11/e21684/PDF.

361 Yulin Hswen, Xiang Xu, Anna Hing, Jared B. Hawkins, John S. Brownstein, and Gilbert C. Gee, “Association of 

“#covid19” Versus “#chinesevirus” With Anti-Asian Sentiments on Twitter: March 9-23, 2020,” American Journal 

of Public Health, May 2021, https://ajph.aphapublications.org/doi/10.2105/AJPH.2021.306154.

362 Ibid.

363 Ibid.

364 Theresa Davidson and Lee Farquhar, “Prejudice and Social Media: Attitudes Towards Illegal Immigrants, 

Refugees, and Transgender People,” In D. Nicole Farris, D’Lane Compton, and Andrea Herrera, (eds.), Gender, 

Sexuality and Race in the Digital Age, Springer 2020; Stephen Croucher, Thao Nguyen, and Diyako Rahmani, 

“Prejudice Toward Asian Americans in the Covid-19 Pandemic: The Effects of Social Media Use in the United 

States,” Frontiers in Communication, June 2020, vol. 5, 

https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fcomm.2020.00039/full; Bing He, Caleb Ziems, Sandeep Soni, Naren 

Ramakrishnan, Diyi Yang, and Srijan Kumar, “Racism is a Virus: Anti-Asian Hate and Counterspeech in Social 

Media during the Covid-19 Crisis,” Association for Computing Machinery, 2021, 

https://arxiv.org/pdf/2005.12423.pdf; Nan Yu, Shuya Pan, Chia-chen Yang, Jiun-Yi Tsai, “Exploring the Role of 

Media Sources on COVID-19 Related Discrimination Experiences and Concerns Among Asian People in the United 

States: Cros-Sectional Survey Study,” Journal of Medical Internet Research, Nov. 2020, 
54 The Federal Response to Anti-Asian Racism in the United States

language that demonizes marginalized groups may have primed negative attitudes toward those 

groups; and over time, this language emboldened members of society to more openly express and 

act on their prejudices.365

Additionally, both the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) and the Federal Bureau of 

Investigation (FBI) expressed concerns about potential violence against Asian communities early 

in the pandemic. For example, on March 23, 2020, DHS issued a warning that White supremacists 

may use the crisis to justify harm or violence against Asian Americans.366 Similarly, the FBI also 

warned that there would be a surge in anti-Asian hate crimes during the pandemic. In late March 

2020, the FBI alerted law enforcement agencies across the U.S. to be on heightened alert for biasmotivated incidents.367 In a statement in 2020, the FBI wrote: 

The FBI assesses hate crime incidents against Asian Americans will likely surge across the 

United States, due to the spread of the coronavirus disease... endangering Asian American 

communities.... The FBI makes this assessment based on the assumptions that a portion of 

the U.S. public will associate COVID-19 with China and Asian American populations.368

Unlike the World Health Organization that warned against using stigmatizing language to speak 

about the pandemic,369 the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) and other federal 

agencies took little action to curb the xenophobic language used to refer to COVID-19.370 This 

inaction failed to follow recommendations developed by the CDC as a result of the severe acute 

https://www.jmir.org/2020/11/e21684/PDF; Yulin Hswen, Xiang Xu, Anna Hing, Jared B. Hawkins, John S. 

Brownstein, and Gilbert C. Gee, “Association of “#covid19” Versus “#chinesevirus” With Anti-Asian Sentiments 

on Twitter: March 9-23, 2020,” American Journal of Public Health, May 2021, 

https://ajph.aphapublications.org/doi/10.2105/AJPH.2021.306154.

365 Tyler T. Reny and Matt A. Barretto, “Xenophobia in the Time of pandemic: Othering, Anti-Asian Attitudes, and 

COVID-19,” Politics, Groups and Identities, May 28, 2020, 

https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/21565503.2020.1769693.

366 Angela R. Gover, Shannon B. Harper, and Lynn Langton, “Anti-Asian Hate Crime During the COVID-19 

Pandemic: Exploring the Reproduction of Inequality,” American Journal of Criminal Justice, vol. 45, 2020, 

https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s12103-020-09545-1.

367 Ibid.

368 Josh Margolin, “FBI warns of potential surge in hate crimes against Asian Americans amid coronavirus,” Mar. 

27, 2020, https://abcnews.go.com/US/fbi-warns-potential-surge-hate-crimes-asian-americans/story?id=69831920.

369 Nina Strochlic, “America’s Long History of Scapegoating its Asian Citizens,” National Geographic, Sept. 2, 

2020, https://www.nationalgeographic.com/history/article/asian-american-racism-covid.

370 Alexia Fernández Campbell and Alex Ellerbeck, “Federal Agencies are Doing Little About the Rise in AntiAsian Hate,” NBC News, Apr. 16, 2020,

https://www.nbcnews.com/news/asian-america/federal-agencies-are-doing-little-about-rise-anti-asian-haten1184766; Kimmy Yam, “Senate Democrats Demand Action from CDC, DOJ to Curb COVID-19 Racism, NBC 

News, May 6, 2020, https://www.nbcnews.com/news/asian-america/senate-democrats-demand-action-cdc-doj-curbcovid-19-racism-n1201491.
Anti-Asian Hate Crimes Introduction and Background 55

respiratory syndrome (SARS) outbreak in 2003. 371 In response to that outbreak, the CDC 

developed guidelines to prevent stigma against communities during public health crises. 

These recommendations included: 

• disseminating simple prevention messages,

• developing in-language materials, 

• sharing information through community-based and culturally based methods and 

partnering with Asian organizations.372

371 C. Aujean Lee and John C. Arroyo, “A Typology of Local and State Government Responses to Racism: A Case 

of Anti-Asian Hate in the COVID-19 Pandemic,” Journal of Planning Education and Research, Mar. 31, 2022, 

https://doi.org/10.1177/0739456X221084592.

372 Ibid.
56 The Federal Response to Anti-Asian Racism in the United States

Data on Anti-Asian Incidents and Hate Crimes

Due to the blaming and scapegoating of Chinese people for the spread of COVID, many Asian 

Americans and people of Asian descent expressed feelings of fear and anxiety.

373 For instance, 

Erin Wen Ai Chew explained, “we know that people are going to look at our black hair and 

‘yellow’ skin and target us.... There’s a lot of anger, a lot of resentment, and also a lot of dread to 

know that when we go out, we could be the subject of racism.”374 Since the start of the pandemic, 

data collected through multiple local, state, and federal sources showed an increase in violent 

incidents directed towards Asian Americans during 2020 and into 2022.

375 These incidents include 

verbal attacks, minor aggressions, and physical assaults. 376 These events occurred across the 

country, with some reaching the level of national attention.377 Below is a snapshot of news excerpts 

that exemplify the types of violence experienced by persons of Asian descent during the pandemic:

• On March 9, 2020, in San Francisco, California, Yuanyuan Zhu noticed a man shouting at 

her as she was walking to her gym. He yelled an expletive about China. She tried to keep 

her distance from him, but they both ended up waiting together at the crosswalk. She felt 

him staring at her and then he spat on her.378 On the same day, in Los Angeles, a 16-yearold boy of Asian descent said students had bullied him and accused him of carrying the 

virus.379

• On March 10, 2020, in Manhattan, NY, a 59-year-old Asian man was attacked and told to 

go back to China. The attacker kicked the man, who was innocently walking on Madison 

373 Deb Riechmann and Terry Tang, “Trump dubs COVID-19 ‘Chinese virus’ despite hate crime risks,” AP News, 

Mar. 18, 2020, https://apnews.com/article/donald-trump-ap-top-news-asia-crime-virus-outbreaka7c233f0b3bcdb72c06cca6271ba6713; Min Jin Lee, “Asian Americans Have Always Lived with Fear,” The New 

York Times, Mar 18, 2022, https://www.nytimes.com/2022/03/18/opinion/asian-american-violence-fear.html.

374 Eleanor Cummins, “The new coronavirus is not an excuse to be racist,” The Verge, Feb. 4, 2020, 

https://www.theverge.com/2020/2/4/21121358/coronavirus-racism-social-media-east-asian-chinese-xenophobia.

375 See e.g., Federal Bureau of Investigation, Supplemental Hate Crime Statistics, 2021, Mar. 2023, 

https://www.fbi.gov/news/press-releases/fbi-releases-supplemental-2021-hate-crime-statistics; Federal Bureau of 

Investigation, “Crime Data Explorer,” https://crime-data-explorer.app.cloud.gov/pages/home; California 

OpenJustice Data Portal, https://openjustice.doj.ca.gov/data (accessed Dec. 14, 2022); New York State, “Hate 

Crimes by County and Bias Type: Beginning 2010, https://data.ny.gov/Public-Safety/Hate-Crimes-by-County-andBias-Type-Beginning-2010/6xda-q7ev (accessed Feb. 15, 2023).

376 FBI UCR/NIBRS Reporting Program; Supplemental Hate Crimes Statistics, 2021.

377 Deb Riechmann and Terry Tang, “Trump dubs COVID-19 ‘Chinese virus’ despite hate crime risks,” AP News, 

Mar 18, 2020, https://apnews.com/article/donald-trump-ap-top-news-asia-crime-virus-outbreaka7c233f0b3bcdb72c06cca6271ba6713.

378 Sabrina Tavernise and Richard A. Oppel Jr., “Spit On, Yelled At, Attacked: Chinese-Americans Fear for Their 

Safety,” The New York Times, Mar 23, 2020, https://www.nytimes.com/2020/03/23/us/chinese-coronavirus-racistattacks.html.

379 Deb Riechmann and Terry Tang, “Trump dubs COVID-19 ‘Chinese virus’ despite hate crime risks,” AP News, 

Mar 18, 2020, https://apnews.com/article/donald-trump-ap-top-news-asia-crime-virus-outbreaka7c233f0b3bcdb72c06cca6271ba6713.
Anti-Asian Hate Crimes Introduction and Background 57

Avenue, in the back, causing him to fall to the ground. The attacker said “(expletive) 

Chinese coronavirus,” and told the victim to go back to his country.380

• On March 14, 2020, at a Midland, Texas Sam’s Club Warehouse, Jose Gomez III, attacked 

an Asian family that he believed to be Chinese and, therefore, responsible for the COVID19 pandemic.381 The assailant said he never saw the family before but perceived them to 

be a “threat” since they were “from the country who started spreading that disease 

around.”382 He attacked the family with a serrated steak knife, which he used to punch the 

father in the face, cutting him. He slashed the family’s 6-year-old child’s face and right ear. 

He also stabbed a Sam’s Club employee who attempted to stop him from further assaulting 

the Asian family. While being restrained, Gomez yelled at the family “Get out of 

America!” 383 He pleaded guilty to three counts of committing a hate crime and was 

sentenced to 25 years in prison.384

• On September 27, 2020, a Japanese pianist was physically assaulted outside a New York 

subway by eight people for being “Chinese.”385

• In April 2021, Yao Man Pa, an Asian immigrant, was hospitalized after he was pushed 

to the ground, kicked in the head, and stomped on several times in Manhattan, New York. 

The victim was left in a coma as a result of the brutal assault. He died in late 

December 2021.386

• On August 10, 2021, a couple assaulted and injured an indigenous Filipina nurse while she 

was distributing protective face masks on a New York subway. The assailants allegedly 

yelled racial slurs at her. “Mind your own business, ch**k! Get out of this train, you 

Chinese, go back home to your dirty country.”387

380 Eyewitness News, “Asian Man Kicked, Told to ‘Go Back to China’ in Coronavirus Hate Attack in East Harlem,”

WABC, Mar. 12, 2020, https://abc7ny.com/hate-crime-coronavirus-asian-bias-attack-man-attacked/6006100/.

381 Jordan Gartner, “Hate Crime: Man Sentenced for Attacking Asian Family He Blamed for Pandemic,” WSAZ,

Aug 6, 2022, https://www.wsaz.com/2022/08/06/hate-crime-man-sentenced-attacking-asian-family-he-blamedpandemic/.

382 Ibid.

383 Ibid.

384 Jordan Gartner, “Hate Crime: Man Sentenced for Attacking Asian Family He Blamed for Pandemic,” WSAZ, 

Aug. 6, 2022, https://www.wsaz.com/2022/08/06/hate-crime-man-sentenced-attacking-asian-family-he-blamedpandemic/.

385 Ana De Liz, “Japanese Man Assaulted by 8 Youths Outside NYC Subway for Being ‘Chinese,’” Newsweek, Oct.

9, 2020, https://www.newsweek.com/japanese-man-assaulted-8-youths-outside-nyc-subway-being-chinese-1537827.

386 Troy Closson, “Asian Immigrant Attacked in Hate Crime Last Year Dies,” The New York Times, Jan. 8, 2022, 

https://www.nytimes.com/2022/01/08/nyregion/anti-asian-hate-crime-death-harlem.html.

387 Ryan General, “Couple Violently Attacks Indigenous Filipina Nurse Distributing Face Masks in New York 

Subway,” Yahoo.com Lifestyle, Aug. 18, 2021, https://www.yahoo.com/video/couple-violently-attacks-indigenousfilipina-185336808.html --

0Naewq4Ws7d0SovGz07dG2gc9s_u9werWBPhnL2nT42bmkn_PkTUzlqpLELtdH3BmRrpi13WaXxlBSrK08. 
58 The Federal Response to Anti-Asian Racism in the United States

• On May 11, 2022, three women of Korean descent were shot and injured at an Asian-run 

hair salon in Dallas, Texas.388 The shooter walked into the salon and fired 13 rounds.389

This shooting appeared to be part of a pattern of shootings around North Texas, whereby 

an assailant appeared to be targeting Asian-run establishments.390

Another incident that garnered national attention and increased the spotlight on hate crimes against 

Asian Americans was the incident that occurred on March 16, 2021, at three Atlanta-area spas. 

Eight people of Asian and Pacific Islander descent were killed.

391 The victims killed in the 

shooting were Xiaojie “Emily” Tan, 49; Daoyou Feng, 44; Delaina Yaun, 33; Paul Michels, 54; 

Yong Ae Yue, 63; Soon Chung Park, 74; Suncha Kim, 69; and Hyun Jung Grant, 51.392 Elcias 

Hernandez-Ortiz was injured in the shooting.393 The crime was perpetrated by Robert Aaron Long, 

and in May 2021, Fulton County Georgia District Attorney Fani Willis told reporters that her office 

is seeking the death penalty as well as “a sentence enhancement, pursuant to Georgia’s sentencing 

enhancement statute, commonly referred to as a hate crime statute, based on the race and gender 

of the victims.”394 In April 2022, Long was sentenced to life in prison without parole, plus an 

additional 35 years;

395 however the death penalty trial was delayed until May 2023 as of March 

16, 2023.

396

In April 2021, the Pew Research Center conducted a nationally representative survey of 5,109 U.S. 

adults, including 352 Asian adults, and found that 8 out of 10 (81 percent) of Asian adults indicated 

388 Edgar Sandoval and J. David Goodman, “Dallas Salon Shooting May Be Linked to Wider Attacks on Asian 

Businesses,” The New York Times, May 13, 2022, https://www.nytimes.com/2022/05/13/us/dallas-salon-shootinghate-crime.html.

389 Soo Youn, “They Survived the Dallas Hair Salon Shooting. Here’s Their Message,” The Washington Post, May 

26, 2022, https://www.washingtonpost.com/nation/2022/05/26/dallas-hair-salon-shooting-victims-speak-out/.

390 Edgar Sandoval and J. David Goodman, “Dallas Salon Shooting May Be Linked to Wider Attacks on Asian 

Businesses,” The New York Times, May 13, 2022, https://www.nytimes.com/2022/05/13/us/dallas-salon-shootinghate-crime.html.

391 Alexis Stevens, “Spa Shootings: A Timeline of Events that Left 8 dead in Metro Atlanta on March 16, 2021,”

The Atlanta Journal-Constitution, Mar. 15, 2022, https://www.ajc.com/news/spa-shootings-a-timeline-of-eventsthat-left-8-dead-in-metro-atlanta/UH5ZJVXV3FCY3LUPW4T6CUCSC4/.

392 Meredith Deliso, “Suspect in Atlanta Spa Shootings Seeking to Avoid Death Row,” ABC News, Apr 20, 2022, 

https://abcnews.go.com/US/suspect-atlanta-spa-shootings-seeking-avoid-deathrow/story?id=84196035#:~:text=He%20was%20sentenced%20to%20life,of%20murder%2C%20among%20other%

20charges.

393 Alexis Stevens, “Spa Shootings: A Timeline of Events that Left 8 dead in Metro Atlanta on March 16, 2021,”

The Atlanta Journal-Constitution, Mar. 15, 2022, https://www.ajc.com/news/spa-shootings-a-timeline-of-eventsthat-left-8-dead-in-metro-atlanta/UH5ZJVXV3FCY3LUPW4T6CUCSC4/.

394 Jason Morris and Ray Sanchez, “Fulton County District Attorney will seek death penalty against Atlanta spa 

shooting suspect,” CNN, May 11, 2021, https://www.cnn.com/2021/05/11/us/robert-aaron-long-atlanta-spashooting-indictment/index.html.

395 Meredith Deliso, “Suspect in Atlanta Spa Shootings Seeking to Avoid Death Row,” ABC News, Apr. 20, 2022, 

https://abcnews.go.com/US/suspect-atlanta-spa-shootings-seeking-avoid-deathrow/story?id=84196035#:~:text=He%20was%20sentenced%20to%20life,of%20murder%2C%20among%20other%

20charges.

396 Shaddi Abusaid, “YSL trial judge to also hear motions in spa shooter death penalty case, but not until May,” 

Atlanta Journal-Constitution, Jan. 5, 2023, https://www.ajc.com/news/crime/ysl-trial-judge-to-also-hear-motions-inspa-shooter-death-penalty-case-but-not-until-may/UIQVO2JQRZACVHFC7NEATXM6Z4/.
Anti-Asian Hate Crimes Introduction and Background 59

that violence against them was increasing. 397 Forty-five percent of the Asian adults surveyed

reported experiencing at least one of five specific offensive incidents since the start of the 

coronavirus outbreak. The offensive incidents included “feared someone might threaten or 

physically attack them; people acted as if they were uncomfortable around them; been subject to 

racial slurs or jokes; someone made a remark they should go back to their home country; and 

someone made a remark that they are to blame for the coronavirus outbreak.”398

Almost one-third (32 percent) of Asian adults surveyed said that they feared someone might 

threaten or physically attack them. More than a quarter (27 percent) of Asian adults said people 

acted as if they were uncomfortable around them; and 27 percent also said they have been subject 

to slurs or jokes.399 More than 1 in 10 (16 percent) said someone made a remark that they should 

go back to their home country; and 14 percent said someone made a remark that they are to blame 

for the coronavirus outbreak (see Figure 5 below).

400

397 Neil G. Ruiz, Khadijah Edwards and Mark Hugo Lopez, “One-third of Asian Americans Fear Threats, Physical 

Attacks and Most Say Violence Against Them is Rising,” Pew Research Center, Apr. 21, 2021, 

https://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2021/04/21/one-third-of-asian-americans-fear-threats-physical-attacks-andmost-say-violence-against-them-is-rising/.

398 Ibid.

399 Ibid.

400 Ibid.
60 The Federal Response to Anti-Asian Racism in the United States

Figure 5 Experiences of Anti-Asian Sentiment

Source: Neil G. Ruiz, Khadijah Edwards and Mark Hugo Lopez, “One-third of Asian Americans Fear Threats, 

Physical Attacks and Most Say Violence Against Them is Rising,” Pew Research Center, Apr. 21, 2021.

A Center for Public Integrity/Ipsos poll, which was conducted in 2020 found that about 3 in 10 

Americans blamed China or Chinese people for the pandemic.401 Almost one-third (32 percent) of 

those polled witnessed someone blaming Asian people for the coronavirus epidemic. More than 

half (60 percent) of Asian respondents said they witnessed someone blaming Asian people for the 

coronavirus epidemic compared to 27 percent of White respondents.402

In March 2021, the Center for the Study of Hate and Extremism (CSHE) at California State 

University, San Bernardino, released findings showing anti‐Asian hate crimes increased 145 

401 The Ipsos poll surveyed a sample of 1,001 adults, who were 18 years old and older, from the continental U.S., 

Alaska, and Hawaii. The survey was conducted on behalf of the Center for Public Integrity. 

Chris Jackson, Jennifer Berg, and Jinhee Yi, “New Center for Public Integrity/Ipsos Poll finds most Americans say 

the Coronavirus Pandemic is a Natural Disaster,” Ipsos, Apr. 28, 2020, https://www.ipsos.com/en-us/newspolls/center-for-public-integrity-poll-2020.

402 Ibid.
Anti-Asian Hate Crimes Introduction and Background 61

percent in the U.S. from 2019 to 2020.403 In contrast, amid the pandemic-driven closures of 

businesses, schools and public gatherings hate crimes overall declined 6 percent in 2020.

404 Given 

the overall drop in hate crimes, the spike in anti-Asian hate crimes is notable.

405

CSHE also documented that in the first quarter of 2021, anti-Asian hate crimes reported to police 

in 16 of America’s largest cities and counties increased by 164 percent.406 This was determined by 

comparing anti-Asian hate crimes reported in the first quarter of 2020 and to those reported in the 

first quarter of 2021 in each state.

407 These increases were primarily driven by increased anti-Asian 

hate crimes reported in the cities of New York City, Los Angeles, San Francisco, and Boston.408

A study by Stop AAPI Hate also indicates hate incidents between March 2020 and March 2021

“rose sharply over” the one-year period.409 The report documented the following:

• Asian American and Pacific Islander (AAPI) women and girls were 2.2 times more likely 

to report hate incidents compared to AAPI men. 

• Of the 3,943 Asian American women who reported a hate incident, 67.5 percent were East 

Asians, 16.2 percent were Southeast Asians, 8.1 percent were multiethnic Asians, 6.7 

percent were multiracial Asians, and 1.3 percent were South Asians.410

403 Center for the Study of Hate & Extremism, “Fact Sheet: Anti-Asian Prejudice March 2021,” CSUSB, Mar. 21, 

2021, https://www.csusb.edu/sites/default/files/FACT%20SHEET-%20AntiAsian%20Hate%202020%20rev%203.21.21.pdf.

404 Ibid.

405 Researchers examined data of hate crimes reported in 2019 and compared them with those from 2020. The work 

focused on anti-Asian hate crimes reported to local and state police agencies in 16 of the largest U.S. cities. Ibid.

406 Center for the Study of Hate & Extremism, Report to the Nation: Anti-Asian Prejudice & Hate Crime: New 

2020‐21 First Quarter Comparison Data, California State University, San Bernardino, 2021, 

https://www.csusb.edu/sites/default/files/Report%20to%20the%20Nation%20-%20AntiAsian%20Hate%202020%20Final%20Draft%20-

%20As%20of%20Apr%2030%202021%206%20PM%20corrected.pdf.

407 Center for the Study of Hate & Extremism, Report to the Nation: Anti-Asian Prejudice & Hate Crime, New 2020‐

21 First Quarter Comparison Data, CSUSB, 2021, 

https://www.csusb.edu/sites/default/files/Report%20to%20the%20Nation%20-%20AntiAsian%20Hate%202020%20Final%20Draft%20-

%20As%20of%20Apr%2030%202021%206%20PM%20corrected.pdf.

408 Ibid.

409 The sample consisted of 3,943 Asian American women. Stop AAPI Hate disaggregated the data to examine the 

various subgroups within the Asian American community. The groupings were East Asian, South Asian, Southeast 

Asian, multiethnic and multiracial. See Drishti Pillai, Aggie J. Yellow Horse, and Russell Jeung, “The Rising Tide 

of Violence and Discrimination Against Asian American and Pacific Islander Women and Girls,” May 20, 2021, 

https://stopaapihate.org/aapi-women-and-girls-report/. 

410 East Asia includes China, Hong Kong, Japan, Macau, Mongolia, North Korea, South Korea, and Taiwan. See 

Asia Society, “East Asia,” https://asiasociety.org/countries-regions/east-asia; South Asia includes Afghanistan, 

Bangladesh, Bhutan, India, The Maldives, Nepal, Pakistan, and Sri Lanka. See South Asian Heritage Month, “What 

countries make up South Asia?”, https://www.southasianheritage.org.uk/countries; Southeast Asia includes Brunei, 

Burma (Myanmar), Cambodia, Timor-Leste, Indonesia, Laos, Malaysia, Philippines, Singapore, Thailand, and 

Vietnam, Northern Illinois University, Center for Southeast Asian Studies, “Southeast Asian Countries,”

https://www.niu.edu/clas/cseas/resources/countries.shtml.
62 The Federal Response to Anti-Asian Racism in the United States

• Verbal harassment/name calling was the most frequently reported type of hate incident 

experienced by all subgroups of Asian American women (see Table 4). 

• The second most reported incident was avoidance/shunning. Multiethnic, Southeast Asian,

and multiracial women experienced the greatest percentage of these incidents (at 16.3, 15.3 

and 15.3 percent, respectively).

• South Asian women reported experiencing the highest percentage of physical assaults, at 

16.2 percent (see Table 4).

• The most common places that Asian American women reported hate incidents occurring 

were places of business and public streets/sidewalks (see Table 5).

• Among Asian American women, the most frequently reported reason for experiencing hate 

incidents was due to their race. This was followed by their ethnicity and then their gender

(see Table 6).

Table 4 Types of Hate Incidents by Asian American Women, by Subgroups (in percentage)

East Asian Southeast 

Asian

South 

Asian

MultiEthnicMultiRacial

Verbal 

Harassment/

Name Calling

52.6 49.9 36.8 51.7 45.5

Avoidance/

Shunning

12.1 15.3 10.3 16.3 15.3

Physical 

Assault

9.2 6.5 16.2 5.7 5.2

Cough At/ Spat 

Upon

7.2 5.4 7.4 7.2 6.1

Barred from 

Establishment

-- -- 7.4 -- 4.3

Workplace 

Discrimination

3.1 6.1 5.9 5.3 4.0

Vandalism

Graffiti

-- 4.4 -- -- --

Online 4.7 5.3 8.8 5.0 9.2
Anti-Asian Hate Crimes Introduction and Background 63

East Asian Southeast 

Asian

South 

Asian

MultiEthnicMultiRacial

Other 6.2 5.9 -- 4.3 6.1

Total Column 

Percentages

95.1 98.8 92.8 95.5 95.7

n = 5,098 types

Source: Drishti Pillai, Aggie J. Yellow Horse, and Russell Jeung, The Rising Tide of Violence and Discrimination Against Asian American and 

Pacific Islander Women and Girls, May 20, 2021, https://stopaapihate.org/aapi-women-and-girls-report/.

Table 5 Sites of Hate Incidents by Asian American Women, by Subgroups (in percentage)

East 

Asian

Southeast 

Asian

South 

Asian

MultiEthnicMultiRacial

Business 26.2 37.0 21.1 27.0 25.9

Public 

Street/Sidewalk

31.2 20.6 15.8 27.3 19.1

Online 6.7 8.2 14.0 10.2 13.7

School 4.1 5.8 12.3 6.4 8.6

Private 

Residence

6.9 7.7 12.3 8.1 6.8

Public Park 8.3 6.3 5.3 6.7 6.8

-Public Transit 7.9 5.8 7.0 7.0 5.8

n = 4,349 sites

Source: Drishti Pillai, Aggie J. Yellow Horse, and Russell Jeung, The Rising Tide of Violence and Discrimination Against Asian American and 

Pacific Islander Women and Girls, May 20, 2021, https://stopaapihate.org/aapi-women-and-girls-report/.

Table 6 Sites of Hate Incidents by Asian American Women, by Subgroups (in percentage)

East Asian Southeast 

Asian

South 

Asian

MultiEthnicMultiRacial

Race 50.0 53.3 40.4 49.3 46.2

Ethnicity 29.8 28.1 26.6 30.6 30.0
64 The Federal Response to Anti-Asian Racism in the United States

East Asian Southeast 

Asian

South 

Asian

MultiEthnicMultiRacial

Gender 9.4 7.2 8.5 9.4 9.1

N=7,265 types

Source: Drishti Pillai, Aggie J. Yellow Horse, and Russell Jeung, The Rising Tide of Violence and Discrimination Against Asian American and 

Pacific Islander Women and Girls, May 20, 2021, https://stopaapihate.org/aapi-women-and-girls-report/.

A March 2022 report published by Stop AAPI Hate documented 10,905 hate incidents against 

AAPI persons across the nation.

411 The data was based on hate incidents reported to Stop AAPI 

Hate from March 19, 2020, to December 31, 2021.

412 Out of the total number of hate incidents 

reported, 4,632 occurred in 2020 (42.5 percent) and 6,273 occurred in 2021 (57.5 percent).413

Of the 10,905 reported hate incidents, the majority were experienced by persons of Chinese 

descent and Korean descent, 42.8 and 16.1 percent, respectively.414 Persons of Filipino, Japanese, 

and Vietnamese descent also reported experiencing hate incidents, (8.9, 8.2, and 8.0 percent, 

respectively). 415 The top three types of discrimination experienced by respondents included 

harassment (66.9 percent), physical assault (16.2 percent), and avoidance or shunning (16.1 

percent).416 These discriminatory acts most often occurred in the street and public spaces (32.4 

percent), at a business (26.9 percent), in a private residence (10.3 percent), and online (10.1 

percent).417

About 9 out of 10 respondents (91.5 percent) believed they were being discriminated against 

because of their race.418 More than half of respondents (52.6 percent) indicated that they were 

being discriminated against because of their ethnicity. Some respondents also indicated that their 

gender/gender identity (14.4 percent) was also the reason for the discrimination taking place.419

California (38.1 percent), New York (15.7 percent), Washington (4.8 percent), Texas (3.9 percent), 

and Illinois (3.3 percent) represented the five states with the largest percentage of respondents who 

reported hate incidents.

420

411 Aggie Yellow Horse, Russell Jeung, and Ronae Matriano, Stop AAPI Hate National Report, 03/19/2020 –

12/31/202, Mar. 1, 2022, https://stopaapihate.org/national-report-through-december-31-2021/.

412 Aggie Yellow Horse, Russell Jeung, and Ronae Matriano, Stop AAPI Hate National Report, 03/19/2020 –

12/31/202, Mar. 1, 2022, https://stopaapihate.org/national-report-through-december-31-2021/.

413 Ibid.

414 Ibid.

415 Ibid.

416 The report defines harassment as the following items: Verbal hate speech and/or harassment Behavioral (e.g., 

following/stalking, bullying); Gesture (e.g., middle finger, “slanted eye gesture”); Written (e.g., printed materials 

such as hate letters, propaganda, or signage); and Sexual harassment. Ibid.

417 Aggie Yellow Horse, Russell Jeung, and Ronae Matriano, Stop AAPI Hate National Report, 03/19/2020 –

12/31/202, Mar. 1, 2022, https://stopaapihate.org/national-report-through-december-31-2021/.

418 Ibid.

419 Ibid.

420 Aggie Yellow Horse, Russell Jeung, and Ronae Matriano, Stop AAPI Hate National Report, 03/19/2020 –

12/31/202, Mar. 1, 2022, https://stopaapihate.org/national-report-through-december-31-2021/.
Anti-Asian Hate Crimes Introduction and Background 65

Federal Data Collection

Official federal data collection on hate crimes did not begin until the 1990s with the passage of the 

Hate Crimes Statistics Act (HCSA).421 The Act was signed into law by then-President George 

H.W. Bush, who believed that the law was a significant step toward the federal government 

fulfilling its responsibility and mandate to ensure civil rights protections, as he stated that:

Justice for all has been the historic mission of the civil rights movement, and it’s a mission 

still to be fulfilled. Bigotry and hate regrettably still exist in this country, and hate breeds 

violence, threatening the security of our entire society. We must rid our communities of 

the poison we call prejudice, bias, and discrimination. One of the greatest obligations of 

this administration and of the Department of Justice is the guarantee of civil rights for all 

Americans... every one of us must confront and condemn racism, anti-Semitism, bigotry, 

and hate not next week, not tomorrow, but right now – every single one of us. For hate 

crimes cannot be tolerated in a free society.... That’s why I’m signing into law today 

a measure to require the Attorney General to collect as much information as we can on 

crimes motivated by religion, race, ethnicity, or sexual orientation – the Hate Crime 

Statistic Act.422

The FBI’s Hate Crime Statistics Program is responsible for collecting and reporting hate crime 

data as mandated by the Hate Crimes Statistics Act (HCSA).423 The HCSA requires the Attorney 

General to collect data “about crimes that manifest evidence of prejudice based on race, religion, 

sexual orientation, or ethnicity.”424 The Attorney General has delegated the responsibilities to 

develop the needed procedures to implement, collect, and manage hate crime data to the Director 

of the FBI, who in turn, assigned the tasks to the Uniform Crime Reporting (UCR) Program. Under 

the ongoing direction of the Attorney General, the UCR Program cooperated with state and local 

law enforcement to create a hate crimes data collection system to comply with the congressional 

421 Hate Crimes Statistics Act, 28 U.S.C. § 534 (1993). The HCSA defines hate crimes as “crimes that manifest 

evidence of prejudice based on race, gender or gender identity, religion, disability, sexual orientation, or ethnicity.” 

See 28 U.S.C. § 41305(b)(1).

422 President George Bush, “Remarks on Signing the Hate Crime Statistics Act,” Public Papers, George H.W. Bush 

Presidential Library & Museum, April 23, 1990, https://bush41library.tamu.edu/archives/public-papers/1791. 

423 28 U.S.C. § 534 (1993); see 28 U.S.C. § 41305(b)(1).

424 The required data collection was later extended to include disability with the passage of the Violent Crime 

Control and Law Enforcement Act of 1994 and the FBI began gathering data on this population on Jan. 1, 1997. See 

Federal Bureau of Investigation, Uniform Crime Report, “Hate Crimes Statistics,” https://ucr.fbi.gov/hatecrime/2010/resources/hate-crime-2010-about-hate-crime. The definition of a hate crime was again extended with the 

passage of the HCPA, discussed previously, to include gender and gender identity. The FBI began data collection on 

this data in 2013. And in 2013, the FBI further expanded the religious bias category to include Sikhs, Hindus, Arabs, 

Mormons, Jehovah’s Witnesses, and Eastern Orthodox persons; this data has been officially collected since 2015. 

See Swathi Shanmugasundaram, “Hate Crimes, Explained,” Southern Poverty Law Center, April 15, 2018, 

https://www.splcenter.org/20180415/hate-crimes-explained. 
66 The Federal Response to Anti-Asian Racism in the United States

mandate.425 UCR data are voluntarily reported by state, local, and tribal law enforcement agencies 

directly to the FBI, but reporting is mandatory for federal law enforcement.426 These data provide 

the number of incidents, victims, and offenders in hate and bias-related crimes whether the crime 

is motivated in whole or in part, by the offenders bias(es).

427

A major impediment to understanding the severity and magnitude of hate crimes against persons 

of Asian descent is the lack of comprehensive data.428 While the passage of the HCSA was an 

important step in increasing public awareness of hate violence, without mandatory national data 

collection and training law enforcement on how to accurately identify and report hate crimes, 

preventing these crimes becomes substantially more challenging.429

National Data Transition

As discussed in the Commission’s 2019 In the Name of Hate: Examining the Federal 

Government’s Role in Responding to Hate Crimes, collecting complete and accurate data on hate 

crimes is often difficult due to insufficient reporting practices.430 Eric Dreiband, former Assistant 

Attorney General, explained:

It’s important to note that the collection method used [to collect and report hate crimes] 

creates some discrepancies in the data. Each local government provides data on a voluntary 

basis. This in turn means that what one municipality provides may include very different 

information or criteria than another which leads to inconsistency in the data. Unfortunately, 

this leads to some unreliability in the data, as states may categorize hate crimes very 

differently from one another.431

These issues are exacerbated with the transition from the Summary Reporting System (SRS) to the 

National Incident-Based Reporting System (NIBRS). The SRS was an aggregate monthly tally of 

425 See Federal Bureau of Investigation, Uniform Crime Report, “Hate Crimes Statistics,” https://ucr.fbi.gov/hatecrime/2010/resources/hate-crime-2010-about-hate-crime.

426 Federal Bureau of Investigation, “Hate Crime Statistics,” https://www.fbi.gov/how-we-can-help-you/more-fbiservices-and-information/ucr/hate-crime.

427 Ibid.

428 South Asian Americans Leading Together (SAALT), Communities On Fire, 2018, at 25, 

http://saalt.org/wpcontent/uploads/2018/01/Communities-on-Fire.pdf; U.S. Commission on Civil Rights, In the 

Name of Hate: Examining the Federal Government’s Role in Responding to Hate Crimes, Nov. 2019, at 58, 

https://www.usccr.gov/files/pubs/2019/11-13-In-the-Name-of-Hate.pdf.

429 See e.g., Ken Schwencke, “Why America Fails at Gathering Hate Crime Statistics,” ProPublica, Dec. 4, 2017, 

https://www.propublica.org/article/why-america-fails-at-gathering-hate-crime-statistics.

430 U.S. Commission on Civil Rights, In the Name of Hate: Examining the Federal Government’s Role in 

Responding to Hate Crimes, Nov. 2019, https://www.usccr.gov/files/pubs/2019/11-13-In-the-Name-of-Hate.pdf.

431 Eric Dreiband, Written Statement for The Federal Response to Anti-Asian Racism in the United States Briefing 

before the U.S. Comm’n on Civil Rights, Mar. 24, 2023, at 9 (hereinafter Dreiband Statement).
Anti-Asian Hate Crimes Introduction and Background 67

crimes reported by local law enforcement.

432 However, following the introduction of NIBRS, 

many agencies continued to only submit crime data through the SRS, with commonly cited reasons 

for not participating in NIBRS being the costs of implementing a more technical system, and the 

misperception that NIBRS reporting would indicate an increase in crime rates.433

The DOJ announced the transition to NIBRS in 2015 and invested over $120 million to assist state 

and local agencies to improve their crime data collection;

434 and the UCR Program transitioned to 

a NIBRS-only data collection on January 1, 2021.435 Law enforcement agencies that had not 

transitioned to NIBRS prior to the reporting deadline for 2021 data were not included in the 2021 

reported totals.436 However, many agencies have been slow to make the transition to NIBRS, 

therefore had not submitted data for the 2021 UCR releases. For the 2021 first release of hate crime 

data in December 2022, the number of participating agencies within the FBI hate crime database 

was 11,834, compared to the 15,138 participating agencies for 2020 data.

437 In March 2023, the 

FBI’s UCR Program released a 2021 hate crime statistics supplement for bias-motivated incidents 

throughout the nation. For the 2021 data year, the UCR Program accepted SRS hate crime data 

submissions and additional NIBRS hate crime reports from 3,025 agencies that covered a 

combined population of over 87 million.438 The supplemental data was combined with the data 

submitted via NIBRS to allow for a more complete representation of reported hate crimes for 2021. 

Reported hate crime incidents increased nationally 11.6 percent from 2020 to 2021. This data 

reflects the reports of 14,859 law enforcement agencies representing 91.1 percent of the 

U.S. population.439

Crucially, some of the nation’s largest jurisdictions did not submit 2021 data to NIBRS. 440

According to the Bureau of Justice Statistics (BJS), as of August 2022, 62 of the 85 cities with a 

population of 250,000 or more reported NIBRS data, and the two largest agencies in the country 

–– Los Angeles Police Department and New York City Police Department –– have not yet made 

432 Jeffrey Fisher, “NIBRS: The Future of U.S. Crime Data,” Police Chief Magazine, Oct. 2017, 

https://www.theiacp.org/sites/default/files/all/n-o/NIBRSTheFutureofUSCrimeDataOct2017.pdf; see also U.S. 

Bureau of Justice Statistics, Blueprint for the Future of the Uniform Crime Reporting Program, May 1985, 

https://www.ojp.gov/pdffiles1/bjs/98348.pdf.

433 Ibid.

434 U.S. Department of Justice, “New and Better Crime Data for the Nation,” Oct. 5, 2022, 

https://www.justice.gov/opa/blog/new-and-better-crime-data-nation. 

435 Federal Bureau of Investigation, “National Incident-Based Reporting System (NIBRS),” 

https://www.fbi.gov/how-we-can-help-you/more-fbi-services-and-information/ucr/nibrs (accessed Dec. 24, 2022). 

436 U.S. Dep’t of Justice, “Associate Attorney General Vanita Gupta Issues Statement on 2021 FBI Hate Crimes in 

the United States Statistics,” Dec. 12, 2022, https://www.justice.gov/opa/pr/associate-attorney-general-vanita-guptaissues-statement-2021-fbi-hate-crimes-united-states.

437 Federal Bureau of Investigation, “Crime Data Explorer,” https://crime-data-explorer.app.cloud.gov/pages/home.

438 Federal Bureau of Investigation, “FBI Releases Supplemental 2021 Hate Crime Statistics,” Mar. 13, 2023, 

https://www.fbi.gov/news/press-releases/fbi-releases-supplemental-2021-hate-crime-statistics.

439 Federal Bureau of Investigation, “FBI Releases Supplement to the 2021 Hate Crime Statistics,” Mar. 28, 2023, 

https://www.justice.gov/crs/highlights/2021-hate-crime-statistics.

440 Federal Bureau of Investigation Interrogatory Responses to the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights, Mar. 15, 2023 

[on file].
68 The Federal Response to Anti-Asian Racism in the United States

the full transition to NIBRS.441 Phoenix and San Francisco are also not included in the national 

numbers provided by the FBI.442 At the state level, some are “barely covered by the NIBRS data,” 

with 15 of 740 agencies in California reporting, 40 of 1,504 agencies in Pennsylvania, and only 

two of the 757 agencies in Florida. 443 The FBI, in partnership with BJS, generated national 

estimates using statistical estimation techniques, designed to estimate for non-reporting agencies 

and account for missing or unknown information within a reported incident.444 However, BJS and 

the FBI did not produce estimates for hate crimes in 2021. The FBI, however, released national 

estimates for 2021 in October 2022.445 As of June 14, 2023, the 2022 participation statistics for 

California are 568 of 836 agencies reporting NIBRS data. In Florida, 81 of 758 agencies have 

submitted NIBRS data, and in Pennsylvania 133 of 1,479 agencies have submitted NIBRS data. 

Chief William Scott of the San Francisco PD explained: 

What we do know is that the reporting of hate crimes, as we nationwide change our 

reporting system to the National Incident-Based Reporting System, that we hope to have 

better data on reporting. I do have the opinion that without the data to be able to really track 

the patterns of hate crime, to really be able to track what is fueling hate crimes and hatefueled violence, that we’re behind the curve if we don’t have basic consistent, robust 

reporting systems. And I am hopeful that with the implementation of NIBRS across the 

United States, that our reporting will be more consistent, our reporting will be more 

accurate where we really understand the data and what’s fueling and what the patterns are 

in hate crime. 

And that’s one thing that I believe, at least in our city, we are building that infrastructure 

to do just that, to be NIBRS compliant, we hope within the next year and a half or so, and 

we hope that our data and the data that we share with others is more robust so we have 

a way to not only track the data, but track the indicators and the things that we know 

that will help us really try to crack the code, if you will, on addressing hate crime in a 

holistic way.446

Participating in the NIBRS is challenging to many agencies, requiring training almost entire 

departments on new protocols. For example, the federal government gave San Diego $2.6 million 

441 Bureau of Justice Statistics, “NIBRS Estimation Summary,” Aug. 2022, 

https://bjs.ojp.gov/content/pub/pdf/nibrses.pdf. 

442 Richard Rosenfeld, “Was Crime Up or Down in 2021? Why the FBI Can’t Tell Us,” Oct. 11, 2022, 

https://thecrimereport.org/2022/10/11/was-crime-up-or-down-in-2021-why-the-fbi-cant-tell-us/. 

443 Ibid.

444 Bureau of Justice Statistics, “NIBRS Estimation Summary,” Aug. 2022, 

https://bjs.ojp.gov/content/pub/pdf/nibrses.pdf.

445 Federal Bureau of Investigation, “FBI Releases Data on Crime in Nation for 2021,” Oct. 19, 2022, 

https://le.fbi.gov/cjis-division/cjis-link/fbi-releases-data-on-crime-in-the-nation-for2021#:~:text=The%20analysis%20used%20NIBRS%20estimation,2020%20to%2022%2C900%20in%202021.

446 Scott Testimony, pp. 153-54.
Anti-Asian Hate Crimes Introduction and Background 69

in 2016 to help the city’s police department and the county’s sheriff’s office make the NIBRS 

transition and to update their local systems to the Automated Regional Justice Information System 

(ARJIS) that resulted in another 30+ local agencies transitioning to NIBRS at the same time; 

however, the city ended up spending beyond the federal funds provided on these transitions.

447

The San Francisco Police Department does not plan to submit to NIBRS until 2025, with the 

department asking city leaders for almost $14 million for a new record system and staff to manage 

it. The Justice Department stated that running the new system will cost at least $4 million each 

year for maintenance and support.448 For NIBRS, San Francisco has contracted with a vendor for 

a records management system (RMS). As of June 2023, implementation of the RMS has 

commenced.449 Once an agency does find the money to purchase a new record management 

system, jurisdiction-specific procurement requirements can mean that the actual process of 

the purchase can take up to two years, and full implementation can take 18 months or more

after that.450

In addition to technical challenges in making the transition to NIBRS, there are few concrete

incentives to adapt to the system since reporting remains voluntary, and there has not been strong 

political pressure to make the transition.451 Some suggestions include that the FBI to require local 

law enforcement to submit crime data, or in lieu of that, having Congress make submission 

mandatory,452 or considering a range of options to expand implementation.453 Congress could also 

consider authorizing a new grant program that would provide funding to state and local 

governments to cover expenses related to transitioning to NIBRS, such as purchasing new software 

and computers, or training officers on how to use NIBRS.454

447 Weihua Li, “What Can FBI Data Say About Crime in 2021? It’s Too Unreliable to Tell,” The Marshall Project, 

Jun. 14, 2022, https://www.themarshallproject.org/2022/06/14/what-did-fbi-data-say-about-crime-in-2021-it-s-toounreliable-to-tell. 

448 Ibid. The Justice Department explained to the Commission that “much of the SFPD crime incident data are not 

centrally located, with incident narratives stored on local computer hard drives, some data manually uploaded into 

homegrown narrowly focused applications built for specific purposes, such as an ancillary investigation application. 

The agency also has a need to automate the sharing of information across systems and better integrate other sources 

of information to their new RMS, like criminal history data, dispatch data, access to state systems, etc. The 

additional funds will assist with this complicated, multifaceted project that will fundamentally improve the way the 

agency manages their data.” U.S. Dep’t of Justice, Response to Affected Agency Review, June 22, 2023 [on file].

449 U.S. Dep’t of Justice, Response to Affected Agency Review, June 22, 2023 [on file]. 

450 Weihua Li, “What Can FBI Data Say About Crime in 2021? It’s Too Unreliable to Tell,” The Marshall Project, 

Jun. 14, 2022, https://www.themarshallproject.org/2022/06/14/what-did-fbi-data-say-about-crime-in-2021-it-s-toounreliable-to-tell.

451 Priya Krishnakumar, “The FBI released its crime report for 2021 – but it tells us less about the overall state of 

crime in the US than ever,” CNN, Oct. 5, 2022, https://www.cnn.com/2022/10/05/us/fbi-national-crime-report-2021-

data/index.html. 

452 Richard Rosenfeld, “Was Crime Up or Down in 2021? Why the FBI Can’t Tell Us,” Oct. 11, 2022, 

https://thecrimereport.org/2022/10/11/was-crime-up-or-down-in-2021-why-the-fbi-cant-tell-us/.

453 Congressional Research Service, NIBRS Participation Rates and Federal Crime Data Quality, May 24, 2022, 

https://crsreports.congress.gov/product/pdf/IN/IN11936. 

454 Congressional Research Service, Federal Data on Hate Crimes in the United States, Mar. 22, 2021, 

https://crsreports.congress.gov/product/pdf/R/R46318. 
70 The Federal Response to Anti-Asian Racism in the United States

National Crime Victimization Survey 

In addition to the NIBRS, the National Crime Victimization Survey (NCVS) provides another 

source of federally collected data. NCVS data have been collected annually by the Department of 

Justice’s BJS since 2003.455 The NCVS is a self-reported survey from a nationally representative 

sample of households of about 240,000 persons in about 150,000 households. 456 The survey 

collects data on the frequency, characteristics, and consequences of nonfatal personal crimes (i.e., 

rape, sexual assault, aggravated and simple assault, and personal larceny) as well as household 

property crimes (i.e., theft, burglary/trespassing, and motor vehicle theft). 

Both the NCVS and the FBI Hate Crimes Statistics Program utilize the same definition of a hate 

crime established by the HCSA; however, the main difference between these datasets are NCVS 

hate crime data are classified based on victim perceptions and crime scene evidence, whereas the 

UCR/NIBRS dataset is based upon police-reported incidents.

457

Hate crimes in the NCVS dataset include nonfatal crimes that are: 

1) confirmed by police as bias-motivated, according to the victim’s report, 

2) perceived by victims to be bias-motivated because the offender(s) used hate language, or 

3) perceived by victims to be bias-motivated because the offender(s) left behind hate 

symbols.458

BJS states that victims must report at least one of these types of evidence for the NCVS to classify 

the act as a hate crime.459

Moreover, data collected by the NCVS is not dependent on whether a victim reported the crime to 

the police.460 Therefore, the number of reported hate crimes for a particular year can greatly vary 

between the NCVS and the UCR/NIBRS. While the 2019 Commission report highlighted the 

important differences between the two federal data sources, for the purposes of this report, a 

comparison between hate crime data from 2019-2022 reported by UCR/NIBRS and NCVS is not 

455 Madeline Masucci and Lynn Langton, “Hate Crime Victimization, 2004-2015,” Bureau of Justice Statistics, U.S. 

Department of Justice, June 2017.

456 Bureau of Justice Statistics, “National Crime Victimization Survey,” 

https://bjs.ojp.gov/programs/ncvs#:~:text=The%20National%20Crime%20Victimization%20Survey,persons%20in

%20about%20150%2C000%20households.

457 Bureau of Justice Statistics, “Bias-Motivated/Hate Crime,” https://bjs.ojp.gov/topics/crime/hate-crime; Lynn 

Langton and Michael Planty, “Hate Crime, 2003-2009,” Bureau of Justice Statistics, U.S. Dep’t of Justice, June 

2011, https://www.bjs.gov/content/pub/pdf/hc0309.pdf.

458 Bureau of Justice Statistics, “Bias-Motivated/Hate Crime,” https://bjs.ojp.gov/topics/crime/hate-crime.

459 Ibid.

460 U.S. Commission on Civil Rights, In the Name of Hate: Examining the Federal Government’s Role in 

Responding to Hate Crimes, Nov. 2019, at 54, https://www.usccr.gov/files/pubs/2019/11-13-In-the-Name-ofHate.pdf. 
Anti-Asian Hate Crimes Introduction and Background 71

possible since the latest hate crime data BJS published featuring the NCVS does not include data 

post-2019.

461 This can be significant because it is well-documented that hate crime data are 

underreported by victims and by law enforcement.462 Therefore, without additional federal data, a 

comprehensive understanding of rise of hate incidents and hate crimes against persons of Asian 

descent is not fully possible. 

Underreporting of Hate Crimes

Another challenge when trying to gauge the magnitude of the increase in anti-Asian hate crimes 

during the pandemic is the dearth of research on the rates that Asian victims of crime are likely to 

report a crime to the police.463 It is well-established that hate crimes are less likely to be reported 

to the police in comparison to other types of crimes.464 The underreporting of these crimes is 

significant for several reasons. It is less likely that an offender will be arrested or formally charged, 

less likely that a victim will receive the help that they need, and less likely that the crime will be 

documented in official statistics. Therefore, local, state, and federal resources are less likely to be 

allocated to addressing and preventing hate crimes.

There are many reasons why victims of hate crimes may choose not to report the incident to law 

enforcement. The Bureau of Justice Assistance stated:

Hate crimes can be more violent and involve greater victim injury as compared to other 

victimizations, yet they are substantially underreported. Victim reluctance to contact law 

enforcement may arise from perceptions of police bias, distrust of law enforcement or the 

461 Grace Kena and Alexandra Thompson, “Hate Crime Victimization, 2005-2019,” 

https://bjs.ojp.gov/library/publications/hate-crime-victimization-2005-2019; see also, The Department of Justice 

wrote that “the NCVS is undergoing a redesign with an anticipated rollout in 2023.” See Department of Justice, 

“Improving the Identification, Investigation, and Reporting of Hate Crimes,” Interrogatory Responses to the U.S. 

Commission on Civil Rights, Mar. 16, 2023 [on file].

462 See e.g., Tanner Stening, “Why hate crimes are underreported – and what police departments have to do with it,” 

Northeastern Global News, Feb. 16 2023, https://news.northeastern.edu/2021/08/23/why-hate-crimes-areunderreported-and-what-police-departments-have-to-do-with-it/; Ronald Davis and Patrice O’Neill, “The Hate 

Crime Reporting Gap: Low Numbers Keep Tensions High,” Police Chief Magazine, vol. 83, May 2016, 

https://www.policechiefmagazine.org/the-hate-crimes/; Catherine Devine, Liliana Byington, and News21 Staff, 

“Millions are victims of hate crimes, though many never report them,” Center for Public Integrity, Aug. 16, 2018, 

https://publicintegrity.org/politics/millions-are-victims-of-hate-crimes-though-many-never-report-them/; Rebecca 

Stotzer, “Gender Identity and Hate Crimes: Violence Against Transgender People in Los Angeles County,” 

Sexuality Research & Social Policy, Mar. 2008, vol. 5, no. 1.

463 Brendan Lantz and Marin Wenger, “Are Asian Victims Less Likely to Report Hate Crime Victimization to the 

Police? Implications for Research and Policy in the Wake of the COVID-19 Pandemic,” Crime & Delinquency, 

2021, vol. 68, no. 8, https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/00111287211041521#bibr46-00111287211041521.

464 See e.g., Caroline Harlow, “Hate Crime Reported by Victims and Police,” National Criminal Victimization 

Survey and Uniform Crime Reporting, Bureau of Justice Statistics, Nov. 2005, 

https://bjs.ojp.gov/content/pub/pdf/hcrvp.pdf; Brendan Lantz and Joonggon Kim, “Hate Crimes Hurt More, but So 

Do Co-Offenders: Separating the Influence of Co-Offending and Bias on Hate-Motivated Physical Injury,” Criminal 

Justice and Behavior, Nov. 2018.
72 The Federal Response to Anti-Asian Racism in the United States

criminal justice system, or barriers such as language or concerns about their immigration 

status. As law enforcement agencies use data to inform their strategies and allocation of 

resources, this can pose a unique challenge in addressing hate crimes. This underreporting 

and identification of hate crimes can also grow out of lack of training and understanding 

on the part of law enforcement and prosecutors resulting in their inability to identify, report, 

or charge these crimes and effectively investigate or prosecute these cases.465

Similarly, the Commission’s 2019 Hate Crimes report documented numerous reasons why victims 

from a variety of targeted communities may choose not to report an incident, including confusion 

over whether they should report a crime or if the incident would qualify as a hate crime, belief that 

officers would not be helpful or take them seriously, concerns over deportation, or feared 

retaliation or humiliation, to name a few.466

There is a dearth of literature examining the frequency and likelihood that Asian Americans will 

report discrimination, such as how often they report, their attitudes regarding reporting, and 

potential barriers.467 Since it is well-established that hate crimes are underreported in general, not 

knowing the degree to which Asian Americans are likely to report further obfuscates the magnitude 

of anti-Asian bias and hate crimes. 

Legal experts note that one major barrier to gaining a comprehensive understanding of the 

magnitude of hate violence against Asian communities may be due to incidents not rising to the 

legal benchmark of a hate crime. Therefore, many incidents that are reported to community 

organizations, such as being spit on or called racial slurs, are not accounted for in official numbers, 

yet still invoke fear in community members. John C. Yang, executive director and president of 

Asian Americans Advancing Justice (AAJC), explained that:

[r]egardless of whether these are designated as hate crimes, the effect is the same, the Asian 

American community right now is under fear, under pain, and angry. So, these legal 

definitions frankly don’t matter, what matters right now is ensuring that the Asian 

American community feels visible and feels protected.468

The 2022 American Experiences with Discrimination Survey found that a majority (83 percent) of 

Asian Americans reported that they were concerned about the increase in hate incidents469 and that 

465 Dep’t of Justice, Bureau of Justice Assistance, Interrogatory Responses to the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights, 

Mar. 16, 2023 [on file]. 

466 See U.S. Commission on Civil Rights, In the Name of Hate: Examining the Federal Government’s Role in 

Responding to Hate Crimes, Nov. 2019.

467 STOP AAPI Hate, Righting Wrongs: How Civil Rights Can Protect Asian Americans and Pacific Islanders 

Against Racism, May 2023, p. 7.

468 Catherine Thorbecke, “Why anti-Asian hate incidents often go unreported and how to help,” ABC News, Mar. 18, 

2021, https://abcnews.go.com/US/anti-asian-hate-incidents-unreported/story?id=76509072.

469 Jennifer Lee and Karthick Ramakrishnan, “A Year After Atlanta,” Mar. 16, 2022, http://aapidata.com/blog/yearafter-atlanta/.
Anti-Asian Hate Crimes Introduction and Background 73

close to two million individuals have experienced hate incidents since the beginning of the 

pandemic.470 However, only “a very small fraction of them have reported to community hotlines 

and an even smaller proportion, at least what we know, have been established by law enforcement 

as hate crimes.”471 Research suggests that over a quarter of Asian Americans reported having 

experienced hate incidents at some point in time in their lives, but only about 30 percent of Asian 

Americans stated they would be comfortable reporting the incident to the police. 472 Karthick 

Ramakrishman, associate dean of the UC Riverside School of Public Policy, posits that this 

reluctance may be due to “fear of retaliation” and “whether justice would be served.”473 Breaking 

this reluctance down by gender shows that Asian women express more distrust in the criminal 

justice system, are more likely to fear retaliation, and are less likely to believe justice will be served 

if reported; thus, are significantly less likely to report a hate incident to the police compared to 

Asian men.474

Jennifer Wu, founding partner of Groombridge, Wu, Baughman & Stone LLP who represents hate 

crime victims and their families in New York, testified to the Commission:

Asians tend to underreport... Individuals on the other hand are embarrassed. The biggest 

complaint I hear from my victim is my face is in the newspaper. That means all the friends 

and family of the perpetrator are going to come get me. They’re afraid for their own safety 

and they don’t want to report. So, they want to do it anonymously... they’re scared.475

Similarly, Ramakrishman explains that many Asian Americans may choose not to report to avoid 

unwanted attention to themselves or family members.476 Jo-Ann Yoo, executive director of the 

Asian American Federation, testified about how a 90-year-old grandmother who was set on fire 

by teenagers in a Brooklyn neighborhood was “too scared to tell anybody including her own 

family.”477 D.J. Ida, executive director for the National Asian American Pacific Islander Mental 

Health Association, also suggests that when hate incidents occur, Asian Americans may feel 

pressured not to talk or report the incident to avoid burdening other family members, especially 

those who come from families who recently immigrated, and that “[f]rom a psychological 

standpoint, sometimes we don’t want to talk about the problems because, and I see this in younger 

470 Ibid.

471 Ibid.

472 Ibid.

473 Kimmy Yam, “Asian Americans are least likely to report hate incidents, new research shows,” NBC News, Mar. 

31, 2021, https://www.nbcnews.com/news/asian-america/asian-americans-are-least-likely-report-hate-incidentsnew-research-n1262607.

474 Jennifer Lee and Karthick Ramakrishnan, “A Year After Atlanta,” Mar. 16, 2022, http://aapidata.com/blog/yearafter-atlanta/.

475 Wu Testimony, pp. 117-18.

476 Kimmy Yam, “Asian Americans are least likely to report hate incidents, new research shows,” NBC News, Mar. 

31, 2021, https://www.nbcnews.com/news/asian-america/asian-americans-are-least-likely-report-hate-incidentsnew-research-n1262607.

477 Yoo Testimony, p. 25.
74 The Federal Response to Anti-Asian Racism in the United States

people who were immigrants or children of immigrants, their parents had worked so hard for them. 

They don’t want to burden their parents. Because it’s a sense of gratitude and it’s very, 

very powerful.”478

Some research also suggests that stereotypical notions of Asian Americans as “model minorities” 

may also contribute to the belief that Asian individuals need to be more “self-sufficient” and 

address problems within their families instead of seeking help from more formal outlets. The 

model minority stereotype also carries over to the notion of Asian Americans as “model victims 

who can overcome and respond to their victimization quietly.”479 Research suggests that many 

Asian Americans internalize these stereotypes, which makes them less likely to seek help from 

police and/or mental health services after being victimized.480 While there is a lack of literature 

regarding Asian hate crime victims specifically, victimization research on domestic violence and 

sexual assault suggests that Asian Americans consistently demonstrated that they prefer seeking 

aid through informal (e.g., friends) versus formal (e.g., police) means.481 For instance, Quyen 

Dinh, executive director of Southeast Asia Resource Action Center explained that “a lot of our 

community members don’t know they can report, or they are afraid to report to law enforcement. 

They would rather share with the community groups they feel comfortable with.”482

According to the former chairperson and commissioner at the New York Human Rights 

Commission Carmelyn Malalis, another barrier that may lead to hate incidents being underreported 

is due to language barriers, especially among immigrant communities and/or elders. 483 She 

explained that:

when anyone is personally attacked, much more than if they’re personally attacked because 

of their identity, your safe place is to go somewhere where you can talk about it in a way 

478 Kimmy Yam, “Asian Americans are least likely to report hate incidents, new research shows,” NBC News, Mar. 

31, 2021, https://www.nbcnews.com/news/asian-america/asian-americans-are-least-likely-report-hate-incidentsnew-research-n1262607.

479 Yoshiko Takahashi, “Victims Behind the Model Minority Myth: Are Asian Americans Model Victims?,” An 

International Perspective on Contemporary Developments in Victimology, June 2020. 

480 Sungchul Park, Jim Stimpson, Jessie Pintor, Dylan Roby, Ryan McKenna, Jie Chen, and Alexander Ortega, “The 

Effects of the Affordable Care Act on Health Care Access and Utilization Among Asian American Subgroups,” 

Medical Care, vol. 57, no. 11, Nov. 2019, https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/31634267/; Brendan Lantz and Marin 

Wenger, “Are Asian Victims Less Likely to Report Hate Crime Victimization to the Police? Implications for 

Research and Policy in the Wake of the COVID-19 Pandemic,” Crime & Delinquency, 2021, vol. 68, no. 8, 

https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/00111287211041521#bibr46-00111287211041521.

481 Anita Raj and Jay Silverman, “Violence Against Immigrant Women,” The Roles of Culture, Context, and Legal 

Immigrant Status on Intimate Partner Violence,” Mar. 2002, vol. 8, no. 3, https://refugeeresearch.net/wpcontent/uploads/2016/05/Raj-and-Silverman-2002-Violence-against-immigrant-women.pdf; Anita Raj and Jay 

Silverman, “Domestic Violence Help-Seeking Behaviors of South Asian Women Residing in the United States,” 

International Review of Victimology, July 2016, vol. 14, no. 1, 

https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.1177/026975800701400108?journalCode=irva.

482 Priya Krishnakumar, “Why hate crime data can’t capture the true scope of anti-Asian violence,” CNN, Mar. 18, 

2021, https://www.cnn.com/2021/03/18/us/hate-crime-reporting-anti-asian-violence/index.html.

483 Catherine Thorbecke, “Why anti-Asian hate incidents often go unreported and how to help,” ABC News, Mar. 18, 

2021, https://abcnews.go.com/US/anti-asian-hate-incidents-unreported/story?id=76509072.
Anti-Asian Hate Crimes Introduction and Background 75

that you feel most comfortable. One huge issue that [the New York Human Rights 

Commission] has talked about with some partners across the country is the need to 

make sure that as people are doing outreach, as people are doing intake, that there’s 

language accessibility.484 

Manjusha Kulkarni, executive director of AAPI Equity Alliance and co-founder of Stop AAPI 

Hate, wrote in her statement to the Commission that community advocates working with 

immigrant Asian populations have reported that language barriers present an obstacle for those 

with limited English proficiency when it comes to reporting a hate crime.485 This barrier is due to 

“few police departments hav[ing] officers who are fluent speakers of Asian languages, even in 

large metropolitan areas with high numbers of AAPIs.”486

A 2021 study examining variations in the likelihood of reporting hate crimes during the pandemic 

between Asian victims and other victims found that approximately 35 percent of hate crimes were 

reported to the police. 487 Asian respondents comprised a disproportionate percentage of 

respondents who did not report their hate crime victimization. Asian people comprising 7.9 percent 

of respondents who experienced hate crimes, but 9.3 percent of the sample who did not report 

versus 5.2 percent of those that reported. There was no similar variation observed within other 

racial/ethnic groups. Examining the relationship between race and reporting a hate crime, the study

found Asian victims had approximately 53 percent lower odds of reporting a hate crime to the 

police than White victims. Other races did not show significantly different reporting patterns

relative to White victims.

488 The study concluded that the underreporting of anti-Asian hate crimes 

at higher rates than victims of other racial/ethnic groups is not unique to the pandemic; rather, it 

may be a general pattern that persisted previously.

489 Underreporting of hate crimes not only 

obfuscates official data but also threatens overall public safety,490 which creates a serious concern 

as data shows that bias-motivated incidents and hate crimes increased during the pandemic across 

the nation.491

484 Ibid.

485 Kulkarni Statement pp. 7-8.

486 Ibid., 8.

487 Brendan Lantz and Marin Wenger, “Are Asian Victims Less Likely to Report Hate Crime Victimization to the 

Police? Implications for Research and Policy in the Wake of the COVID-19 Pandemic,” Crime & Delinquency, 

2021, vol. 68, no. 8, https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/00111287211041521#bibr46-00111287211041521.

488 Brendan Lantz and Marin Wenger, “Are Asian Victims Less Likely to Report Hate Crime Victimization to the 

Police? Implications for Research and Policy in the Wake of the COVID-19 Pandemic,” Crime & Delinquency, 

2021, vol. 68, no. 8, https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/00111287211041521#bibr46-00111287211041521.

489 Ibid.

490 See e.g., International Association of Chiefs of Police, “Responding to Hate Crimes: A Police Officer’s Guide to 

Investigation and Prevention,” https://www.theiacp.org/resources/responding-to-hate-crimes-a-police-officersguide-to-investigation-and-prevention; U.S. Dep’t of Justice and U.S. Dep’t of Health and Human Services, Raising 

Awareness of Hate Crimes and Hate Incidents During the COVID-19 Pandemic, 

https://www.justice.gov/file/1507346/download. 

491 See supra notes 522-531 (showing FBI data during the pandemic).
76 The Federal Response to Anti-Asian Racism in the United States

In addition to problems with underreporting and incomplete national hate crime data, the federal 

data presents some communities, like Asian and Latino Americans, as monolithic rather than a 

vast diaspora of ethnicities. Federal databases often aggregate reports by ethnicity and lump 

incidents into broader racial categories.492 For Asian Americans specifically, according to a 2016 

study, more than 17 million members of approximately 50 different races and ethnicities are 

classified under the umbrella term of “Asian American or Pacific Islander.”493 This can have 

widespread confounding effects when trying to understand differences in income levels, 

educational attainment, and experiences of racism and discrimination. For Asian Americans 

specifically, aggregated data continues to reify the “model minority” myth, and having 

disaggregated data would allow researchers and policymakers to better understand the challenges 

that different communities face.494 When it comes to hate crimes the European Union Agency for 

Fundamental Rights recommends: 

the collection and reporting of disaggregated data ... [are] necessary to monitor the 

effectiveness of the police response to the phenomenon, and to prepare effective and 

targeted policies. Publication and dissemination of, and easy access to, the data all help to 

assure victims and communities that hate crime[s] [are] taken seriously and sends a 

message to the public that hate crime[s] [are] monitored, addressed, and not tolerated.495

Because national data does not distinguish between Asian subgroups, it is difficult to establish 

correlations between public attitudes and the rise of hate crimes during the pandemic. The lack of 

nuanced and disaggregated data also poses another barrier for researchers and policymakers to 

understand the causes of hate incidents and hate crimes and keeps law enforcement and 

government officials from being able to direct resources and provide services to targeted 

communities to address the increase of violence.496

Hate Crimes Based on Multiple Characteristics

Victims of hate crimes and bias-motivated incidents may be targeted due to multiple characteristics

of their real or perceived identity (e.g., race, gender, and sexual orientation or religion and race). 

Various aspects of an individual’s identity may be associated with a particular group that could 

492 Federal Bureau of Investigation, Crime Data Explorer, https://cde.ucr.cjis.gov/LATEST/webapp/#/pages/home.

493 Christian Edlagan and Kavya Vaghul, “How data disaggregation matters for Asian Americans and Pacific 

Islanders,” Washington Center for Equitable Growth, Dec. 14, 2016, https://equitablegrowth.org/how-datadisaggregation-matters-for-asian-americans-and-pacific-islanders/.

494 See e.g., Tina Kauh, Jen’nan Ghazal Read, and A.J. Scheitler, “The Critical Role of Racial/Ethnic Data 

Disaggregation for Health Equity,” Population Research and Policy Review, vol. 40, no. 1-7, 2021, 

https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s11113-020-09631-6. 

495 European Union Agency for Fundamental Rights, “FRA Opinions Hate Crime Reporting,” 

https://fra.europa.eu/en/content/fra-opinions-hate-crime-recording.

496 The Justice Department noted to the Commission that the FBI’s UCR Program follows the Office of 

Management and Budget’s (OMB) minimum reporting guidelines for race and ethnicity. See Dep’t of Justice, 

Response to Affected Agency Review, June 22, 2023 [on file].
Anti-Asian Hate Crimes Introduction and Background 77

put them at risk of being targeted for hate violence. Moreover, these risks may be intersectional497

in nature. For instance, data suggest that Muslim, Middle Eastern, and Arab women who wear 

hijabs or head scarves are among the most targeted for hate violence in their communities due to 

the “intersection of gender, skin color, religious presentation, and immigrant background they 

represent.”498 One example of the intersectional nature of hate crimes targeting Asian people was 

witnessed in the heinous Atlanta spa shootings. As discussed previously, Asian women are 

subjected to a form of exoticized sexualization that is distinct from the way women in other racial 

groups in the U.S. are sexualized.499 Public outcry following the 2021 spa shooting rampage 

argued that the shooter targeted Asian women precisely because of these harmful stereotypes, 

which allowed the assailant to make the racist and misogynistic link between his sex addiction and 

Asian women in general.500 Despite these cases, hate crimes are often not reported intersectionally, 

even when there may be evidence to suggest that an individual was targeted for multiple reasons.

In many cases, law enforcement reports a crime as a hate crime only when there is clear evidence 

(e.g., the perpetrator used slurs or symbols) during the attack or left at the scene of the crime. 

Therefore, a crime is reported as a hate crime based on the most obvious motivating factors that 

the assailant used during the crime, even if an individual’s multiple identities may be a driving 

force as to why they were targeted.501 For instance, if a hate crime occurred against a queer Asian 

woman, where a perpetrator assaults her and uses racist slurs during the attack, in most cases, the 

attack would be recorded as racially motivated, despite the fact that she is also queer. This would 

be due to the motivating factor that she is Asian, not the fact that she is also queer and a woman. 

It can be argued that these other identity characteristics may also play a role as motivating factors 

for why she was targeted, even if the attack is only recorded as anti-Asian and not also anti-LGBTQ 

+and/or anti-woman. In some cases, however, if there is evidence that the crime was motivated by 

two or more biases, the crime may be reported as a multiple-bias incident. In the 2021 

Supplemental Hate Crime report released by the FBI, there were 310 multiple-bias hate crime 

incidents that involved 411 victims (see further discussion below).502

497 Intersectionality is an analytical framework that examines the relationships between social identities (e.g., race, 

class, gender) and how these identities create overlapping and interlocking systems that affect marginalized 

individuals and communities in society. Kimberle Crenshaw, “Demarginalizing the Intersection of Race and Sex: A 

Black Feminist Critique of Antidiscrimination Doctrine, Feminist Theory and Antiracist Politics,” The University of 

Chicago Legal Forum, 140:139-167 (1989).

498 Ibid.

499 Shruti Mukkamala and Karen L. Suyemoto, “Racialized Sexism/Sexualized Racism: A Multimethod Study of 

Intersectional Experiences of Discrimination for Asian American Women,” Asian American Journal of Psychology, 

2018, vol. 9, num. 1, http://dx.doi.org/10.1037/aap0000104; see also, supra notes 269-276.

500 Kate Brumback, “Man Pleads Guilty to 4 Asian Spa Killings, Sentenced to Life,” APNews.com, July 28, 2021, 

https://apnews.com/article/shootings-georgia-massage-business-shootings-4c9d611102b25b49b8bfee276278c472.

501 Lisa M. Jones, Kimberly J. Mitchell, and Heather A. Turner, “U.S. Hate Crime Investigation Rates and 

Characteristics: Findings from the National Hate Crime Investigations Study (NHCIS),” Office of Justice Programs, 

U.S. Dep’t of Justice, Apr. 2022, https://www.ojp.gov/pdffiles1/nij/grants/304531.pdf.

502 See Federal Bureau of Investigation, Supplemental Hate Crime Statistics, 2021, Mar. 2023, 

https://www.fbi.gov/news/press-releases/fbi-releases-supplemental-2021-hate-crime-statistics.
78 The Federal Response to Anti-Asian Racism in the United States

Reports of bias incidents against individuals who are Asian and LGBTQ were prominent between 

2019 and 2022, highlighting the intersectional nature of these incidents. For example, one story 

that was collected was from a transgender Asian woman who stated: 

I was with my new boyfriend at a restaurant and when we walked in the server started 

calling me a b---h, c---k, tr---ie... He said I have a big fat p---s, and told me to go back to 

China. Then my boyfriend proceeded to walk in the restaurant and when I took a step 

forward, the server hit me, so I left.

Left a restaurant with friends in the Asian district of town. A man began to follow me 

calling out ‘Hey you f—got c---k!’ & ‘Come here you virus!’ I began to walk fast towards 

a crowd until he stopped following me.

Cynthia Choi, co-executive director with Chinese for Affirmative Action and co-founder of Stop 

AAPI Hate, stated that Asian victims who are most likely to be targeted were “individuals who 

live in the intersections.”503 For instance, Kyle Navarro who is queer identified and Filipino 

American said that he was spat at and called a “gook” outside of his workplace. He stated that he 

wanted to defend himself, but “I took a breath and realized if I had gotten hurt or worse, I have a 

partner to worry about...” and now he is fearful for his and his partner’s safety. 504 Navarro 

explained that “every time my partner and I go out, we give each other hugs, we hold each other, 

and tell each other to be safe.”505 Choi explained that the increase in anti-Asian hate incidents have 

a compounding effect on some victims, especially those who 

were already living in situations where their safety has been an issue... whether you’re an 

immigrant, undocumented, or because of your gender identity and sexuality – the pandemic 

has amplified that. Those who were suffering before the pandemic, their situation is worse 

off.506

Choi also described a request for support from the mother of a student enrolled in Montana State 

University, who reached out to Stop AAPI Hate when her daughter was allegedly subjected to antiAsian, anti-LGBT slurs, and found a noose in her closet with a note telling her to kill herself.507

503 Nico Lang, “LGBTQ Asian Americans Brace for a ‘Double Whammy’ as Hate Crimes Rise,” Vice, Apr. 22, 

2020, https://www.vice.com/en/article/y3mywy/lgbtq-asian-americans-brace-for-a-double-whammy-as-hate-crimesrise.

504 Ibid.

505 Ibid.

506 Ibid.

507 Choi Testimony, p. 70.
Anti-Asian Hate Crimes Introduction and Background 79

Hieu Nguyen, founder of the Viet Rainbow in Orange County, stated that being LGBTQ and Asian 

during COVID-19 has become a “double whammy.”508 Nguyen explained that “when you’re 

LGBTQ and an ethnic minority, there’s already a sense of not feeling safe in the environment that 

you’re in. It just adds a heightened level of anxiety for folks, and it challenges their sense of 

safety.”509 Moreover, due to a combination of being fearful to report and the lack of being able to 

report these incidents intersectionally, many cases like these may not be reflected in national 

statistics. Thus, the lack of disaggregated hate crime data continues to obfuscate the full 

understanding of hate violence in the United States. As such, Manjusha Kulkarni, executive 

director of AAPI Equity Alliance, wrote to the Commission that solutions to stop hate crimes 

against Asian Americans solutions need to “address issues of intersectionality as many who have 

been harmed do not simply identify as AAPI, but also as women, LGBTQ+, low-income, disabled, 

and immigrant.”510

FBI Data

Notwithstanding the problems associated with data collection and data reliance, the federal 

government has documented increases in anti-Asian hate crimes, confirming the uptick in hate 

crimes noted by AAPIs and other groups. Congress highlighted these increases in the COVID-19 

Hate Crimes Act.511 They have also been reported by the DOJ in the Raising Awareness of Hate 

Crimes and Hate Incidents During the COVID-19 Pandemic report and by the FBI in its Hate 

Crimes Statistics Reports. 

In the bipartisan COVID-19 Hate Crimes Act, Congress stated that following the spread of 

COVID-19 in 2020, there was a dramatic increase in hate crimes and violence against Asian

Americans and Pacific Islanders. 512 There were nearly 3,800 reported cases of anti-Asian 

discrimination and incidents related to COVID-19 between March 19, 2020, and February 28, 

2021, in all 50 States and the District of Columbia.513 Race-based bias was cited as the primary 

reason for discrimination, making up over 90 percent of incidents over this period.514 Moreover, 

36 percent of these incidents took place at a business,

515 which highlights additional civil rights 

concerns. For instance, a report from Stop AAPI Hate showed that from March 2020 to December 

2021, almost 11,000 anti-Asian hate incidents were reported, a quarter of these incidents occurred 

at businesses, a third on public streets, and other civil rights violations (e.g., being refused service, 

508 Nico Lang, “LGBTQ Asian Americans Brace for a ‘Double Whammy’ as Hate Crimes Rise,” Vice, Apr. 22, 

2020, https://www.vice.com/en/article/y3mywy/lgbtq-asian-americans-brace-for-a-double-whammy-as-hate-crimesrise.

509 Ibid.

510 Kulkarni Statement at 11.

511 Pub. L. No. 117-13, 135 Stat. 265 (2021).

512 Pub. L. No. 117-13, § 2(1), 135 Stat. 265 (2021); COVID-19 Hate Crimes Act, Public Law No: 117-13, S. 937. 

(2021), https://www.congress.gov/bill/117th-congress/senate-bill/937/text.

513 Pub. L. No. 117-13, § 2(2), 135 Stat. 265 (2021).

514 Id.

515 Id.
80 The Federal Response to Anti-Asian Racism in the United States

being barred from transportation, and housing and workplace discrimination) accounted for 11.5 

percent of reported incidents.516

Additionally, in a report issued by the DOJ and HHS titled Raising Awareness of Hate Crimes and 

Hate Incidents During the COVID-19 Pandemic, data showed the overall number of race-related 

hate crimes rose by 30 percent in 2020.517 Comparatively, the report found that anti-Asian hate 

crimes, specifically, increased by over 70 percent in 2020.518

According to the Bureau of Justice Assistance (BJA), anti-Asian hate crimes rose 164 percent in 

16 of the largest cities and counties in the first quarter of 2021 compared to the same period in 

2020.519 BJA wrote that the first quarter increases in 2021 followed a “historic surge” in anti-Asian 

hate crimes that started in 2020, with anti-Asian hate crimes increasing 149 percent in 16 of the 

largest cities in 2020.520 Specifically, data show that the first spike of anti-Asian hate crimes 

“occurred in March and April of 2020 concurrently with a rise in COVID cases and negative 

stereotyping of Asians related to the pandemic.”521

In 2021, the FBI released amended 2020 hate crime statistics to include 8,052 single-bias 

incidents522 involving 11,126 victims.523 There were also 211 multiple-bias hate crime incidents 

that involved 346 victims.524 This represents an increase from 2019 that documented 7,103 singlebias incidents involving 8,552 victims.525

516 Aggie J. Yellow Horse, Russell Jeung, and Ronae Matriano, “Stop AAPI Hate National Report,” Stop AAPI 

Hate, Mar. 1, 2022, https://stopaapihate.org/wp-content/uploads/2022/03/22-SAH-NationalReport-3.1.22-v9.pdf.

517 United States Department of Justice and United States Department of Health and Human Services, Raising 

Awareness of Hate Crimes and Hate Incidents During the COVID-19 Pandemic, (2021), 

https://www.justice.gov/hatecrimes/resource/raising-awareness-hate-crimes-and-hate-incidents-during-covid-19-

pandemic, https://www.justice.gov/file/1507346/download.

518 Ibid.

519 Bureau of Justice Assistance, Dep’t of Justice, Interrogatory Responses to the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights, 

Mar. 16, 2023, at 5 [on file]; see also, Center for the Study of Hate & Extremism, Report to the Nation: Anti-Asian 

Prejudice & Hate Crime: New 2020‐21 First Quarter Comparison Data, Apr. 28, 2021, 

https://www.csusb.edu/sites/default/files/Report%20to%20the%20Nation%20-%20AntiAsian%20Hate%202020%20Final%20Draft%20-

%20As%20of%20Apr%2030%202021%206%20PM%20corrected.pdf. 

520 Bureau of Justice Assistance, Dep’t of Justice, Interrogatory Responses to the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights, 

Mar. 16, 2023, at 5 [on file].

521 Ibid.

522 The FBI defines an incident as an “incident in which one or more offense types are motivated by the same bias.” 

As of 2013, law enforcement agencies can report up to five bias motivations per offense type. The definition of a 

multiple-bias incident is “an incident in which one or more offense types are motivated by two or more biases.” See 

Federal Bureau of Investigation, Uniform Crime Reporting, 2017 Hate Crime Statistics, https://ucr.fbi.gov/hatecrime/2017.

523 FBI Releases Updated 2020 Hate Crime Statistics. FBI, Oct. 25, 2021, https://www.fbi.gov/news/pressreleases/fbi-releases-updated-2020-hate-crime-statistics.

524 Ibid.

525 FBI Releases 2019 Hate Crime Statistics, FBI, Nov. 16, 2020, https://www.fbi.gov/news/press-releases/fbireleases-2019-hate-crime-statistics.
Anti-Asian Hate Crimes Introduction and Background 81

Among the various bias motivations categories,526 61.8 percent of single-bias incident victims 

were targeted because of their race, ethnicity, or ancestry in 2020. In comparison, in 2019, 57.6 

percent of single bias-incident victims were targeted because of their race, ethnicity, or ancestry. 

In the March 13, 2023, Supplemental Hate Crime Statistics 2021 report, there were 10,530 singlebias incidents that involved 12,411 victims. Race/ethnicity/ancestry incidents comprised 63.1 

percent of single-bias incidents in 2021. Race/ethnicity/ancestry single bias-incident victims 

comprised 64.5 percent of single-bias incident victims in 2021. 

Table 7 FBI Hate Crimes Statistics (2019-2021)

2019 2020 2021

Number of Single Bias Incidents 7,103 8,052 10,530

Number of Victims 8,552 11,126 12,411

Percent of Single-Bias Incident Victims: 

Race, Ethnicity, and Ancestry

57.6 61.8 64.5

An examination of anti-Asian bias also shows an upward trend from 2018 and through 2021 (see 

Table 8 below). From 2018 and 2019, there were 10 more incidents reported with 38 more victims. 

However, comparing 2020 to 2019 shows a precipitous increase in reported hate incidents and 

victims: 121 more anti-Asian hate crime incidents and 127 more anti-Asian hate crime victims 

from 2019 to 2020. 

The FBI noted that due to the NIBRS transition, participation in the December 2022 release of 

2021 data from local law enforcement agencies was down 22 percent. 527 Despite the low 

participation, comparing anti-Asian hate crime incidents occurring during the pandemic to the year 

prior shows 147 more reported incidents in 2021 compared to 2019, 158 more offenses, 169 more 

victims, and 94 more known offenders.528 In March 2023, the FBI released a Supplemental Hate 

Crimes Statistics report to address some of the low participation caused by the NIBRS transition 

and provide a more accurate picture of hate crimes in the United States.529 Brian Levin, Professor 

at California State University San Bernardino and Director of the Center for the Study of Hate and 

526 The bias motivation categories included race/ethnicity/ancestry, religion, disability, sexual orientation, gender, 

and gender identity.

527 FBI Interrogatory Responses to USCCR, Mar. 15, 2023.

528 Ibid.

529 For the 2021 data year, the FBI retroactively accepted hate crime data submissions and additional hate crime 

reports from 3,025 agencies that covered a combined population of 87,239,467 to compile the supplemental report. 

See Federal Bureau of Investigation, Supplemental Hate Crime Statistics, 2021, Mar. 2023, 

https://www.fbi.gov/news/press-releases/fbi-releases-supplemental-2021-hate-crime-statistics.
82 The Federal Response to Anti-Asian Racism in the United States

Extremism (CSHE), testified that CSHE found a surge of 2021 anti-Asian hate crimes in 21 large 

U.S. cities, seeing a 224 percent increase from 2020.530

Moreover, analyzing the rise of anti-Asian hate crimes utilizing the updated 2021 FBI hate crime 

statistics show an even more troubling increase from a year prior to the pandemic. Comparing 

2019 to 2021 shows 585 more reported incidents, 604 more offenses, 620 more victims, and 521 

more known offenders (see Table 8 below).531

Table 8 Anti-Asian Bias (2018-2021)

Incidents Offenses* Victims1 Known 

Offenders2

2018 148 171 177 125

2019 158 205 215 153

2020 279 330 342 239

2021 (original) 305 363 384 247

2021 (update)†746 820 845 680

* SRS/NIBRS reports data on 13 offense types: murder and nonnegligent manslaughter, rape, aggravated assault, 

simple assault, intimidation, human trafficking — commercial sex acts and human trafficking — involuntary 

servitude (crimes against persons); and robbery, burglary, larceny-theft, motor vehicle theft, arson, and 

destruction/damage/vandalism (crimes against property).

† The FBI released a Supplemental Hate Crimes Statistics Report for 2021 in March 2023 to address the low 

participation in the previous report.

1 Victim may refer to an individual, business/financial institution, government entity, religious organization, or 

society/public as a whole.

2 Known offender does not imply the suspect’s identity is known; rather, the term indicates some aspect of the suspect 

was identified, thus distinguishing the suspect from an unknown offender.

Source: FBI Interrogatory Responses to USCCR, Mar. 15, 2023; FBI Supplemental Hate Crime Statistics, 2021.

Table 9 below provides a more in-depth look at reported hate crimes across the country from 2019 

to 2021. These data show that the majority of these incidents were against individuals (rather than 

businesses), the largest percent increase in offenses were simple assault cases, and as with all 

previous years during this study’s timeframe the offenders were more likely to be White (see Table 

9 below).

Table 9 Anti-Asian Hate Crimes (2019-2021)

530 Levin Statement, at 7. 

531 Federal Bureau of Investigation, Supplemental Hate Crime Statistics, 2021, Mar. 2023, 

https://www.fbi.gov/news/press-releases/fbi-releases-supplemental-2021-hate-crime-statistics.

2019 2020 2021 2021 (updated)

Number Percent Number Percent Number Percent Number Percent

Bias Incidents 158 279 305 746

Victims
Anti-Asian Hate Crimes Introduction and Background 83

Note: 2019, 2020, 2021 data are sourced via CDE Hate Crime data page. The updated 2021 data are from the 

Supplemental Hate Crimes Statistics report publication tables. The DOJ notes that these data may not be consistent 

between the two data sources.

Source: FBI UCR/NIBRS Reporting Program; Supplemental Hate Crimes Statistics, 2021.

As this chapter discussed, discrimination against people of Asian descent is not a new 

phenomenon,532 nor is it the first time that Asian communities have been blamed for a disease in 

the U.S.533 This chapter has shown that AAPI hate incidents and hate crimes rose from 2019 

through 2021, despite data collection low participation. Chapter 2 moves to a discussion about the 

state and local level responses to anti-Asian hate crimes, specifically focusing on three states with 

the largest Asian populations: California, New York, and Texas. Chapter 3 then discusses the 

federal response to the rise of anti-Asian hate crimes and its responsibility to enforce federal laws 

protecting all U.S. citizens.

532 See supra notes 156-229 (Anti-Asian Laws and Historical Racism Against Asians).

533 Alicia Lee, “The Dark and Complex History of Quarantine Goes Back to the Middle Ages,” CNN, Mar. 4, 2020, 

https://www.cnn.com/2020/03/04/us/coronavirus-quarantine-word-history-trnd/index.html.

Individual 202 316 388 713

Business 12 15 12

Other 6 19 9

Total 225 356 411 845

Offense Type

Intimidation 53 25% 116 34% 136 36% 227 28%

Simple Assault 82 38% 103 30% 106 28% 270 33%

Destruction/Damage/Vandalism 28 13% 54 16% 60 16% 149 18%

Aggravated Assault 32 15% 47 14% 47 12% 109 13%

Robbery 3 1% 7 2% 11 3% 28 3%

Burglary 3 1% 3 1% 6 2% 14 2%

Larceny-theft 5 2% 6 2% 8 2% 8 1%

Arson 2 1% 0 0% 1 0% 5 1%

Murder 4 2% 0 0% 2 0% 2 0%

Other 4 2% 5 1% 6 2% 8 1%

Total 216 341 381 820

Offender Race

White 83 52% 126 52% 132 50% 319 49%

Black 35 22% 53 22% 82 31% 215 33%

Asian 5 3% 6 2% 5 2% 16 3%

Native Hawaiian 1 1% 1 0% 1 0% 1 0%

American Indian/Alaska Native 2 1% 0 0% 1 0% 2 0%

Multiple 26 16% 12 5% 17 6% 21 3%

Unknown 7 4% 46 19% 24 9% 78 12%

Total 159 244 262 652
84 The Federal Response to Anti-Asian Racism in the United States

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Local Level Responses to Anti-Asian Hate Crimes 85

Chapter 2: Local Level Responses to Anti-Asian Hate Crimes

While understanding what anti-Asian hate crimes look like at a national level is essential in 

determining how the federal government can best respond to rising violence, hate crimes occur at 

a local level. This chapter provides an analysis of anti-Asian hate incidents for three selected states 

(i.e., California, New York, and Texas) that have the largest Asian communities in the United 

States respectively; and specifically, three cities within these states that have sizeable Asian 

populations (i.e., San Francisco, New York City, and Houston) from 2018 through 2021. Where 

possible, types of crime and perpetrator demographics are also provided, as well as any state and 

local initiatives developed to address these incidents. The chapter also provides an overview of 

state definitions of hate crimes and incidents, highlighting whether they differ from the federal 

definition. Lastly, the chapter details challenges in reporting and prosecuting hate crimes, best 

practices for law enforcement and prosecutors, and community organizations’ efforts to combat 

the rise in anti-Asian incidents occurring on the local, state, and national levels. 

Hate Crimes at the State and Local Level

As discussed in Chapter 1, data collection and reporting are challenging for many reasons. One of 

the greatest barriers to understanding the severity and magnitude of hate crimes is the lack of 

sufficient data. While the passage of the Matthew Shepard and James Byrd Jr. Hate Crimes 

Prevention Act (HCPA)534 in 2009 was an important step in confronting bigotry, increasing public 

awareness, and improving law enforcement’s responses to hate violence, without complete 

national databases and police training to accurately identify and report hate crimes, preventing 

these incidents in the first place is substantially more challenging.535 Additionally, while federal 

law requires the Justice Department to collect crime data and publish a yearly report, state and 

local law enforcement reporting is voluntary.

California

In the 1850s, Chinese immigrants began coming to the United States in significant numbers, 

particularly to California and other Western states for mining and railroad construction jobs that 

fueled a landscape for discrimination almost immediately.536 In 1853, a White man named George 

Hall, shot and killed Ling Sing, a Chinese miner.

537 Hall convicted in a California court and 

534 18 U.S.C. § 249].

535 Ken Schwencke, “Why American Fails at Gathering Hate Crime Statistics,” ProPublica, Dec. 4, 2017, 

https://www.propublica.org/article/why-america-fails-at-gathering-hate-crime-statistics; Hate Crimes Coalition, 

Policy Recommendations Letter to the U.S. Department of Justice following the Charlottesville’s “Unite the Right” 

Rally, Sept. 15, 2017, http://civilrightsdocs.info/pdf/policy/letters/2017/final%20postCharlottesville%20DoJ%20hate%20crime%20summit%20coalition%20recommendations.docx.pdf. 

536 Gillian Brockell, “The long, ugly history of anti-Asian racism and violence in the U.S.” The Washington Post, 

Mar. 18, 2021, https://www.washingtonpost.com/history/2021/03/18/history-anti-asian-violence-racism/. 

537 Ibid.
86 The Federal Response to Anti-Asian Racism in the United States

appealed the verdict arguing that the testimony of three witnesses should be rejected because they 

were of Asian descent.538 In 1854, the California Supreme Court ruled in People v. Hall that people 

of Asian descent could not testify against a White person in court.539 The Court ruled that the 

witnesses’ testimony were inadmissible, based off the racist presumption that Chinese people were 

“a race of people whom nature has marked as inferior, and who are incapable of progress or 

intellectual development beyond a certain point” and therefore did not have the right “to swear 

away the life of a citizen.”540 Less than two decades later, following the murder of a White man 

during an exchange of crossfire between rival Chinese groups, more than 500 rioters surrounded 

and attacked Los Angeles’ Chinese community. 541 At least 17 Chinese men and boys were 

lynched. Eight of the rioters were eventually convicted of manslaughter, but their convictions 

were overturned.542

As discussed in Chapter 1, California has a long history of anti-Asian racism and discrimination,

543

and the increase in hate incidents and hate crimes from 2019 through 2022 stoked fear and anxiety 

among Asian communities once again. As discussed later in this chapter, in June 2020, Stop AAPI 

Hate published a report detailing 832 incidents of COVID-19-related discrimination and 

harassment in California over the course of 13 weeks.544 As William Scott, Chief of the San 

Francisco Police Department, testified before the Commission, “[o]n May 11, 2021, our California 

Attorney General Bonta declared a state of crisis as heightened hate crime violence in the Asian 

American and Pacific Islander communities reverberated and continue to do so in some respects 

across the state.”545

California has the largest Asian population in the United States. The 2020 Census reports that 

California has a total population of 39,538,223, with an Asian population of 6,085,947, making up 

about 15 percent of the state’s population.546 In the past decade, the state’s Asian population grew 

by 25 percent, making it the fastest growing ethnic group in the state.547 San Francisco has a total 

population of 873,965 according to the 2020 Census, with an Asian population of 296,505 (34 

538 Gillian Brockell, “The long, ugly history of anti-Asian racism and violence in the U.S.” The Washington Post, 

Mar. 18, 2021, https://www.washingtonpost.com/history/2021/03/18/history-anti-asian-violence-racism/.

539 People v. Hall, 4 Cal. 399 (1854).

540 Id. at *405.

541 Gillian Brockell, “The long, ugly history of anti-Asian racism and violence in the U.S.” The Washington Post, 

Mar. 18, 2021, https://www.washingtonpost.com/history/2021/03/18/history-anti-asian-violence-racism/.

542 Gillian Brockell, “The long, ugly history of anti-Asian racism and violence in the U.S.” The Washington Post, 

Mar. 18, 2021, https://www.washingtonpost.com/history/2021/03/18/history-anti-asian-violence-racism/.

543 See supra notes 321-332 (discussing anti-Asian racism in California).

544 See supra note 564.

545 William Scott, Police Chief, San Francisco Police Department, testimony, Anti-Asian Racism Briefing, p. 148.

546 U.S. Census Bureau, “California,” https://data.census.gov/profile?g=040XX00US06 (accessed May 8, 2023).

547 Adam Beam, “California’s Asian population soars, new census data shows,” AP News, Aug. 13, 2021, 

https://apnews.com/article/california-race-and-ethnicity-census-2020-4209eebb820f00e9238e0dba0a35a1e3. 
Local Level Responses to Anti-Asian Hate Crimes 87

percent).548 California also saw the most numerical growth in its Asian populations between 2019 

and 2020, growing by over 2 million.549

Hate Crimes Defined and Reported

Under Penal Code 422.55, California law defines a hate crime as a criminal act committed in whole 

or in part because of one or more of the following actual or perceived characteristics of the victim: 

disability, gender, nationality, race or ethnicity, religion, sexual orientation, or association with a 

person or group with one or more of these actual or perceived characteristics.550 Compared to 

federally protected bias categories, California includes all with the exception of gender identity.551

In California, one hate crime report may include up to 10 offenses, 999 victims, and/or 99 suspects, 

thus there may be more offenses than events.552 The state also provides information indicating the 

difference between a hate crime and a hate incident: 

A hate crime Is a crime against a person, group, or property motivated by the victim’s real 

or perceived protected social group. You may be the victim of a hate crime if you have 

been targeted because of your actual or perceived: (1) disability, (2) gender, (3) nationality, 

(4) race or ethnicity, (5) religion, (6) sexual orientation, and (7) association with a person 

or group with one or more of these actual or perceived characteristics. Hate crimes are 

serious crimes that may result in imprisonment or jail time.

A hate incident is an action or behavior motivated by hate but which, for one or more 

reasons, is not a crime. Examples of hate incidents include name-calling, insults, displaying 

hate material on your own property, posting hate material that does not result in property 

damage, and distribution of materials with hate messages in public places.553

In addition to the criminal code, California enacted the Ralph Civil Rights Act of 1976, which 

states that “[a]ll persons within the jurisdiction of this state have the right to be free from any 

violence, or intimidation by threat of violence, committed against their persons or property because 

of political affiliation, or on account of [sex, race, color, religion, ancestry, national origin, 

548 U.S. Census Bureau, “San Francisco city; California,” https://data.census.gov/profile?g=160XX00US0667000 

(accessed May 9, 2023).

549 Abby Budiman and Neil G. Ruiz, “Asian Americans are the fastest-growing racial or ethnic group in the U.S.,” 

Pew Research Center, Apr. 9, 2021, https://www.pewresearch.org/short-reads/2021/04/09/asian-americans-are-thefastest-growing-racial-or-ethnic-group-in-the-u-s/. 

550 Ca. Penal Code § 422.6(a) (2004), 

https://leginfo.legislature.ca.gov/faces/codes_displaySection.xhtml?sectionNum=422.6.&nodeTreePath=4.12.2&law

Code=PEN. 

551 U.S. Department of Justice, “Federal Laws and Statutes,” https://www.justice.gov/hatecrimes/laws-and-policies.

552 California Department of Justice, Tackling the Rise of Hate: How California Aims to Protect Our Diverse 

Communities, Aug. 23, 2022, https://oag.ca.gov/system/files/media/demystifying-the-doj-hate-crimes-slidedeck.pdf. 

553 State of California Department of Justice, “Hate Crimes,” https://oag.ca.gov/hatecrimes.
88 The Federal Response to Anti-Asian Racism in the United States

disability, medical condition, genetic information, marital status, sexual orientation, citizenship, 

primary language, or immigration status], or position in a labor dispute, or because another person 

perceives them to have one or more of those characteristics.”554

California’s Justice Department works with law enforcement agencies to collect and review hate 

crime data monthly, compiles hate crime data and submits it to the FBI, and also publishes an 

annual report on hate crimes within California.555 California DOJ reviews incident reports to 

determine if incidents were identified and reported correctly, and reviews incoming submissions 

for accuracy and completeness, running quality control checks and identifying any anomalies in 

the data.556 Acts of discrimination, hate incidents, and hate speech do not qualify for state hate 

crime reporting.557 California DOJ also provides data on the OpenJustice portal for many crimes, 

including hate crimes.558

A ranking system of states based on response to reported hate crimes by the Arab American 

Institute deemed California to be one of the six states with a perfect rating in 2018 due to its 

inclusive hate crime statute, mandatory reporting and data collection statute, mandatory law 

enforcement training on hate crime, an annual hate crime report, and consistent participation in the 

FBI hate crime statistic data collection program.559

Hate Crimes, 2018-2021

In California, hate crime numbers vary across different sources. For instance, the FBI’s Crime 

Data Explorer (CDE) site, which indicates that hate crime data for California are derived from the 

National Incident-Based Reporting System (NIBRS), reports 73 incidents for 2021, while the 

California Department of Justice reports 1,763 incidents. This is due to the number of agencies 

reporting to the FBI changing from year to year. In 2020, 732 of the 740 law enforcement agencies 

in the state provided data. In 2021, the FBI only received data from 15 agencies.560 Table 10 below 

554 Ca. Civil Code § 51.7(b)(1); see also Ca. Civil Code § 51(b), (e).

555 California Department of Justice, Tackling the Rise of Hate: How California Aims to Protect Our Diverse 

Communities, Aug. 23, 2022, https://oag.ca.gov/system/files/media/demystifying-the-doj-hate-crimes-slidedeck.pdf.

556 California Department of Justice, Tackling the Rise of Hate: How California Aims to Protect Our Diverse 

Communities, Aug. 23, 2022, https://oag.ca.gov/system/files/media/demystifying-the-doj-hate-crimes-slidedeck.pdf.

557 California Department of Justice, Tackling the Rise of Hate: How California Aims to Protect Our Diverse 

Communities, Aug. 23, 2022, https://oag.ca.gov/system/files/media/demystifying-the-doj-hate-crimes-slidedeck.pdf.

558 California Department of Justice, “OpenJustice,” https://openjustice.doj.ca.gov/. 

559 Arab American Institute Foundation, Under Reported, Under Threat, July 2018, 

https://static1.squarespace.com/static/5faecb8fb23a85370058aed8/t/6020669176128b0db2fa9efd/1612736148542/U

nderreported_Under_Threat+%282%29.pdf.

560 Federal Bureau of Investigation, “Crime Data Explorer,” 

https://cde.ucr.cjis.gov/LATEST/webapp/#/pages/explorer/crime/hate-crime; see also supra notes 434-444

(transition to NIBRS and low reporting). 
Local Level Responses to Anti-Asian Hate Crimes 89

provides annual hate crime numbers from 2018 to 2021 from the two sources. The numbers from 

the two sources are either close or identical for each year other than 2021, where the FBI only 

reports 73 hate crimes for the entire state, while the California Department of Justice reports 1,763.

Table 10 California Hate Crime Sources, 2018-2021

FBI CDE CA DOJ

2018 1065 1066

2019 1015 1015

2020 1339 1330

2021 73 1763

Source: Federal Bureau of Investigation, “Crime Data Explorer,” https://crime-dataexplorer.app.cloud.gov/pages/home (as of Jan. 4, 2023); California OpenJustice Data Portal, 

https://openjustice.doj.ca.gov/data (accessed Dec. 14, 2022).

Due to the low participation via NIBRS,

561 the analysis in this report focuses on the data available 

from the California Department of Justice. Table 11 provides the number of hate crime events and 

the proportion of the events that targeted Asian individuals for the years with available data. As 

reflected below, data show that the number of anti-Asian events in 2020 was 89, representing 6.7 

percent of all hate crimes that year. In 2021, the number of anti-Asian events was 248, representing 

over 14 percent of all hate crimes for the state.

Table 11 California Anti-Asian Hate Crimes, 2018-2021

Events # Anti-Asian Events % Anti-Asian Events

2018 1066 34 3.19%

2019 1015 43 4.20%

2020 1330 89 6.70%

2021 1763 248 14.10%

Source: California OpenJustice Data Portal, https://openjustice.doj.ca.gov/data (accessed Dec. 14, 2022).

It is worth noting that while the proportion of anti-Asian bias-motivated events more than doubled 

from 2020 to 2021, the number of bias-motivated events against these communities almost tripled, 

indicating an overall rise in hate crimes across the state of California. For example, Attorney 

General Rob Bonta stated that crimes against Black people were the most prevalent in 2021, 

561 The FBI stated that because many law enforcement agencies were not able to submit data via NIBRS, 

participation in 2021 was down 22 percent.

Federal Bureau of Investigation, Interrogatory Responses to U.S. Commission on Civil Rights, Mar. 15, 2023.
90 The Federal Response to Anti-Asian Racism in the United States

climbing 13 percent from 2020 to 2021, and hate crimes motivated by sexual orientation bias 

increased nearly 50 percent.562 Bonta stated in written testimony to the Commission that 

[e]ach of these incidents represents an attack on a person, a neighbor, a family member, a 

Californian. And worse, we know our statistics likely are not exhaustive. Still today, too 

many are too afraid to come forward. While there is no single solution, it is up to all of us 

to heed the call. Hate is a vicious disease – a virus that can only be stopped if we 

stand together.563

In June 2020, Stop AAPI Hate published a report detailing 832 incidents of COVID-19-related 

discrimination and harassment in California over the course of 13 weeks.564 Eighty-one of these 

incidents included physical assault, and 64 suggested potential civil rights violations, including 

instances of discrimination at the workplace, being barred from establishments, or being prevented 

from using transportation.565 A larger study by Stop AAPI Hate, examining incidents from March 

19, 2020 to December 31, 2021, found that the largest proportion (38 percent) occurred in 

California.566 The majority of these incidents involved “conduct that is not criminal, such as verbal 

harassment, and take place in person and in spaces open and accessible to the public, such as streets 

and sidewalks, businesses, public transit, and parks.”567 Additionally, 63 percent of the incidents 

were reported by women.568

While Stop AAPI Hate’s reported incidents are largely non-criminal, the official state-recorded 

incidents are mostly violent crimes, as opposed to property crimes (see Error! Reference source n

ot found.Error! Reference source not found. 12). From 2018 to 2020, violent crimes were more 

than three-quarters of the total amount of anti-Asian hate crimes. In 2021, the proportion of 

property crimes increased to more than 30 percent, while 68 percent of incidents were violent.

562 Associated Press, “Anti-Black, gay, Asian bias fuel California hate crime surge,” NBC News, Jun. 29, 2022, 

https://www.nbcnews.com/news/asian-america/anti-black-gay-asian-bias-fuel-california-hate-crime-surgercna35895. 

563 Rob Bonta, California Attorney General, Written Statement for The Federal Response to Anti-Asian Racism in 

the United States Briefing before the U.S. Comm’n on Civil Rights, Mar. 24, 2023, at 1 (hereinafter Bonta 

Statement). 

564 Stop AAPI Hate, California Report: Over 800 Hate Incidents in 3 Months, Jun. 30, 2020, 

https://stopaapihate.org/wp-content/uploads/2021/04/Stop-AAPI-Hate-Report-California-200630.pdf. 

565 Ibid.

566 Stop AAPI Hate, National Report (Through December 31, 2021), Mar. 4, 2022, https://stopaapihate.org/wpcontent/uploads/2022/03/22-SAH-NationalReport-3.1.22-v9.pdf. 

567 Stop AAPI Hate, California State Policy Recommendations to Address AAPI Hate: A Starting Point for Taking 

Action, Oct. 13, 2021, https://drive.google.com/file/d/1uPFwB0ZbOoQnVs0FXPrlfTkIK3LLM41Y/view. 

568 Stop AAPI Hate, California State Policy Recommendations to Address AAPI Hate: A Starting Point for Taking 

Action, Oct. 13, 2021, https://drive.google.com/file/d/1uPFwB0ZbOoQnVs0FXPrlfTkIK3LLM41Y/view.
Local Level Responses to Anti-Asian Hate Crimes 91

Table 12 California Anti-Asian Hate Crime Types, 2018-2021

Violent Crimes Property Crimes Total

2018 25 (73.5%) 9 (26.5%) 34

2019 32 (74.4%) 11 (25.6%) 43

2020 72 (80.9%) 17 (19.1%) 89

2021 169 (68.1%) 79 (31.9%) 248

Source: California OpenJustice Data Portal, https://openjustice.doj.ca.gov/data (accessed Dec. 14, 2022).

In October 2022, a man in Santa Clara County was charged with more than a dozen hate crimes 

targeting South Asian women following a two-month spree in which the victims had jewelry 

ripped off of their bodies.569 In at least one case, he broke a woman’s wrist and attacked her 

husband while robbing her of her jewelry. 570 The Santa Clara District Attorney Jeff Rosen 

announced “to our South Asian community that anyone who targets and attacks you will be 

arrested and treated with the utmost severity under our law.... Santa Clara County’s precious 

diversity is our strength, our superpower – not a criminal opportunity.”571

The Asian Business Association of Los Angeles surveyed over 400 businesses across the Southern 

California region in April 2021, and over two in five reported that anti-Asian racism was affecting 

their business negatively.572 The most frequent form of business being affected was the climate 

creating fear among staff, and one in six respondents changed their business operations due to 

safety concerns.573

569 Dion Lim, “Man charged with hate crimes for attacking, robbing more than dozen Bay Area Hindu women,” 

ABC News 7, Oct. 4, 2022, https://abc7news.com/jewelry-robbery-hindu-hate-crime-lathan-johnson-arrested-indianwomen/12295301/.

570 Dion Lim, “Man charged with hate crimes for attacking, robbing more than dozen Bay Area Hindu women,” 

ABC News 7, Oct. 4, 2022, https://abc7news.com/jewelry-robbery-hindu-hate-crime-lathan-johnson-arrested-indianwomen/12295301/.

571 County of Santa Clara Office of the District Attorney, “Man Charged with Hate Crimes after Targeting South 

Asian Women in Necklace Robbery Spree,” Oct. 3, 2022, https://countyda.sccgov.org/news/news-release/mancharged-hate-crimes-after-targeting-south-asian-women-necklace-robbery-spree. 

572 Ong, P., Cheng, A., & Ong, J. (2021). Asian American Businesses: The Impacts of Anti-Asian Racism, 

2021. UCLA: Center for Neighborhood Knowledge, https://escholarship.org/uc/item/1x62v28m. 

573 Ibid.
92 The Federal Response to Anti-Asian Racism in the United States

Figure 6 Types of Anti-Asian Business Impacts, California

Source: Ong, P., Cheng, A., & Ong, J. (2021). Asian American Businesses: The Impacts of Anti-Asian Racism, 

2021. UCLA: Center for Neighborhood Knowledge, https://escholarship.org/uc/item/1x62v28m.

The most common reason cited by respondents as the cause for the change in attitudes and behavior 

towards Asian communities was due to the politicization of blaming the pandemic on China or 

Chinese people.574

Regarding perpetrators of anti-Asian hate crimes in California, Table 13 provides a breakdown of 

the suspect’s race and ethnicity across the study years. For each year, the majority of suspects in 

the state’s data portal were White and adults (as opposed to being a juvenile). 

Table 13 California Anti-Asian Hate Crime Suspects, 2018-2021

White

Black or 

African 

American Asian

Hispanic

or Latino

Hawaiian 

or Other 

Pacific 

Islander Unknown

Group of 

Multiple 

Races Total*

2018 16 3 4 5 1 9 1 28

2019 16 8 0 5 0 12 5 39

2020 40 11 2 20 0 35 1 87

2021 124 61 2 59 0 51 9 261

Source: California OpenJustice Data Portal, https://openjustice.doj.ca.gov/data (accessed Dec. 14, 2022).

*Due to the nature of coding race and ethnicity separately, columns will not add together to equal the total number of 

suspects and the portal does not report suspect’s gender. 

574 Ibid.
Local Level Responses to Anti-Asian Hate Crimes 93

San Francisco

Hate crimes were on the rise in San Francisco prior to the COVID-19 pandemic, with incidents 

increasing 58 percent from 2017 to 2018. 575 The San Francisco Police Department (SFPD) 

maintains a publicly available Crime Dashboard576 that provides numbers on crimes in all districts 

from January 2017 through the present day, but this dashboard does not break out hate crime data 

specifically. The California Department of Justice’s OpenData577 portal allows analysis at the 

agency level, however. Table 14 provides the breakdown of anti-Asian hate crime events for this 

study’s period. Like incidents at the state level, the proportion of anti-Asian events in San 

Francisco has increased significantly, representing 16 percent of bias-motivated incidents in 2020 

and more than half of events in 2021. It should be noted, additionally, that all hate crime events 

increased from 2020 to 2021 (from 54 to 114).

Table 14 San Francisco Anti-Asian Hate Crimes, 2018-2021

Events # Anti-Asian Events % Anti-Asian Events

2018 68 4 5.9%

2019 64 6 9.4%

2020 54 9 16.7%

2021 114 60 52.6%

Source: California OpenJustice Data Portal, https://openjustice.doj.ca.gov/data (accessed Dec. 14, 2022).

Anti-Asian hate crimes rose 567 percent from 2020 to 2021, a spike that “is significant, that is 

concerning, and that is alarming,” according to Police Chief Bill Scott.578 The Chief testified 

before the Commission that “[h]ate crimes convey a message to both the victims and their group 

or perceived group that they are not welcome and not safe, and as such, these crimes are an attack 

on the fundamental rights of our communities at large.”579 Moreover, leading up to the pandemic, 

most anti-Asian hate crimes in San Francisco were violent. The increase in anti-Asian hate crimes 

in San Francisco in 2021 (Table 15 below) also saw a higher number of property crimes (56.7 

575 Anna Bauman, “FBI: Hate crimes rose 58% in San Francisco as nationwide numbers leveled off,” San Francisco 

Chronicle, Nov. 15, 2019, https://www.sfchronicle.com/bayarea/article/FBI-Hate-crimes-rose-58-in-San-Franciscoas-14836371.php. 

576 San Francisco Police Department, “Crime Dashboard,” https://www.sanfranciscopolice.org/stay-safe/crimedata/crime-dashboard (accessed Dec. 16, 2022). 

577 California OpenJustice Data Portal, https://openjustice.doj.ca.gov/data

578 Stella Chan and Augie Martin, “Anti-Asian hate crimes increased 567% in San Francisco as lawsuit accuses DA 

of not doing enough,” CNN, Jan. 27, 2022, https://www.cnn.com/2022/01/27/us/anti-asian-hate-crimes-sanfrancisco-lawsuit/index.html.

579 William Scott, Police Chief, San Francisco Police Department, testimony, Anti-Asian Racism Briefing, pp. 148-

49.
94 The Federal Response to Anti-Asian Racism in the United States

percent) than violent crimes (43.4 percent). The majority of these property crimes were reported 

as “Destruction/Damage/Vandalism.”580

Table 15 San Francisco Anti-Asian Hate Crime Types, 2018-2021

Violent Crimes Property Crimes Total

2018 3 (75.0%) 1 (25.0%) 4

2019 6 (100%) 0 (0%) 6

2020 9 (100%) 0 (0%) 9

2021 26 (43.4%) 34 (56.7%) 60

Source: California OpenJustice Data Portal, https://openjustice.doj.ca.gov/data (accessed Dec. 14, 2022).

Similar to the state level, the majority of perpetrators of anti-Asian hate crimes in San Francisco 

were White, and along with the sharp increase of incidents in 2021, there is also an increase in 

perpetrators that are Latino (44.6 percent of suspects in 2021). Table 16 provides a breakdown of 

suspect race and ethnicity across the study years.

Table 16 San Francisco Anti-Asian Hate Crime Suspects, 2018-2021

White

Black or 

African 

American Asian

Hispanic 

or Latino Unknown

Group of 

Multiple 

Races Total

2018 1 0 2 0 1 0 3

2019 4 2 0 1 0 0 6

2020 6 2 1 1 0 0 11

2021 42 15 0 33 1 2 74

Source: California OpenJustice Data Portal, https://openjustice.doj.ca.gov/data (accessed Dec. 14, 2022).

*Due to the nature of coding race and ethnicity separately, columns will not add together to equal the total number 

of suspects

The rise in hate crimes across the city has been vividly depicted in media stories over the years. 

For instance, an 84-year-old Thai man was knocked to the ground while out on a walk and later 

died from his injuries. The assailant was captured on camera seemingly celebrating the attack, and 

then returned to take cellphone pictures of his victim bleeding on the ground.581 Public outrage 

spread after then-District Attorney Chesa Boudin stated there was no evidence to suggest the attack 

was motivated by racial animus, stating that it appeared “that the defendant was in some sort of a 

580 California OpenJustice Data Portal, https://openjustice.doj.ca.gov/data (accessed Dec. 14, 2022).

581 Dan Noyes, “Suspect appears in court for fatal shoving attack on elderly Thai immigrant in SF’s Anza Vista,” 

ABC7 News, Jun. 15, 2022, https://abc7news.com/anti-asian-hate-san-francisco-attacks-on-elderly-asians-vicharatanapakdee-man-shoved-to-ground-in-sf-anza-vista/11961979/. 
Local Level Responses to Anti-Asian Hate Crimes 95

temper tantrum.”582 The victim’s son-in-law, in response to the District Attorney’s comment, 

replied “I don’t buy it for a second, I don’t buy it for a second. He knew what he was doing. 

Hearing this excuse of a hissy fit is really upsetting.”583

Another incident was against a 70-year-old woman who was beaten and kicked in the head by 

multiple attackers in a San Francisco housing complex.584 While these incidents are horrific on 

their own, they also reflect a larger issue in the rise in violence against Asian Americans: without 

solid evidence of racial bias to indicate motivation, random attacks against marginalized 

communities appear as traditional criminal offenses.585 For example, in March 2021, a man was 

brutally attacked on the street in San Francisco’s Mission District, but nothing was stolen from 

him.586 The victim, Danilo Yu Chang, believed he was targeted for being a Chinese-Filipino man, 

yet police said there is “nothing to indicate that the incident was motivated by bias.”587 This 

highlights the continuing challenges in capturing true numbers of hate crimes.588 As discussed later 

in this chapter, the absence of easy identifiers such as hate speech or symbols present make proving 

a crime is a hate crime extremely difficult.589 Chang says he now fears being in San Francisco and 

is going to try to move near family in Indiana or Nevada, stating that “San Francisco is 

deteriorating right now, the old San Francisco is gone, it’s all gone and it’s a dangerous place to 

walk it’s not safe anymore.”590

582 Thomas Fuller, “He Came From Thailand to Care For Family. Then Came a Brutal Attack.” The New York 

Times, Feb. 27, 2021, https://www.nytimes.com/2021/02/27/us/asian-american-hate-crimes.html. 

583 Dion Lim, “Family outraged over SF DA’s description of 84-year-old Asian man’s suspected killer,” ABC7 

News, Mar. 2, 2021, https://abc7news.com/san-francisco-da-chesa-boudin-sf-district-attorney-84-year-old-mankilled/10381125/. 

584 Dion Lim, “EXCLUSIVE: 70-year-old woman brutally beaten, kicked in head by 4 attackers in SF housing 

complex,” ABC7 News, Aug. 1, 2022, https://abc7news.com/asian-woman-beaten-in-sf-attacked-by-four-peopleelderly-kicked-head-san-francisco-senior-attacks/12091867/. 

585 Kiara Alfonseca, “Hate crimes are hard to prosecute, but why?” ABC News, Apr. 13, 2021, 

https://abcnews.go.com/US/hate-crimes-hard-prosecute/story?id=76926458.

586 J.R. Stone, “’San Francisco is deteriorating’: Asian American victim considers moving out of state after brutal 

attack,” ABC7 News, Mar. 17, 2021, https://abc7news.com/asian-man-attacked-san-francisco-abc-7-news-attackstop-hate/10424801/. 

587 J.R. Stone, “’San Francisco is deteriorating’: Asian American victim considers moving out of state after brutal 

attack,” ABC7 News, Mar. 17, 2021, https://abc7news.com/asian-man-attacked-san-francisco-abc-7-news-attackstop-hate/10424801/.

588 One criticism of the HCPA is that meeting the standard of proof to establish criminal liability is challenging, 

specifically since prosecutors must prove the act was committed because of bias. Prosecutors must prove 

discriminatory intent. Therefore, most of the hate cases that are prosecuted that result in a hate crime conviction 

involve the perpetrator using hate speech when committing the act, thereby proving intent. See U.S. Commission on 

Civil Rights, In the Name of Hate: Examining the Federal Government’s Role in Responding to Hate Crimes, Nov. 

2019, https://www.usccr.gov/files/pubs/2019/11-13-In-the-Name-of-Hate.pdf.

589 See infra notes 847-852 (challenges in prosecuting hate crimes).

590 J.R. Stone, “’San Francisco is deteriorating’: Asian American victim considers moving out of state after brutal 

attack,” ABC7 News, Mar. 17, 2021, https://abc7news.com/asian-man-attacked-san-francisco-abc-7-news-attackstop-hate/10424801/.
96 The Federal Response to Anti-Asian Racism in the United States

The beginning of 2021 also had business owners in Oakland’s Chinatown on edge following at 

least 20 robberies and attacks, often targeting women and older adults. 591 The president of 

Oakland’s Chinatown Chamber of Commerce, Carl Chan, said the increase in crime was keeping 

shoppers away during a time the neighborhood was suffering due to the pandemic, and also stated 

“[w]hat you’re seeing is only a fraction of what has happened in Chinatown. Many are not willing 

to [report an incident], they feel that if they report it nothing happens. We have been trying to 

encourage them [to] please report the incidents.”592

At the beginning of 2022, San Francisco Police Chief Bill Scott indicated that more than 30 of the 

incidents in 2021 had been committed by one person who was deliberately targeting Asian people. 

The individual was arrested in August 2021 for burglaries, acts of vandalism, and also faced hate 

crime enhancements.593 Regarding the 561 percent increase of anti-Asian hate crimes in the city 

in 2021 from 2020, Mayor London Breed stated, “‘I’m heartbroken, I’m frustrated, I’m 

embarrassed, I’m angry about the violence that continues to impact many of the people who are 

part of our Asian community but especially our seniors.’”594

In several cases, social media has been used as a tool to capture evidence of hate crimes. In 

December 2022, two TikTok users were filming a video at a fast food chain when they were 

approached by a man who asked about their race and ethnicity before making homophobic and 

anti-Asian comments.595 The TikTok video had millions of views, and following an investigation 

the assailant was arrested on hate crime charges.596 Arine Kim, a UCLA student and the social 

media influencer that posted the video, said she hopes her experience will encourage others to 

report similar incidents: 

This story is getting so much more attention than I thought it would and so many more 

people are speaking out about the kind of experiences that they have gone through...had I 

not recorded that encounter, and had I not posted on my account, I think more people 

591 Dion Lim, “Oakland’s Chinatown on edge after more than 20 reported robberies, Chamber of Commerce 

President says,” ABC7 News, Jan. 31, 2021, https://abc7news.com/amp/oakland-chinatown-chamber-of-commercerobbery-attack/10202793/. 

592 Dion Lim, “Oakland’s Chinatown on edge after more than 20 reported robberies, Chamber of Commerce 

President says,” ABC7 News, Jan. 31, 2021, https://abc7news.com/amp/oakland-chinatown-chamber-of-commercerobbery-attack/10202793/.

593 Stella Chan and Augie Martin, “Anti-Asian hate crimes increased 567% in San Francisco as lawsuit accuses DA 

of not doing enough,” CNN, Jan. 27, 2022, https://www.cnn.com/2022/01/27/us/anti-asian-hate-crimes-sanfrancisco-lawsuit/index.html. 

594 Ibid.

595 Kendall Ross, “Social media influencer speaks out after racist, bigoted incident on Christmas Eve,” ABC News, 

Dec. 27, 2022, https://abcnews.go.com/US/social-media-influencer-speaks-after-racist-bigotedincident/story?id=95839444. 

596 Kendall Ross, “Social media influencer speaks out after racist, bigoted incident on Christmas Eve,” ABC News, 

Dec. 27, 2022, https://abcnews.go.com/US/social-media-influencer-speaks-after-racist-bigotedincident/story?id=95839444.
Local Level Responses to Anti-Asian Hate Crimes 97

wouldn’t realize how severe, how dangerous it is for us, for people of color, for Asian 

Americans, for everyone... This happens to other people on a daily basis and they don’t 

have an avenue to be able to speak out about this.597

According to the San Francisco Police Department, hate crimes against people of Asian descent 

dropped significantly in 2022, with six official reports as opposed to the 60 in 2021.598 Experts 

warn, however, that hate crimes, including those targeting Chinese-owned businesses, may be 

vastly underreported. 599 Cynthia Choi, co-founder of Stop AAPI Hate, stated that “[l]aw 

enforcement numbers will never capture the full extent of the racism and hate our communities 

face.” 600 Rex Tabora, executive director at the Asian Pacific American Community 

Center, cautioned that “[w]hat they don’t take into account is the non-reported hate crime that 

occurs on a regular basis.”601 Tabora estimated that more than 75 percent of Asian people would 

not report the crimes they experienced unless they’re subject to serious violence. Cynthia Choi 

also explained that the majority of hate incidents are not “crimes” under the law, and, even when 

they are, Asian Americans are unlikely to report them to law enforcement.602 SFPD Chief Scott 

testified before the Commission that if hate incidents do not amount to a violation of California 

Penal Code, it is technically not a crime, but that the department does “encourage the reporting of 

hate incidents here in San Francisco because we believe that that is a precursor oftentimes 

to...more serious crimes that may occur by the people that perpetrate hate incidents.”603

New York

The 2020 Census reports that New York has a total population of 20,201,249, with an Asian 

population of 1,933,127 (about 9.5 percent).604 New York also saw the third highest numerical 

growth in its Asian populations between 2019 and 2020 (following California and Texas), growing 

597 Ibid.

598 Nora Mishanec, “S.F. leaders tout steep drop in anti-Asian hate crimes,” San Francisco Chronicle, Jan. 11, 2023, 

https://www.sfchronicle.com/sf/article/S-F-leaders-tout-steep-drop-in-anti-Asian-hate-17711920.php. 

599 Nora Mishanec, “S.F. leaders tout steep drop in anti-Asian hate crimes,” San Francisco Chronicle, Jan. 11, 2023, 

https://www.sfchronicle.com/sf/article/S-F-leaders-tout-steep-drop-in-anti-Asian-hate-17711920.php; see also supra 

notes 825-833.

600 Han Li, “Is Anti-Asian Hate on the Decline in San Francisco? Activists Aren’t So Sure,” The San Francisco 

Standard, Jan. 12, 2023, https://sfstandard.com/criminal-justice/is-anti-asian-hate-on-the-decline-in-san-franciscoactivists-arent-so-sure/. 

601 Han Li, “Is Anti-Asian Hate on the Decline in San Francisco? Activists Aren’t So Sure,” The San Francisco 

Standard, Jan. 12, 2023, https://sfstandard.com/criminal-justice/is-anti-asian-hate-on-the-decline-in-san-franciscoactivists-arent-so-sure/.

602 Han Li, “Is Anti-Asian Hate on the Decline in San Francisco? Activists Aren’t So Sure,” The San Francisco 

Standard, Jan. 12, 2023, https://sfstandard.com/criminal-justice/is-anti-asian-hate-on-the-decline-in-san-franciscoactivists-arent-so-sure/.

603 William Scott, Police Chief, San Francisco Police Department, testimony, Anti-Asian Racism Briefing, p. 151.

604 U.S. Census Bureau, “New York,” https://data.census.gov/profile?g=040XX00US36 (accessed May 9, 2023).
98 The Federal Response to Anti-Asian Racism in the United States

by over 600 people.605 New York City has a total population of 8,804,190 according to the 2020 

Census, with an Asian population of 1,385,144 (15.7 percent).606

As discussed in subsequent sections, New York saw a clear uptick in anti-Asian hate crime 

incidents from 2019 through 2021.607 Panelist Jennifer Wu, a founding partner of a law firm in 

New York City, testified that “we have witnessed firsthand in New York City the surge in antiAsian violence. While we have tried to provide wraparound services to address these issues for 

some of the victims and their families, the serious and long-lasting negative impacts on the Asian 

American community’s economic, social, physical, emotional, and psychological well-being 

cannot be ignored.”608

Hate Crimes Defined and Reported

The State of New York indicates that a person commits a hate crime when they commit a specified 

offense and either: (a) intentionally selects the person against whom the offense is committed or 

intended to be committed in whole or in substantial part because of a belief or perception regarding 

the race, color, national origin, ancestry, gender, gender identity or expression, religion, religious 

practice, age, disability or sexual orientation of a person, regardless of whether the belief or 

perception is correct, or (b) intentionally commits the act or acts constituting the offense in whole 

or in substantial part because of a belief or perception regarding the race, color, national origin, 

ancestry, gender, gender identity or expression, religion, religious practice, age, disability or sexual 

orientation of a person, regardless of whether the belief or perception is correct.609 The protected 

bias categories include all categories that are federally protected.610

Per New York State Executive Law § 837(4)(c), the Division of Criminal Justice Services (DCJS) 

is required to collect and analyze statistical and all other information and data with respect to hate 

crimes reported by law enforcement through the Uniform Crime Reporting (UCR) Program. DCJS 

produces an annual report which details hate crime incidents that law enforcement agencies have 

reported to DCJS, including data on the number of incidents and type of bias reported.611 DCJS 

605 Abby Budiman and Neil G. Ruiz, “Asian Americans are the fastest-growing racial or ethnic group in the U.S.,” 

Pew Research Center, Apr. 9, 2021, https://www.pewresearch.org/short-reads/2021/04/09/asian-americans-are-thefastest-growing-racial-or-ethnic-group-in-the-u-s/. 

606 U.S. Census Bureau, “New York city, New York,” https://data.census.gov/profile?g=160XX00US3651000

(accessed May 9, 2023).

607 See supra notes 617-618.

608 Jennifer Wu, Founding Partner, Groombridge, Wu, Baughman & Stone LLP, Written Statement for The Federal 

Response to Anti-Asian Racism in the United States Briefing before the U.S. Comm’n on Civil Rights, Mar. 24, 

2023, at 8 (hereinafter J. Wu Statement).

609 N.Y. Penal Code § 485.05 (2020), “Hate Crimes,” https://www.nysenate.gov/legislation/laws/PEN/485.05. 

610 U.S. Department of Justice, “Federal Laws and Statutes,” https://www.justice.gov/hatecrimes/laws-and-policies

(accessed Jan. 20, 2023).

611 New York State, “New York State Anti-Hate Crime Resource Guide,” https://www.ny.gov/we-are-one-newyork/new-york-state-law-enforcement-hate-crimes-resource-guide (accessed Dec. 2, 2022).
Local Level Responses to Anti-Asian Hate Crimes 99

also submits the data to the FBI for its collection and publication.612 DCJS Annual Reports on hate 

crimes indicates that all agencies submit data on hate crime, and roughly 20-30 percent of agencies 

reported no incidents or arrests over the study period examined in this report.613

In accordance with the New York State Penal Law, the New York City Police Department uses 

the following guideline to identify hate crime and bias incidents: 

A bias incident is any offense or unlawful act that is motivated in whole or substantial part 

by a person’s, a group’s or a place’s identification with a particular race, color, religion, 

ethnicity, gender, age, disability, ancestry, national origin, or sexual orientation (including 

gay, lesbian, bi-sexual, and transgender) as determined by the commanding officer of the 

Hate Crime Task Force.614

Hate Crimes, 2018-2021

Like California, in New York, annual numbers vary across different sources. For instance, the 

FBI’s CDE site, which indicates that hate crime data for New York were derived from both NIBRS 

and Summary Reporting System (SRS) reports voluntarily submitted to the FBI, reports 463 

incidents for 2020, while the Division of Criminal Justice Services (DCJS) Open Data Portal 

reports 488 incidents. For 2021, the FBI reports a much lower number than the state itself, likely 

due to fewer agencies reporting hate crimes to the FBI through NIBRS as compared to the previous 

data collections.615 In 2020, 559 of the 595 law enforcement agencies in the state provided data. 

In 2021, the FBI only received data from 124 agencies.616 Table 17 provides an overview of 

different sources reporting annual hate crime incidents. The data show that, for the DCJS data 

sources, hate crimes were rising in 2019 and dropped to 488 in 2020 and increased to 773 in 2021.

Table 17 New York Hate Crime Sources, 2018-2021

DCJS Open Data Portal DCJS Annual Report FBI CDE

2018 527 525 523

612 New York State, “New York State Anti-Hate Crime Resource Guide,” https://www.ny.gov/we-are-one-newyork/new-york-state-law-enforcement-hate-crimes-resource-guide (accessed Dec. 2, 2022). 

613 New York State Division of Criminal Justice Services, “Annual Reports and Publications,” 

https://www.criminaljustice.ny.gov/crimnet/pubs.htm (accessed Jan. 3, 2023) (calculations made by Commission 

staff).

614 New York City Police Department, “Hate Crime/Bias Incidents,” https://www.nyc.gov/site/nypd/services/lawenforcement/hate-crimes.page (accessed Dec. 8, 2022).

615 See supra notes 434-444.

616 Federal Bureau of Investigation, “Crime Data Explorer,” 

https://cde.ucr.cjis.gov/LATEST/webapp/#/pages/explorer/crime/hate-crime.
100 The Federal Response to Anti-Asian Racism in the United States

2019 623 619 612

2020 488 488 463

2021 773 773 62

Source: New York State Division of Criminal Justice Services, “Hate Crime in New York State 2018 Annual 

Report,” https://www.criminaljustice.ny.gov/crimnet/ojsa/2018.Domestic.Homicide.Report.pdf; New York State 

Division of Criminal Justice Services, “Hate Crime in New York State 2019 Annual Report,” 

https://www.criminaljustice.ny.gov/crimnet/ojsa/FINAL%202019%20Domestic%20Homicide%20Report.pdf; New 

York State Division of Criminal Justice Services, “Hate Crime in New York State 2020 Annual Report,” 

https://www.criminaljustice.ny.gov/crimnet/ojsa/FINAL2020-Domestic-Homicide-Report12-21.pdf; New York 

State Division of Criminal Justice Services, “Hate Crime in New York State 2021 Annual Report,”

https://www.criminaljustice.ny.gov/crimnet/ojsa/hate-crime-in-nys-2021-annual-report.pdf Federal Bureau of 

Investigation, “Crime Data Explorer,” https://crime-data-explorer.app.cloud.gov/pages/home (as of Jan. 5, 2023); 

New York State, “Hate Crimes by County and Bias Type: Beginning 2010, https://data.ny.gov/Public-Safety/HateCrimes-by-County-and-Bias-Type-Beginning-2010/6xda-q7ev. 

For the purpose of this report, the analysis focuses on the data available in the DCJS Open Data 

Portal due to it providing the most recently updated data available. Table 18 below provides the 

proportion of hate crime incidents in New York that were reported as anti-Asian for the years with 

available data. The number of anti-Asian incidents went from five in 2019, to 31 in 2020, to 140 

in 2021. The proportion of anti-Asian incidents increased from less than one percent of incidents 

in 2019, to more than six percent in 2020, to more than 18 percent in 2021.

Table 18 New York Anti-Asian Hate Crimes, 2018-2021

Incidents # Anti-Asian Incidents % Anti-Asian Incidents

2018 527 8 1.52%

2019 623 5 0.80%

2020 488 31 6.35%

2021 773 140 18.11%

Source: New York State, “Hate Crimes by County and Bias Type: Beginning 2010, https://data.ny.gov/PublicSafety/Hate-Crimes-by-County-and-Bias-Type-Beginning-2010/6xda-q7ev (accessed Feb. 15, 2023).

Across the state, there has been a clear uptick in anti-Asian hate crime incidents from 2019 through 

2021. New York saw five anti-Asian hate crimes in 2019, followed by 31 in 2020, which according 

to New York State’s Department of Criminal Justice Services was the highest number reported 
Local Level Responses to Anti-Asian Hate Crimes 101

since reliable and complete hate crime reporting began in 2010.617 However, 2021 saw an even 

larger increase, with 140 anti-Asian hate crimes.618 For each of the years with data provided at the 

state level, most incidents were crimes against persons as opposed to property crimes (see Table 

19). The New York Division of Criminal Justice does not collect hate crime data regarding suspect 

race or ethnicity.

Table 19 New York Anti-Asian Hate Crime Types, 2018-2021

Crimes Against Persons Property Crimes Total

2018 6 (75.0%) 2 (25.0%) 8

2019 4 (80.0%) 1 (20.0%) 5

2020 23 (74.2%) 8 (25.8%) 31

2021 120 (85.7%) 20 (14.3%) 140

Source: New York State, “Hate Crimes by County and Bias Type: Beginning 2010, https://data.ny.gov/PublicSafety/Hate-Crimes-by-County-and-Bias-Type-Beginning-2010/6xda-q7ev (accessed Feb, 9, 2023).

New York City

Similar to San Francisco, data show that the number of anti-Asian hate crimes were increasing in 

New York City through 2020 and 2021. For instance, The Manhattan Institute analyzed hate crime 

offenses and rates by borough from 2019-2021 and found the highest rates to be in Manhattan 

(9.55 per 100,000 residents) and Brooklyn (5.79 per 100,000). Some of the disparity is due to 

population numbers more generally, while also a representation of victims: “[r]ising hate crime in 

Manhattan in 2020 and 2021, meanwhile, reflects increased targeting of both Jews and Asians—

the latter make up 13% of the borough.”619 Similarly, it was reported in December 2021 that 

incidents targeting Asian residents rose by 361 percent from the previous year, from 28 in 2020 to 

129.620 Further, in the first five months of 2021, New York City witnessed 42 anti-Asian hate crime 

incidents, which represented a 223 percent increase from the same period in 2020.621

617 New York State Division of Criminal Justice Services, “Hate Crime in New York State 2020 Annual Report,” 

Sept. 2021, https://www.criminaljustice.ny.gov/crimnet/ojsa/FINAL2020-Domestic-Homicide-Report12-21.pdf; 

Personal correspondence with New York Division of Criminal Justice Services, Mar. 21, 2023.

618 New York State Division of Criminal Justice Services, “Hate Crime in New York State 2021 Annual Report, 

https://www.criminaljustice.ny.gov/crimnet/ojsa/hate-crime-in-nys-2021-annual-report.pdf.

619 Charles F. Lehman, “Understanding and Reducing Hate Crimes in New York City,” Manhattan Institute, Mar. 

2022, https://media4.manhattan-institute.org/sites/default/files/lehman-understanding-reducing-hate-crimes-nyc.pdf.

620 Kimmy Yam, “NYPD reports 361 percent increase in anti-Asian hate crimes since last year,” NBC News, Dec. 

10, 2021, https://www.nbcnews.com/news/asian-america/nypd-reports-361-percent-increase-anti-asian-hate-crimeslast-year-rcna8427. 

621 Zoe Christen Jones, “NYPD Asian Hate Crimes Task Force chief says attacks are “absolutely not new,”” CBS 

News, May 13, 2021, https://www.cbsnews.com/news/asian-hate-crimes-nypd-not-new/. 
102 The Federal Response to Anti-Asian Racism in the United States

Russell Jeung, co-founder of Stop AAPI Hate, explained that these increases could be due to 

several factors such as an increased awareness about reporting and do not necessarily reflect the 

extent to which Asian communities are experiencing racism. Jeung stated that this uptick is 

“consistent with the general surge in racism against Asian Americans, first of all. It’s consistent 

with the increase in crimes during the epidemic. And then thirdly, reflective of the Asian American 

community more likely to report.”622

A survey of over 300 Asian business owners in New York found that over half of businesses (55 

percent of respondents) lost revenue of 75 percent or more during 2020, and 45 percent had to shut 

down entirely.623 Sixty-one percent of respondents expressed concern about anti-Asian attacks on 

themselves, staff, or their businesses.624 A Michelin-starred restaurant was vandalized with antiAsian graffiti in April 2020.625 The owner ended up temporarily closing the restaurant as opposed 

to staying open for deliveries because his head chef and employees did not feel safe going into 

work or doing deliveries.626

For definitional purposes, it is important to highlight that the NYPD uses the same definition for 

hate crimes and bias incidents: “A bias incident is any offense or unlawful act that is motivated in 

whole or substantial part by a person’s, a group’s or a place’s identification with a particular race, 

color, religion, ethnicity, gender, age, disability, ancestry, national origin, or sexual orientation 

(including gay, lesbian, bi-sexual, and transgender) as determined by the commanding officer of 

the Hate Crime Task Force.”627 Table 20 below provides the number of hate crimes reported to the 

New York City Police Department (NYPD). The number of anti-Asian hate crimes in the city was 

one in 2019, rose to 27 in 2020, and rose again to 131 in 2021. 

Table 20 New York City Anti-Asian Hate Crimes, 2018-2021

Complaints # Anti-Asian Complaints % Anti-Asian 

Complaints

2018 353 5 1.4%

622 Kimmy Yam, “NYPD reports 361 percent increase in anti-Asian hate crimes since last year,” NBC News, Dec. 

10, 2021, https://www.nbcnews.com/news/asian-america/nypd-reports-361-percent-increase-anti-asian-hate-crimeslast-year-rcna8427. 

623 Asian American Federation, “Small Business, Big Losses: The Impact of the Covid Crises on Asian Small 

Business in New York City,” 2021, https://www.aafederation.org/wpcontent/uploads/2021/05/Small_Biz_Survey.pdf. 

624 Ibid.

625 Anneta Konstantinides, “An NYC Michelin-starred restaurant was vandalized with racist graffiti as attacks 

against Asian-American workers are on the rise,” Insider, Apr. 17, 2020, https://www.insider.com/racist-graffitinew-york-city-restaurant-during-coronavirus-2020-4.

626 Ibid. 

627 New York Police Department, “Hate Crimes/Bias Incidents,” https://www.nyc.gov/site/nypd/services/lawenforcement/hate-crimes.page. 
Local Level Responses to Anti-Asian Hate Crimes 103

2019 420 1 0.2%

2020 265 27 10.2%

2021 524 131 25.0%

Source: New York City Police Department, “Hate Crimes Report,” https://www.nyc.gov/site/nypd/stats/reportsanalysis/hate-crimes.page (accessed Dec. 14, 2022).

Jessie Essig, Chief of Detectives for the NYPD Hate Crime Review Panel (a civilian group that 

aids law enforcement in identifying possible hate crimes), stated that anti-Asian incidents 

contributed to New York City’s 100 percent overall increase in hate crimes in 2021. Other hate 

crimes, such as those based on sexual orientation, rose from 29 to 85 cases, and incidents of antiSemitism also rose from 121 to 183 in 2021.628

The NYPD Hate Crimes Report page does not provide information regarding whether incidents 

were crimes against persons or crimes against properties broken out by bias, but the NYPD 

provides an interactive dashboard of confirmed incidents starting in January 2019, and these 

numbers only differ very slightly from the NYPD Hate Crimes Reports. Table 21 provides a 

breakdown of anti-Asian hate crimes by type of crime committed. In 2020 and 2021, the majority 

(53 percent and 65 percent, respectively) of anti-Asian hate crimes in New York City were 

misdemeanors. In 2022, the majority (52 percent) were felonies.

Table 21 New York City Anti-Asian Hate Crime Types, 2018-2022

Felonies Misdemeanors Violations Total

2018 n/a n/a n/a n/a

2019 1 (100%) 0 0 1

2020 12 (42.86%) 15 (53.57%) 1 (3.57%) 28

2021 46 (34.59%) 86 (64.66%) 1 (0.75%) 133

2022 320 (52.7%) 282 (46.4%) 4 (0.6%) 606

Source: NYPD Hate Crimes Dashboard,

https://app.powerbigov.us/view?r=eyJrIjoiYjg1NWI3YjgtYzkzOS00Nzc0LTkwMDAtNTgzM2I2M2JmYWE1Iiwid

CI6IjJiOWY1N2ViLTc4ZDEtNDZmYi1iZTgzLWEyYWZkZDdjNjA0MyJ9 (accessed Feb. 9, 2023).

628 Kimmy Yam, “NYPD reports 361 percent increase in anti-Asian hate crimes since last year,” NBC News, Dec. 

10, 2021, https://www.nbcnews.com/news/asian-america/nypd-reports-361-percent-increase-anti-asian-hate-crimeslast-year-rcna8427. 
104 The Federal Response to Anti-Asian Racism in the United States

Regarding perpetrators of anti-Asian hate crimes in New York City, the majority of suspects were 

White until 2020, when the majority of arrestees were Black and Latino. Table 22 provides a 

breakdown of suspect race and ethnicity across the study years. 

Table 22 New York City Anti-Asian Hate Crime Suspects, 2018-2021

White Black

White 

Hispanic

Black 

Hispanic

Asian/Pacific 

Islander Unknown Total

2018 2 0 0 0 0 0 2

2019 3 0 0 0 0 0 3

2020 2 11 5 2 0 0 20

2021 7 31 15 0 5 1 59

Source: New York City Police Department, “Hate Crimes Report,” https://www.nyc.gov/site/nypd/stats/reportsanalysis/hate-crimes.page (accessed Dec. 14, 2022).

Like San Francisco, the rise in anti-Asian hate crimes in New York City has been depicted in 

numerous news stories over the past few years. In March 2021, an apartment building surveillance 

video showed a 65-year-old woman being physically and verbally attacked, with building staff 

failing to intervene.629 Video showed a man kicking the woman to the ground, stomping on her 

head and upper body several times, and casually walking away as she remained on the sidewalk. 

Police have said that he made “anti-Asian statements” during the assault, including reportedly 

telling her that “you don’t belong here.”630 The suspect was arrested and charged with felony 

assault as a hate crime.631

In April 2021, Yao Pan Ma, a 62-year-old Asian man was bashed in the head in an unprovoked 

attack in East Harlem, and died from his injuries eight months later.632 Ma was collecting cans on 

a street corner on April 23 last year when Jarrod Powell, 50, allegedly approached him from 

behind, struck him in the back and then kicked him in the head multiple times as Ma laid on 

the ground. 633 Powell was arrested the following week and initially charged with attempted 

murder and two hate crime assault charges.634In January 2023, Powell pled guilty to a hate629 Rachel Treisman, “Suspect Arrested On Hate Crime Charges Over Attack On Asian Woman In Manhattan,” 

NPR, Mar. 31, 2021, https://www.npr.org/2021/03/31/983002295/suspect-arrested-on-hate-crime-charges-overattack-on-asian-woman-in-manhattan. 

630 Ibid.

631 Rachel Treisman, “Suspect Arrested On Hate Crime Charges Over Attack On Asian Woman In Manhattan,” 

NPR, Mar. 31, 2021, https://www.npr.org/2021/03/31/983002295/suspect-arrested-on-hate-crime-charges-overattack-on-asian-woman-in-manhattan.

632 Artemis Moshtaghian, “An Asian man injured in an unprovoked attack in New York last April has died, officials 

say,” CNN, Jan. 9, 2022, https://www.cnn.com/2022/01/09/us/asian-man-new-york-attack-death/index.html. 

633 Ibid.

634 Artemis Moshtaghian, “An Asian man injured in an unprovoked attack in New York last April has died, officials 

say,” CNN, Jan. 9, 2022, https://www.cnn.com/2022/01/09/us/asian-man-new-york-attack-death/index.html.
Local Level Responses to Anti-Asian Hate Crimes 105

crime manslaughter charge, and in the plea he acknowledged that he had targeted Ma because he 

was Asian.635

In January 2022, another violent incident in New York City occurred that gained national attention 

and “jolted Asian Americans across the United States.” 636 Michelle Go, a 40-year-old Asian 

American woman was pushed to her death in front of a subway train by a homeless man.637 While 

the incident was not investigated as a hate crime, it “prompted a kind of collective grief in a 

community affected by an increase in anti-Asian violence in recent years.”638 Charles Jung, an 

attorney and executive director of the California Asian Pacific American Bar Association, said it 

might be hard to say that Go’s death met the legal burden of proof for a hate crime but “it doesn’t 

mean it’s not real” that it “arose within a climate of anti-Asian scapegoating, fear of racism” and 

numerous other violent attacks.639

Sung Yeon Choimorrow, Executive Director of the National Asian Pacific American Women’s 

Forum, explained “whether it was a hate crime or not, the reality is, Asian Americans, especially 

Asian American women, every time we see an incident like this, our anxiety goes up. Regardless 

of what the correlation is, we see ourselves in these pictures.” 640 The Asian American Bar 

Association of New York analyzed 233 anti-Asian incidents in New York City over the first three 

quarters of 2021 and found that more than half (55 percent) of the victims were female, while 82 

percent of the perpetrators were male.641

635 Associated Press, “NYC Man Pleads Guilty in Brutal Hate Crime Stomping Death of Chinese Immigrant,” NBC 

New York, Jan. 12, 2023, https://www.nbcnewyork.com/news/local/crime-and-courts/nyc-man-pleads-guilty-inbrutal-hate-crime-stomping-death-of-chinese-immigrant/4045308/.

636 Stella Chan and Augie Martin, “Anti-Asian hate crimes increased 567% in San Francisco as lawsuit accuses DA 

of not doing enough,” CNN, Jan. 27, 2022, https://www.cnn.com/2022/01/27/us/anti-asian-hate-crimes-sanfrancisco-lawsuit/index.html.

637 Myles Miller, “Homeless Man Charged With Murder in Death of NYC Woman Pushed in Front of Train,” NBC 

New York, Jan. 16, 2022, https://www.nbcnewyork.com/news/local/crime-and-courts/homeless-man-charged-withmurder-in-death-of-nyc-woman-pushed-in-front-of-train/3498350/. 

638 Nicole Chavez, “Michelle Go’s death hasn’t been labeled a hate crime but it adds to the fear that Asian 

Americans feel,” CNN, Jan. 20, 2022, https://www.cnn.com/2022/01/20/us/asian-americans-attacks-michelle-alyssago/index.html.

639 Nicole Chavez, “Michelle Go’s death hasn’t been labeled a hate crime but it adds to the fear that Asian 

Americans feel,” CNN, Jan. 20, 2022, https://www.cnn.com/2022/01/20/us/asian-americans-attacks-michelle-alyssago/index.html.

640 Kimmy Yam, “NYC subway station death of Michelle Go leaves Asian Americans reeling,” NBC News, Jan. 19, 

2022, https://www.nbcnews.com/news/asian-america/nyc-subway-station-death-michelle-go-leaves-asianamericans-reeling-rcna12650.

641 Asian American Bar Association of New York, Endless Tide: The Continuing Struggle to Overcome Anti-Asian 

Hate in New York, May 2022, 

https://cdn.ymaws.com/www.aabany.org/resource/resmgr/aavtf/Endless_Tide_Report_2022_FIN.pdf.
106 The Federal Response to Anti-Asian Racism in the United States

Similarly, Jo-Ann Yoo, Executive Director of the Asian American Federation stated that Asian 

communities were already on “high alert since the start of the pandemic, when many had been 

blamed or scapegoated for the virus.”642 Amanda Nguyen, CEO of the civil rights nonprofit 

Rise, said that the “intersection of race and gender is one that we cannot overlook.... 

Unfortunately, these acts of violence that have been targeted toward the Asian American 

community, especially women, have existed pre-COVID. The pandemic absolutely exacerbated 

these issues, especially when we had leaders saying things like ‘China virus’ or ‘China flu.’”643

The following month Christina Yuna Lee was stabbed more than 40 times in her Chinatown 

apartment by a man that followed her into her home,644 and a “Stop Asian Hate” sign at her 

memorial was vandalized.645 The landlord of Lee’s building explained “I had to clean up all the 

shattered glass. I try to put the sign back together as best as I can.... They try to desecrate her as 

much as they could and we as a community are beyond fed up, we are beyond angry and we are 

tired of being attacked.”646 He did not report the vandalism to the cops, questioning the point in 

doing so: “It’s a sign of how things are in the Asian community. We don’t report these things 

anymore.”647 In fact, the lack of anti-Asian hate crime prosecutions and convictions likely only 

add to the perception that reporting may not be worth the effort for the victims.648

The Commission also heard testimony from Jo-Ann Yoo, executive director of the Asian American 

Federation, describing a 90-year old grandmother out for a walk in a Brooklyn neighborhood being 

set on fire by two teenagers, and being too afraid to tell even her own family about it.649

642 Kimmy Yam, “NYC subway station death of Michelle Go leaves Asian Americans reeling,” NBC News, Jan. 19, 

2022, https://www.nbcnews.com/news/asian-america/nyc-subway-station-death-michelle-go-leaves-asianamericans-reeling-rcna12650.

643 James Bikales, “Woman charged with hate crimes after anti-Asian attack, authorities say,” The Washington Post, 

Jun. 19, 2022, https://www.washingtonpost.com/nation/2022/06/19/pepper-spray-hate-crime-charges/. 

644 Marlene Lenthang, “Woman stabbed over 40 times after she was followed into her NYC apartment, official 

says,” NBC News, Feb. 15, 2022, https://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/woman-stabbed-40-was-followed-nycapartment-official-says-rcna16295.

645 Georgett Roberts and Gabrielle Fonrouge, “Memorial for NYC stabbing victim Christina Yuna Lee vandalized,” 

New York Post, Feb. 16, 2022, https://nypost.com/2022/02/16/memorial-outside-of-christina-yuna-lees-apartmentvandalized/.

646 Ibid.

647 Georgett Roberts and Gabrielle Fonrouge, “Memorial for NYC stabbing victim Christina Yuna Lee vandalized,” 

New York Post, Feb. 16, 2022, https://nypost.com/2022/02/16/memorial-outside-of-christina-yuna-lees-apartmentvandalized/.

648 See infra note 831.

649 Jo-Ann Yoo, Executive Director, Asian American Federation, testimony, The Federal Response to Anti-Asian 

Racism in the United States Briefing Before the U.S. Comm’n on Civil Rights, Washington, DC, Mar. 4, 2023, 

transcript, p. 25 (hereinafter cited as Anti-Asian Racism Briefing).
Local Level Responses to Anti-Asian Hate Crimes 107

Yoo continued to provide devastating stories about community members being violently attacked, 

including a man that was slashed from ear to ear on his way to work, requiring over 100 stitches.650

A woman and her son were beaten in their own neighborhood, with the mother punched until 

losing consciousness and her son, a Marine, sustaining skull fractures trying to protect 

his mother.651

Other incidents continue to occur and stir tensions among Asian communities in New York. For 

instance, a Vietnamese grandmother was punched in the face by an assailant, and the criminal 

complaint stated: “[t]he defendant stated (he) punched Hoa Nguyen (because he) doesn’t like how 

Chinese people look; thinks Chinese people look like measles; and doesn’t like Chinese people 

looking at (him).”652 In May 2021, a 65-year old woman was kicked down a flight of stairs at a 

subway station.653 In April 2022 a man that had allegedly assaulted seven Asian women over a 

three hour period was indicted on multiple hate crime charges. 654 Six victims were injured, 

including bleeding cuts and bruises to their faces, and one victim was knocked unconscious and 

treated for a concussion. The victims ranged in age from 19 to 57, and at least two were treated at 

a hospital.655 District Attorney Alvin Bragg said in a statement: 

As alleged, within just three hours, Steven Zajonc selectively ambushed seven Asian 

women in separate assaults, some of which he struck from behind – for no other reason 

than their perceived race. This indictment is a result of our collaboration with the NYPD’s 

Hate Crimes Task Force, and critically, assistance from the brave witnesses and victims 

who came forward to stand up against hate.656

In another incident, a South Korean diplomat was punched in the face during an unprovoked attack 

while walking down Fifth Avenue.657 A woman was assaulted by a man on the subway, spitting 

on her and calling her a “carrier.”658 When she filed a police report, she said the detective refused 

twice to include the words said to her in the report, and that she was “taking a situation and blowing 

650 Yoo testimony, Anti-Asian Racism Briefing, pp. 25-26.

651 Ibid., 26.

652 CeFaan Kim, “Exclusive: Asian grandmother sucker-punched while walking in Brooklyn,” ABC7 New York, Jan. 

27, 2022, https://abc7ny.com/hate-crime-asian-woman-attacked-brooklyn-sucker-punch/11515982/. 

653 Checkey Beckford, “Serial Offender Arrested for Kicking Victim Down Subway Stairs in Random NYC Attack,” 

NBC New York, Jun. 2, 2021, https://www.nbcnewyork.com/news/local/crime-and-courts/serial-offender-arrestedfor-kicking-victim-down-midtown-subway-station-stairs-unprovoked/3085412/. 

654 Rob Frehse, “New York man indicted on multiple hate crime charges in attacks on 7 Asian women,” CNN, Apr. 

4, 2022, https://www.cnn.com/2022/04/04/us/new-york-asian-women-attacks-charges/index.html. 

655 Ibid.

656 Rob Frehse, “New York man indicted on multiple hate crime charges in attacks on 7 Asian women,” CNN, Apr. 

4, 2022, https://www.cnn.com/2022/04/04/us/new-york-asian-women-attacks-charges/index.html.

657 Brie Stimson, “South Korean diplomat punched in unprovoked attack in New York City: police,” Fox News, Feb. 

10, 2022, https://www.foxnews.com/us/south-korean-diplomat-punched-unprovoked-attack-new-york-city-police. 

658 CeFaan Kim, “NYPD shake-up: Head of Hate Crimes unit reassigned amid complaints from community 

activists,” ABC7 New York, Feb. 16, 2022, https://abc7ny.com/nypd-hate-crimes-special-victimsreplacement/11571260/. 
108 The Federal Response to Anti-Asian Racism in the United States

it out of proportion.”659 In January 2023, an Asian man was approached by a man that “made 

derogatory anti-Asian statements and threatened to kill him” and then struck him in the head with 

an umbrella.660 Also in January 2021, a New York man was arrested for allegedly pushing a 

woman to the ground and making an anti-Asian statement before fleeing the scene on New Year’s 

Eve of 2022.661 He faces felony charges of third-degree assault as a hate crime and second-degree 

aggravated harassment, according to the District Attorney’s Office.662

Jo-Ann Yoo testified that she has talked to “countless Asian New Yorkers who have had to steel 

themselves for potential harassment or violence, sometimes planning their days to better avoid 

interactions.” 663 Stop AAPI Hate commissioned a nationally representative survey of Asian 

Americans and Pacific Islanders and found that 45 percent indicated discrimination negatively 

changed their sense of belonging, and 31 percent stated that discrimination negatively changed 

their behavior, such as switching schools, jobs, or where they shop.664 Additionally, more than half 

(52 percent) of those experiencing discrimination, but did not report it, thought that reporting 

would not make a difference.665 Some opt not to report incidents to the police because they feel 

that their concerns would not be properly addressed due to lack of hate crime charges, 

prosecutions, and convictions of these incidents.666

Texas

As discussed in Chapter 1, Texas was one of the fifteen states that adopted Alien Land Laws that 

barred Asian immigrants from owning land and property in the state. 667 These laws were 

subsequently ruled to be unconstitutional in 1948.668

659 CeFaan Kim, “NYPD shake-up: Head of Hate Crimes unit reassigned amid complaints from community 

activists,” ABC7 New York, Feb. 16, 2022, https://abc7ny.com/nypd-hate-crimes-special-victimsreplacement/11571260/.

660 Tina Moore, “Racist spews hate at Asian man during random umbrella attack in NYC,” Jan. 8, 2023, 

https://nypost.com/2023/01/08/racist-spews-hate-at-asian-man-during-random-umbrella-attack-in-nyc/. 

661 Celina Tebor, “New York man arrested, charged with assault and aggravated harassment in alleged New Year’s 

Eve anti-Asian attack,” CNN, Jan. 17, 2023, https://www.cnn.com/2023/01/17/us/new-york-anti-asianattack/index.html. 

662 Celina Tebor, “New York man arrested, charged with assault and aggravated harassment in alleged New Year’s 

Eve anti-Asian attack,” CNN, Jan. 17, 2023, https://www.cnn.com/2023/01/17/us/new-york-anti-asianattack/index.html.

663 Kimmy Yam, “NYC subway station death of Michelle Go leaves Asian Americans reeling,” NBC News, Jan. 19, 

2022, https://www.nbcnews.com/news/asian-america/nyc-subway-station-death-michelle-go-leaves-asianamericans-reeling-rcna12650. 

664 Stop AAPI Hate, Righting Wrongs: How Civil Rights Can Protect Asian Americans & Pacific Islanders Against 

Racism, May 2023, https://stopaapihate.org/wp-content/uploads/2023/05/23-SAH-CivilRightsReport-1.pdf. 

665 Ibid.

666 See infra notes 831-832.833

667 See supra notes 220-224 (discussing Alien Land Laws).

668 Ibid.
Local Level Responses to Anti-Asian Hate Crimes 109

Despite the 1948 U.S. Supreme Court ruling, in November 2022, Texas Senator Lois Kolkhorst 

proposed a bill that would ban citizens, government, and entities from China, Iran, North Korea, 

and Russia from purchasing land in Texas.669 Specifically, the bill would prohibit the purchase or 

acquisition of property in Texas by a “government entity” and “a company or other entity that is

headquartered [] or directly or indirectly held or controlled by the government” of the four 

countries.670 Kolkhort stated that her bill was prompted due to concerns over “growing ownership” 

of foreign entities buying up Texas land. She stated: 

The time to address adversarial countries acquiring land is before it becomes widespread, 

not after they already control substantial amounts of Texas. [The bill] will make crystal 

clear that the prohibitions do not apply to United States citizens and lawful permanent 

residents.671

Opponents to the bill worried that it would “further sow anti-Asian sentiment that has skyrocketed 

in recent years and will disenfranchise immigrants, business owners, and green-card holders while 

doing little to address any national security concerns.”672 Texas Representative Gene Wu stated 

that the bill was reminiscent anti-Chinese legislation such as the Chinese Exclusionary Act of 

1882.673 According to a statement by the Houston chapter of the Council on American-Islamic 

Relations, “[i]f signed into law, this bill would make anti-Asian hate state policy. It would violate 

the fundamental rights of not only citizens of other countries regardless of their relationship to 

their governments, but also Green Card holders and possibly dual citizens.”674

In March 2023, however, Senator Kolkhorst amended the proposed legislation to “ensure that 

property prohibitions in the bill applied only to foreign governments – not individuals seeking to 

buy homes... [nor] apply to those fleeing the tyranny of those governments who seek freedom in 

Texas.”675 The Senator stated that these changes came after citizens raised concerns that the bill 

may be possibly discriminatory against individuals from North Korea, Iran, Russia, or China.676

 

The 2020 Census reports that Texas has a total population of 29,145,505, with an Asian population 

of 1,585,480 (5.4 percent).677 Texas also had the second highest numerical growth in its Asian 

669 S.B. 147, 88th Leg., Reg Sess. (Tex. 2022), https://capitol.texas.gov/tlodocs/88R/billtext/html/SB00147I.htm.

670 Id.

671 Robert Downen, “Bill to ban Chinese citizens and government from buying Texas land gains stem among 

Republicans,” The Texas Tribune, Jan. 20, 2023, https://www.texastribune.org/2023/01/20/texas-legislature-chinaland-ownership/.

672 Ibid.

673 Ibid.

674 Ibid.

675 Sakshi Venkatraman, “Texas bill will no longer aim to ban Chinese citizens from buying homes, state senator 

says,” NBC News, Mar. 1, 2023, https://www.nbcnews.com/news/asian-america/texas-bill-will-no-longer-aim-banchinese-citizens-buying-homes-state-rcna72887.

676 Ibid.

677 U.S. Census Bureau, “Texas,” https://data.census.gov/profile?g=040XX00US48 (accessed May 9, 2023).
110 The Federal Response to Anti-Asian Racism in the United States

populations between 2019 and 2020 (following California), growing by over 800 people.678 The 

Houston total population in 2020 was 2,304,580, and the Asian population was 167,189 

(7.2 percent).679

Hate Crimes Defined and Reported

The Texas Hate Crimes Act defines hate crimes as crimes that are motivated by prejudice, hatred, 

or advocacy of violence including, but not limited to, incidents for which statistics are or were kept 

under Public Law 101-275 (the Federal Hate Crimes Statistics Act). 680 Bias or prejudice 

enhancements can be sought where the defendant selected a person or their property to victimize 

based on the defendant’s bias against “a group identified by race, color, disability, religion, 

national origin or ancestry, age, gender, or sexual preference, or by status as a peace officer or 

judge.”681 The Code of Criminal Procedure defines “sexual preference” to include “a preference 

for heterosexuality, homosexuality, or bisexuality.”682 Thus, compared to federally protected bias 

categories, Texas includes all with the exception of gender identity.683

The Houston Police Department (HPD) defines a hate crime as “any crime that is committed 

against a person or property that is motivated, in whole or in part, by an offender’s bias against a 

race, religion, disability, sexual orientation, ethnicity, gender, or gender identity.”684 HPD 

views all hate crimes as major, and possibly organized, acts, which are given the highest 

investigation priority possible to ensure rapid apprehension of all persons involved. HPD’s 

Criminal Intelligence Division investigates all reported hate crimes and has the ultimate 

responsibility for determining whether a crime is reported to federal or state record keeping 

agencies as a hate crime.685

Because a hate crime in Texas is not a separate offense but a penalty enhancement, the HPD 

website specifies that “[r]egardless of whether someone is ultimately charged with a ‘bias 

motivated’ crime, the police department will investigate the case and any suspect or suspects who 

are developed from the investigation may still face prosecution for the underlying crime.”686

678 Abby Budiman and Neil G. Ruiz, “Asian Americans are the fastest-growing racial or ethnic group in the U.S.,” 

Pew Research Center, Apr. 9, 2021, https://www.pewresearch.org/short-reads/2021/04/09/asian-americans-are-thefastest-growing-racial-or-ethnic-group-in-the-u-s/. 

679 U.S. Census Bureau, “Houston city; Texas,” https://data.census.gov/profile?g=160XX00US4835000 (accessed 

May 9, 2023).

680 Tx. Govt. § 411.046(a) (West, 1999).

681 Tx. Crim. Pro. Art. 42.014(a) (West, 2021).

682 Id. at 42.014(c).

683 U.S. Department of Justice, “Federal Laws and Statutes,” https://www.justice.gov/hatecrimes/laws-and-policies

(accessed Jan. 20, 2023).

684 Houston Police Department, “Hate Crime,” http://www.houstontx.gov/police/hatecrime/ (accessed Dec. 29, 

2022).

685 Ibid. 

686 Ibid.
Local Level Responses to Anti-Asian Hate Crimes 111

Hate Crimes, 2018-2021

Similar to both California and New York, annual hate crime numbers for Texas also vary across 

different databases. For instance, the FBI’s CDE reports 542 incidents for 2021, while the Texas 

Department of Public Safety (DPS) provides differing numbers on its online summary of hate 

crimes and its annual crime reports. Unlike California and New York, Texas agencies did not see 

a drop in agencies reporting to the FBI in 2021 (in 2020, 1,073 of the 1,158 agencies in the state 

provided data and in 2021, 1,012 provided data).687 According to DOJ, 1,007 Texas agencies 

provided data in the original 2021 report,688 while the Texas DPS report for 2021 indicates that 

1,248 agencies submitted data,689 further illustrating the incongruent reporting of data between 

different datasets. Table 23 provides an overview of different sources reporting annual hate crime 

incidents. With the exception of the Department of Public Safety’s Annual Crime Report, all 

sources indicate an increase in hate crimes from 2020 to 2021. The state’s online data portal is the 

most frequently updated and shows a steady increase in hate crimes from 2019 with 397, to 2020 

with 471, to 2021 with 530.

Table 23 Texas Hate Crime Sources, 2018-2021

FBI CDE TX Dep’t of Public Safety: 

Annual Crime Report

TX Dep’t of Public Safety: Crime in 

Texas Online

2018 405 380 380

2019 408 407 397

2020 406 550 471

2021 542 508 530

Source: Federal Bureau of Investigation, “Crime Data Explorer,” https://crime-dataexplorer.app.cloud.gov/pages/home (as of Dec. 31, 2022); Texas Department of Public Safety, Crime in Texas 

Annual Reports, https://www.dps.texas.gov/section/crime-records/crime-texas; Texas Department of Public Safety, 

Summary of Hate Crime Detail for Each ORI – All Agencies, https://txucr.nibrs.com/Report/HateCrime. 

One of the most notable differences between Texas and the preceding states described in this report 

is that Texas reports much lower numbers of hate crime incidents than New York and California. 

Reasons for the discrepancy in Texas could include misclassification or crimes going unreported 

687 Federal Bureau of Investigation, “Crime Data Explorer,” 

https://cde.ucr.cjis.gov/LATEST/webapp/#/pages/explorer/crime/hate-crime; see also supra notes 434-444 (data 

transition to NIBRS and low reporting numbers).

688 U.S. Department of Justice, Response to Affected Agency Review, Jun. 22, 2023 [on file].

689 Texas Department of Public Safety, Crime in Texas Annual Reports, https://www.dps.texas.gov/section/crimerecords/crime-texas.
112 The Federal Response to Anti-Asian Racism in the United States

to law enforcement.690 Stop AAPI Hate collected self-reported incidents on anti-Asian hate in 

Texas from March 19, 2020 through July 1, 2020, and received 63 incident reports in the time 

frame.691 While many of these reports likely would not rise to the definition of a hate crime (e.g., 

such as verbal harassment or workplace discrimination), 14 of these incidents were reported to 

involve physical assault.692 Additionally, the large majority of respondents were not of Chinese 

descent, reflecting that “broader segments of the Asian American community are being racially 

profiled.”693 Additionally, Stop AAPI Hate analyzed almost 3,800 incidents of anti-Asian hate 

occurring between March 2020 and February 2021 and found that Texas had 20 percent of the 

incidents that were physical assaults.694

Like the varying numbers of all hate crimes across the state, the number of anti-Asian incidents 

also varies across sources; however, these discrepancies do not drastically change the proportion 

of anti-Asian hate crimes depicted. Table 24 below provides the number of hate crime incidents, 

and the proportion of those incidents that were anti-Asian for the years with available data using 

the FBI CDE as well as the Texas Department of Public Safety Data. The table below shows that 

the number of incidents increased slightly each year from 2019 through 2021 across both data 

sources. According to the Texas Department of Public Safety’s online data portal, the state

experienced four anti-Asian events in 2019, 11 in 2020, and 13 in 2021.

690 See Pezzella, F. S., Fetzer, M. D., and Keller, T. (2019). The Dark Figure of Hate Crime 

Underreporting. American Behavioral Scientist, 0(0). https://doi.org/10.1177/0002764218823844; KXXV, “Central 

Texas hate crime numbers are under reported, critics say,” Nov. 14, 2019, https://www.kxxv.com/hometown/centraltexas-hate-crime-numbers-are-under-reported-critics-say; Malini Basu, “FBI Dallas launches new campaign for hate 

crime awareness,” WFAA, Oct. 3, 2022, https://www.wfaa.com/article/news/local/fbi-dallas-launches-newcampaign-hate-crime-awareness/287-5de173d4-f083-404e-b066-68dc842420d6. 

691 Stop AAPI Hate, Report: Anti-Asian American Hate in Texas, Jul. 24, 2020, https://stopaapihate.org/wpcontent/uploads/2021/04/Stop-AAPI-Hate-Report-Texas-200723.pdf. 

692 Stop AAPI Hate, Report: Anti-Asian American Hate in Texas, Jul. 24, 2020, https://stopaapihate.org/wpcontent/uploads/2021/04/Stop-AAPI-Hate-Report-Texas-200723.pdf.

693 Ibid.

694 Tiffany Liou, “Texas ranks 4th in anti-Asian incidents; how to stop the hate,” WFAA, Mar. 23, 2021, 

https://www.wfaa.com/article/news/local/texas/texas-ranks-4th-in-anti-asian-racist-incidents-how-to-stop-the-aapihate/287-6f10e1f8-64c4-4434-8be3-71fca2eb8a3e. 
Local Level Responses to Anti-Asian Hate Crimes 113

Table 24 Texas Anti-Asian Hate Crimes, 2018-2021

FBI CDE data for Texas TX Dep’t of Public Safety: Crime in Texas Online

Incidents

# AntiAsian 

Incidents

% AntiAsian 

Incidents Incidents

# Anti-Asian 

Incidents

% Anti-Asian 

Incidents

2018 405 8 2.0% 380 9 2.4%

2019 408 4 1.0% 397 4 1.0%

2020 406 9 2.2% 471 11 2.3%

2021 542 15 2.8% 530 13 2.5%

Source: Federal Bureau of Investigation, “Crime Data Explorer,” https://crime-dataexplorer.app.cloud.gov/pages/home (as of Dec. 31, 2022); Texas Department of Public Safety, Summary of Hate 

Crime Detail for Each ORI – All Agencies, https://txucr.nibrs.com/Report/HateCrime. 

The Texas Department of Public Safety data does not provide enough data to examine the type of 

event (i.e., assault, intimidation, murder) across bias types, nor does it provide the suspect’s race 

or ethnicity data broken out by bias type. Table 25 below shows a breakdown of crime types among 

anti-Asian hate crimes provided by the FBI Crime Data Explorer as of December 31, 2022. The 

data show that destruction of property and simple assault were the most common crimes in 2018 

and 2019, respectively, and that in 2020 the most prevalent crime was aggravated assault. In 2021, 

the most common incidents involved intimidation, followed by simple assault.

Table 25 Texas Anti-Asian Hate Crime Types, 2018-2021

Intimidation

Simple 

Assault

Destruction/ 

Damage/ 

Vandalism 

of Property

Aggravated 

Assault

Burglary/ 

Breaking 

& 

Entering

False 

Pretenses/ 

Swindle/ 

Confidence 

Game

Weapon 

Law 

Violations Robbery Total

2018 2 2 4 0 0 0 0 1 9

2019 2 5 0 0 0 0 0 0 7

2020 3 3 0 7 0 0 0 0 13

2021 11 6 2 1 1 1 1 0 23

Source: Federal Bureau of Investigation, “Crime Data Explorer,” https://crime-dataexplorer.app.cloud.gov/pages/home (as of Dec. 31, 2022).

Table 26 below provides offender race and ethnicity data among anti-Asian hate crimes provided 

by the FBI Crime Data Explorer, in which the majority of offenders are White or of multiple races.
114 The Federal Response to Anti-Asian Racism in the United States

Table 26 Texas Anti-Asian Hate Crime Suspects, 2018-2021

White Black

Multiple 

Races Asian Hispanic

2018 3 3 0 1 0

2019 2 0 2 0 0

2020 6 2 0 0 1

2021 6 2 3 1 2

Source: Federal Bureau of Investigation, “Crime Data Explorer,” https://crime-dataexplorer.app.cloud.gov/pages/home (as of Dec. 31, 2022).

It is important to note that numbers alone do not explain the heinous nature of these hate crimes 

and the impact these crimes have on individuals and the communities in which they occur. In 

March 2020, a man in Texas violently attacked a father and his young child because he perceived 

the family to be a “threat” because they were “from the country who started spreading that disease 

around.”695 The man also attacked a store clerk who intervened to stop him from further assaulting 

the family; and while being held down on the ground, the attacker yelled at the Asian family, “Get 

out of America!”696 The assailant admitted that he had attempted to kill the six-year-old child he 

attacked, and after pleading guilty to three counts of committing a hate crime, was sentenced to 25 

years in prison on hate crime charges.697 Assistant Attorney General for the Justice Department’s 

Civil Rights Division Kristen Clarke, speaking on the matter, stated that: 

[p]andemic-driven and racially-motivated acts of violence are deplorable crimes, and the 

Justice Department stands ready to use our hate crimes laws to hold perpetrators 

accountable.... Hate crimes targeting Asian Americans have spiked during the pandemic 

and must be confronted. All people deserve to feel safe and secure living in their 

communities, regardless of race, color or national origin.698

The case was investigated by the Midland Texas Police Department and the FBI, and was 

prosecuted by the U.S. Attorney for the Western District of Texas and a trial attorney of the Civil 

Rights Division’s Criminal Section.699 As of the writing of this report, the assailant is still facing 

pending state charges for three counts of attempted capital murder and one count of 

695 U.S. Department of Justice, “Texas Man Sentenced on Hate Crime Charges for Attacking Asian Family,” Aug. 4, 

2022, https://www.justice.gov/opa/pr/texas-man-sentenced-hate-crime-charges-attacking-asian-family. 

696 U.S. Department of Justice, “Texas Man Sentenced on Hate Crime Charges for Attacking Asian Family,” Aug. 4, 

2022, https://www.justice.gov/opa/pr/texas-man-sentenced-hate-crime-charges-attacking-asian-family.

697 Ibid.

698 Ibid.

699 U.S. Department of Justice, “Texas Man Sentenced on Hate Crime Charges for Attacking Asian Family,” Aug. 4, 

2022, https://www.justice.gov/opa/pr/texas-man-sentenced-hate-crime-charges-attacking-asian-family.
Local Level Responses to Anti-Asian Hate Crimes 115

aggravated assault, and according to District Attorney Laura Nodolf, the state can now proceed 

with charges now that his sentencing for the federal charges is complete.700

Houston

Unlike San Francisco and New York City, Houston did not see a noticeable increase in official 

anti-Asian hate crimes during the examined years. Table 27 below provides the number of all hate 

crimes reported across several sources: the FBI’s CDE, the Texas Department of Public Safety 

online portal, and the annual Houston Police Department’s Hate Crimes Report. While the 

numbers differ slightly across sources, none portray significant changes in the number of hate 

crimes reported over the report’s time frame, though all sources did see an increase from 2019 to 

2020, and from 2020 to 2021. According to the Texas Department of Public Safety’s online data 

portal for Houston data, the city saw 24 hate crimes in 2019, 43 in 2020, and 56 in 2021.

Table 27 Houston Hate Crime Sources, 2018-2021

FBI CDE: Houston Police 

Department

TX Dep’t of Public Safety: 

Crime in Texas Online 

(reported by Houston’s 

ORI*)

Houston Police 

Department Hate 

Crimes Report

2018 28 31 32

2019 26 24 30

2020 43 43 46

2021 48 56 50

Source: Federal Bureau of Investigation, “Crime Data Explorer,” https://crime-dataexplorer.app.cloud.gov/pages/home (as of Dec. 31, 2022); Texas Department of Public Safety, Summary of Hate 

Crime Detail for Each ORI – All Agencies, https://txucr.nibrs.com/Report/HateCrime; Houston Police Department, 

Annual Hate Crime Report, Oct. 3, 2022, 

https://www.houstontx.gov/police/department_reports/hate_crime/HateCrimes_AnnualReport220405.pdf. 

*ORI = FBI’s Originating Agency Identifier

Table 28 below provides the number of hate crime incidents, and the proportion of those incidents 

that were anti-Asian for the years with available data using the FBI CDE as well as the Texas 

700 Marlene Lenthang, “Texas man sentenced to 25 years in jail after slashing attack on Asian family he blamed for 

Covid pandemic,” NBC News, Aug. 5, 2022, https://www.nbcnews.com/news/asian-america/texas-man-sentenced25-years-jail-slashing-attack-asian-family-blamed-rcna41689. 
116 The Federal Response to Anti-Asian Racism in the United States

Department of Public Safety Data for Houston. Both sources report very small numbers of antiAsian hate crimes across the years examined in this report. With zero reported anti-Asian incidents 

in 2019, Houston saw an increase in the proportion of these crimes in 2020, with either two 

incidents in the FBI data or one incident in the Texas Department of Public Safety data. 

Table 28 Houston Anti-Asian Hate Crimes, 2018-2021

FBI CDE data for Houston Police 

Department

TX Dep’t of Public Safety: Crime in 

Texas Online (reported by Houston’s 

ORI)

Incidents

# AntiAsian 

Incidents

% Anti-Asian 

Incidents Incidents

# AntiAsian 

Incidents

% Anti-Asian 

Incidents

2018 28 0 0.0% 31 1 3.2%

2019 26 0 0.0% 24 0 0.0%

2020 43 2 4.7% 43 1 2.3%

2021 48 2 4.2% 56 1 1.8%

Source: Federal Bureau of Investigation, “Crime Data Explorer,” https://crime-dataexplorer.app.cloud.gov/pages/home (as of Dec. 31, 2022); Texas Department of Public Safety, Summary of Hate 

Crime Detail for Each ORI – All Agencies, https://txucr.nibrs.com/Report/HateCrime.

Yan Zhang, a professor at Sam Houston State University who studies hate crimes against Asian 

Americans, noted that even with Houston crime data not showing a statistically significant rise, 

“everybody knows that is significantly underreported...[s]o we don’t know the actual 

(numbers).”701 Data show that over 40 percent of hate crime victimizations go unreported to the 

police.702 Moreover, Zhang says that Asian Americans are the least likely of any racial group to 

report any type of crime. When these crimes are reported, there must be evidence that bias was a 

motivating factor for it to show up in the official hate crime data, such as the offender uttering a 

racial slur or having a history of anti-Asian hate.703 Zhang explained that “it is so hard to identify 

people’s motivation because it’s not a manifested feature. It’s more hidden.”704

701 Sara Willa Ernst, “Houston Hasn’t Seen A Spike In Anti-Asian Hate, But Experts Say The Data Is Unreliable,” 

Houston Public Media, Mar. 29, 2021, https://www.houstonpublicmedia.org/articles/news/criminaljustice/2021/03/29/394530/is-the-spike-in-anti-asian-hate-happening-in-houston/. 

702 See infra notes 825-826.

703 Ibid.

704 Sara Willa Ernst, “Houston Hasn’t Seen A Spike In Anti-Asian Hate, But Experts Say The Data Is Unreliable,” 

Houston Public Media, Mar. 29, 2021, https://www.houstonpublicmedia.org/articles/news/criminaljustice/2021/03/29/394530/is-the-spike-in-anti-asian-hate-happening-in-houston/.
Local Level Responses to Anti-Asian Hate Crimes 117

An examination of Houston hate crime data over an 11-year period did report discrepancies in 

numbers reported by Houston Police Department, the Texas Department of Public Safety, and the 

FBI.705 The report, published by the Houston Coalition Against Hate, suggested that “[v]ictim 

underreporting and the challenges in establishing a hate motivation for a criminal offense are some 

of the problems that may influence the total numbers of hate crimes reported by the HPD.”706 In 

general, the report concluded that there is low reporting of hate crimes in Houston (and its 

surrounding areas) and the numbers reported each year are “surprisingly low” for a city of 

Houston’s population.707 In fact, a Texas House Representative filed a resolution in the 87th Texas 

Legislative session calling for the investigation and prosecution of all credible reports of hate 

crimes and incidents, stating that “[t]he number of victims is likely higher than official tallies, 

since many incidents are not reported to law enforcement, due to past negative experiences with 

law enforcement or a lack of faith in a response; nevertheless, Asian American families are well 

aware of the growing frequency of violence and harassment.”708

Indeed, the increasing attacks on the Asian American community has created a heightened sense 

of alarm. Thu Nguyen, executive director of OCA-Houston709 and local manicurist, shared that her 

store has gotten broken into several times, and that: 

[p]eople have been throwing dead animals at our house over the past year. I talked to my 

dad, and was like, ‘Oh, this is weird. This is the pandemic.’ He said, ‘No, this has been 

happening for the past five or six years,’ and I said, ‘Why, didn’t you do anything?’ He 

said, ‘Well, what are they going to do?’710

Harris County Violent Crime Investigator Hoang Nguyen said discrimination and hate crimes are 

underreported and they are trying to build trust within the community, stating that “[a] lot of 

people... are afraid and they don’t want to be involved. We have to get involved, so we have to go 

out there and talk to them more and show more presence and try to convince them like, ‘Hey, we 

are here to help you guys so report to us and open up and talk to us more.’”711

One issue with determining how widespread the issue of hate violence is in Houston is that the 

Houston Police Department does not collect data on hate incidents – only criminal offenses 

determined to be motivated by hate. Alleged hate-related offenses that are later determined to be 

non-criminal are processed as traditional offenses, therefore are not reported as hate-related.712

705 Anita Kalunta-Crumpton, “Hate in Houston: A Study of Hate Crimes and Hate Incidents in the City of Houston, 

Texas,” Nov. 2020, https://houstonagainsthate.org/wp-content/uploads/2020/12/Hate-in-Houston-FINAL.pdf. 

706 Ibid.

707 Ibid.

708 H.C.R. 66, 2021 Reg. Sess. (Tex. 2021), 

https://capitol.texas.gov/billlookup/History.aspx?LegSess=87R&Bill=HCR66

709 See, infra note 819.

710 ABC 13 News, “Houston authorities work to ease Asian communities’ fear of attacks,” Mar. 18, 2021, 

https://abc13.com/houston-asian-communities-on-high-alert-attack-georgia-shooting/10430220/. 

711 Ibid.

712 Anita Kalunta-Crumpton, “Hate in Houston: A Study of Hate Crimes and Hate Incidents in the City of Houston, 

Texas,” Nov. 2020, https://houstonagainsthate.org/wp-content/uploads/2020/12/Hate-in-Houston-FINAL.pdf.
118 The Federal Response to Anti-Asian Racism in the United States

Regarding the crime types of the reported anti-Asian hate crimes in Houston, Table 29 below 

provides the breakdown as reported by the FBI, which reports no anti-Asian incidents for 2018-

2019. In 2020, the anti-Asian hate crimes in Houston were intimidation and simple assault. In 

2021, they involved simple assault as well as aggravated assault.

Table 29 Houston Anti-Asian Hate Crime Types, 2020-2021

Intimidation

Simple 

Assault

Destruction/ 

Damage/ 

Vandalism 

of Property

Aggravated 

Assault

Burglary/ 

Breaking 

& 

Entering

False 

Pretenses/ 

Swindle/ 

Confidence 

Game

Weapon 

Law 

Violations Robbery Total

2020 1 1 0 0 0 0 0 0 2

2021 0 1 0 1 0 0 0 0 2

Source: Federal Bureau of Investigation, “Crime Data Explorer,” https://crime-dataexplorer.app.cloud.gov/pages/home (as of Dec. 31, 2022).

Table 30 below provides the demographics of anti-Asian hate crime offenders in Houston as 

reported by the FBI, which reports no anti-Asian incidents for 2018-2019. In 2020 there was one 

White suspect and one Black suspect, and in 2021 the majority of suspects were reported as 

multiple races.

Table 30 Houston Anti-Asian Hate Crime Suspects, 2020-2021

White Black Multiple Races Asian Hispanic

2020 1 1 0 0 0

2021 1 0 3 0 1

Source: Federal Bureau of Investigation, “Crime Data Explorer,” https://crime-dataexplorer.app.cloud.gov/pages/home (as of Dec. 31, 2022).
Local Level Responses to Anti-Asian Hate Crimes 119

Local efforts to document and prevent anti-Asian hate crimes 

California

State and Local Measures

In response to the wave of hate crime reports in California, the Commission on the State of Hate 

(CA Commission) was established by Assembly Bill 1126 and funding was appropriated in the 

Budget Act of 2022.713 Signed into law by Governor Newsom in 2021, the bill tasks the CA 

Commission with developing recommendations for preventing and responding to hate crimes and 

incidents.714 Specifically, the CA Commission is tasked with “monitoring trends in hate activity in 

the state, engaging in research on hate activity, increasing awareness of the state of hate through 

public forums and collaborations, and advising local governments, the Governor, the Legislature, 

and communities on how to prevent and respond to hate activity.”715 The CA Commission will 

also release an Annual State of Hate Commission Report, the first of which is anticipated to be 

published on or before July 1, 2023.716

In September 2022, Governor Newsom signed two bills dealing with racially based harassment on 

public transportation and in businesses. SB 1161, proposed by Senator Dave Min (D-Irvine) and 

sponsored by Stop AAPI Hate, aims to improve public transit ridership safety and requires the 

Mineta Transportation Institute at San Jose University to develop a survey to inform public transit 

safety efforts.717 AB 2448 requires the California Civil Rights Department to establish a pilot 

program on or before January 1, 2025, to recognize businesses that create environments free from 

discrimination and harassment and would require the development of criteria to qualify for 

recognition, including, among other things, demonstrating compliance with the Unruh Civil 

Rights Act.718

The California Attorney General’s office developed the Attorney General’s Hate Crime Rapid 

Response Protocol, which calls for the prioritization of resources to ensure that the California 

Department of Justice makes available to residents skilled law enforcement special agents, lawyers 

who are experts on handling civil rights issues, victim services professionals, and others, in order 

713 California Civil Rights Department, “Commission on the State of Hate,” 

https://calcivilrights.ca.gov/commission-on-the-state-of-hate/#background (accessed Jan. 20, 2022).

714 Ibid.

715 Ibid.

716 Ibid.

717 S.B. 1161, Reg. Sess. (Ca. 2021-22).

718 California Assembly Bill 2448, Reg. Sess. (Ca. 2021-22).

The Unruh Civil Rights Act provides that all persons within the jurisdiction of this state are entitled to full and equal 

accommodations in all business establishments regardless of specified characteristics, including sex, race, color, 

religion, ancestry, national origin, disability, medical condition, genetic information, marital status, sexual 

orientation, citizenship, primary language, or immigration status.

California Code, Civil Code - CIV § 51
120 The Federal Response to Anti-Asian Racism in the United States

to provide a comprehensive response to major incidents.719 The Rapid Response Protocol acts as 

a supplemental resource to local, state, and federal enforcement agencies’ investigation and 

prosecution of hate crimes, and ensures local agencies have access to the full resources of the 

Department of Justice at their disposal.720

In June 2021, the California Attorney General’s Office published a guidance on the prosecution of 

hate crimes.721 The guidance mentions the COVID-19 Hate Crimes Act,722 stating that while the 

bill is federal law, it can be used by California prosecutors as a model for restorative prosecution 

practices.723 The alternative sentencing guidance states that:

[p]rosecutors should be cognizant of and familiar with all community-based programs to 

which defendants may be sentenced or referred to as a condition of probation or parole. In 

the context of hate crimes, prosecutors are encouraged to develop sentencing alternatives 

such as community-based programs where defendants can be referred to address the 

underlying biases of their hate crime. Such programs may include educational or 

experiential components that deal with addressing bias-motivated anti-social attitudes and 

behaviors. Prosecutors should leverage their partnerships with community-based entities 

to develop such sentencing programs or community-based programs.724

The guidance explains that eligibility for restorative approaches725 should be determined on a caseby-case bases working in collaboration with law enforcement.726

Additionally, the California Department of Social Services offers funding for non-profit 

organizations to provide support and services to victims of hate incidents and hate crimes, and to 

facilitate prevention measures.727 The Stop The Hate grant program awarded a total of $14 million 

to 80 organizations for FY 2021-22 for a 1-year grant term, and the Transformative Grant Program 

awarded $30 million for FY 21-22 and 22-23 to 12 organizations for a 3-year term. These 

organizations demonstrated experience in anti-hate work as well as a capacity for transformative 

impact.728 The California Government Code § 8260 authorizes the California Department of Social 

719 State of California Department of Justice, “Hate Crimes,” https://oag.ca.gov/hatecrimes (accessed Dec. 14, 2022).

720 Ibid.

721 California Office of the Attorney General, “The California Attorney General’s Guidance to Prosecutors on Hate 

Crimes,” June 2021, https://oag.ca.gov/system/files/media/hc-prosecutor-guidance.pdf. 

722 See infra notes 1142-1148 (discussion of COVID 19 Hate Crimes Act).

723 California Office of the Attorney General, “The California Attorney General’s Guidance to Prosecutors on Hate 

Crimes,” June 2021, https://oag.ca.gov/system/files/media/hc-prosecutor-guidance.pdf.

724 California Office of the Attorney General, “The California Attorney General’s Guidance to Prosecutors on Hate 

Crimes,” June 2021, https://oag.ca.gov/system/files/media/hc-prosecutor-guidance.pdf.

725 Some restorative justice model approaches provided as examples include community conferences and restorative 

circles in which a trained facilitator brings together all who have been affected by an incident to discuss what 

happened, how everyone has been impacted, and what the group would like to do about repairing the harm.

726 California Office of the Attorney General, “The California Attorney General’s Guidance to Prosecutors on Hate 

Crimes,” June 2021, https://oag.ca.gov/system/files/media/hc-prosecutor-guidance.pdf.

727 California Department of Social Services, “CA Resources to Address Hate Crimes Webinar,” Oct. 31, 2022, 

https://oag.ca.gov/system/files/media/dss-presentation-103122.pdf. 

728 Ibid.
Local Level Responses to Anti-Asian Hate Crimes 121

Services (CDSS), in consultation with the Commission on Asian and Pacific Islander American 

Affairs (CAPIAA), to administer the Stop the Hate (STH) Program that awards funding to 

qualified nonprofit organizations to provide support and services to victims and survivors of hate 

incidents and hate crimes and their families and facilitate hate incident or hate crime prevention 

measures.729 For Stop the Hate funding, a total of 80 organizations were awarded a total of 

$14,269,246 for the service period of April 15, 2022 through June 30, 2023. 730 For the 

Transformative Grants Award, CDSS allocated $30,338,307 in Transformative Grant funding to 

12 organizations for a service term of three years, from August 1, 2022 through July 31, 2025.731

In May 2021, the California Attorney General also launched the Racial Justice Bureau, which will 

“bring six new attorneys and a supervising deputy attorney general to DOJ’s Civil Rights 

Enforcement Section to help tackle some of California’s most pressing racial and social justice 

issues head on.”732 Specifically, the Bureau was developed to support the state’s Department of 

Justice’s mandate to advance the civil rights of Californians through new and ongoing efforts on 

hate crimes and organizations, implicit and explicit bias in policing, law enforcement best 

practices, campus climate issues, and a task force to study and develop reparation proposals for 

African Americans.733

Other efforts to combat hate in the Bay Area have been led by the Human Rights Commission. 

The Human Rights Commission staffs the San Francisco Coalition Against Hate Violence, which 

is comprised of over 20 agencies representing a broad array of, government agencies, law 

enforcement agencies, service providers, nongovernmental organizations, educators, and 

community members, all of whom are committed to ending hate incidents and hate crimes in San 

Francisco. 734 The Coalition meets quarterly to share information, allow for networking 

opportunities among members and to develop educational programs and outreach opportunities to 

combat hate incidents and hate crimes.735

729 California Department of Social Services, “Stop the Hate Program Funding,” 

https://cdss.ca.gov/inforesources/cdss-programs/civil-rights/care-funding. 

730 California Department of Social Services, “Stop the Hate Funding Amended Award Announcement,” Jan. 6, 

2023, https://cdss.ca.gov/Portals/9/CivilRights/FY2021-22_STH_Award_Web%20AccessibleAnnouncement.pdf. 

731 California Department of Social Services, “Hate Incident Services and Prevention Funding Transformative 

Grants Award Announcement,” Jun. 20, 2022, 

https://cdss.ca.gov/Portals/9/CivilRights/TG_Award_Announcement.pdf. 

732 State of California Department of Justice, “Attorney General Bonta Launches New Racial Justice Bureau, 

Announces Virtual Convening Against Hate Crime with Big City Mayors,” May 11, 2021, 

https://oag.ca.gov/news/press-releases/attorney-general-bonta-launches-new-racial-justice-bureau-announces-virtual. 

733 Ibid.

734 Human Rights Commission, “San Francisco Coalition Against Hate Violence (CAHV), https://sf-hrc.org/sanfrancisco-coalition-against-hate-violence-cahv. 

735 Ibid.
122 The Federal Response to Anti-Asian Racism in the United States

In May 2022, the San Francisco Human Rights Commission mobilized a small grants process to 

address the spike of anti-Asian hate crimes in the city.736 The request for proposals (RFP), titled 

“Small Grants to Support Asian and Pacific Islander Community Safety Initiatives, Cross-Cultural 

Activities, and Transformation,” established an opportunity for community organizations to work 

together on violence prevention, intervention, and harm reduction initiatives.737 Commissioner 

Irene Riley worked with the community on the effort, and noted: “[t]his Request for Proposals in 

the amount of $400,000 is focused on delivering culturally responsive services to improve 

outcomes in preventing, intervening in, and healing from hate violence for Asian and Pacific 

Islander communities and communities throughout San Francisco.” The RFP seeks proposals in 

four program areas: public safety; cross-cultural solidarity; transformative justice; and language 

access. The press release states that best proposals would also identify and address any underlying 

causes of hate violence or other race-based structural violence.738

Other cities have also implemented strategies to combat the rise of anti-Asian hate. For example, 

Sacramento is home to a successful collaborative effort between law enforcement and community 

leaders. As described on the U.S. District Attorney’s Office for the Eastern District of

California website:

Since its inception in 1994, the Greater Sacramento Area Hate Crimes Task Force has 

brought a diverse group of community leaders together with federal, state and local law 

enforcement officials to form a united front in our District’s effort to combat hate crimes. 

The Task Force was formed following a string of hate-related fire bombings in Sacramento, 

and now meets bi-annually to update members on current prosecutions and investigations, 

as well as to provide a forum for dialogue between community members and law 

enforcement personnel.739

The Sacramento District Attorney’s Office Hate Crimes Unit website urges members of the public 

to not only report hate crimes and hate incidents that they are victims of, but also to notify an 

authority after witnessing a bias incident: 

• It is important to record bias incidents for educational, informational, and statistical 

purposes. Do not be frustrated if law enforcement personnel tell you that what you 

736 City of San Francisco, “HRC mobilizes small grants process to address anti-Asian sentiment & escalating hate 

violence,” May 12, 2022, https://sf.gov/news/hrc-mobilizes-small-grants-process-address-anti-asian-sentimentescalating-hate-violence.

737 Ibid.

738 City of San Francisco, “HRC mobilizes small grants process to address anti-Asian sentiment & escalating hate 

violence,” May 12, 2022, https://sf.gov/news/hrc-mobilizes-small-grants-process-address-anti-asian-sentimentescalating-hate-violence.

739 United States Attorney’s Office for the Eastern District of California, “Hate Crimes Task Forces: Greater 

Sacramento Area Hate Crimes Task Force,” Updated Jul. 1, 2021, https://www.justice.gov/usao-edca/hate-crimestask-forces. 
Local Level Responses to Anti-Asian Hate Crimes 123

experienced was not a crime. We are interested in tracking hate incidents because hatemotivated attacks often occur in the same area where these incidents happen. Studying 

trends, may in turn, assist in preventing and solving crimes. 

• If you hear a person yelling racial or other bias slurs on a public street, on campus, or 

shopping mall, notify an authority. For example, you may contact a store or restaurant 

manager in close proximity. At a school or public building, notify security or the 

administration. Responding to insults yourself may provoke a physical attack against you. 

• If you find or receive racist flyers, notify your local law enforcement agency as soon 

as possible.740

Partnerships between local and federal agencies have shown to be beneficial in the fight against 

hate for all communities. For instance, after a Black man was attacked with a knife in Santa Cruz 

in July 2020, witness accounts flagged the assault as possibly motivated by bias. Local law 

enforcement worked with the FBI to coordinate as to whether charging the assailant federally 

would present a stronger case.741 The assailant had assaulted two other Black men in similar 

incidents in California in 2014 and 2018, and there was also an older charge involving an assault 

on a Black man in Washington state. Garnering a federal prosecution is significant because it 

allows the U.S. Attorneys’ Office to show a pattern of hate-based violence —information that 

could put the current charges in context.742 The assailant was found guilty and sentenced to 82 

months in prison. The FBI Special Agent described the benefits of local police working with the 

FBI: “[t]he community could see not only that their local police department was acting but they 

had the full support and resources of the federal government, too.”743 Additionally, even if federal 

hate crime charges are not pursued, the FBI recommended that state and local officials utilize the 

FBI’s resources, publicity tools, forensic expertise, and experience in identifying and investigating 

hate-based motivations. 744 More detailed discussion of the federal tools and resources are 

discussed in Chapter 3 of this report.

Nonprofit/Community Organization Efforts

United Against Hate Week, which emerged from a United Against Hate poster campaign created 

by Bay Area Cities in response to white supremacist rallies in Berkeley and San Francisco in 2017, 

has now spread to over 200+ communities including all of Los Angeles County, faith-based 

groups, LGBTQ, and human rights organizations.745 United Against Hate Week was held on 

740 Sacramento County District Attorney’s Office, “Hate Crimes Frequently Asked Questions,” 

https://www.sacda.org/in-the-courtroom/criminal-prosecutions/hate-crimes-faqs/. 

741 Federal Bureau of Investigation, “Combating Hate Crimes Through Action and Outreach,” Jan. 27, 2022, 

https://www.fbi.gov/news/stories/san-francisco-prosecutes-first-federal-hate-crimes-case-012722. 

742 Ibid.

743 Federal Bureau of Investigation, “Combating Hate Crimes Through Action and Outreach,” Jan. 27, 2022, 

https://www.fbi.gov/news/stories/san-francisco-prosecutes-first-federal-hate-crimes-case-012722.

744 Ibid.

745 United Against Hate, “United Against Hate Week,” https://www.unitedagainsthateweek.org/. 
124 The Federal Response to Anti-Asian Racism in the United States

November 13-19, 2022. The website provides individual and group ideas for action and 

downloadable Action Kits to help communities, schools, college campuses, and law enforcement 

agencies accurately report and consistently respond to incidents; demonstrate support for targeted 

groups and all residents; and proactively create welcoming, inclusive environments.746

The California vs. Hate initiative was started by the California Civil Rights Department. The 

initiative is a non-emergency hate incident and hate crime reporting hotline and online portal 

established to support individuals and communities targeted for hate violence.747 The goals are to 

help individuals and communities targeted for hate by identifying options for next steps after a 

hate incident, connecting people targeted for hate with culturally competent resources, and 

improving hate incident and crime reporting data to enhance hate crimes prevention and 

response.748 California vs. Hate uses the information captured through their portal and networks to 

improve services for people targeted for hate violence.749 Resources are provided based on the 

particular situation of the targeted person, and may include mental health services, 

relocation/shelter, residential security and many other services from local non-profit organizations, 

trauma recovery centers, the California Victim Compensation Board, and other victim service 

providers, as well as legal resources.750 The online portal form is available in 15 languages, and 

the phone line provides access to services in 200 languages.751

Some initiatives by the local organizations that specifically support Asian communities in the Bay 

Area include the United Peace Collaborative (UPC) which was created after San Francisco’s 

thriving Chinatown began struggling at the start of the pandemic. The neighborhood and 

surrounding communities experienced widespread issues ranging from business closures to

vandalism to racial attacks.752 Since March 2020, the UPC has conducted over 6,000 volunteer 

hours with walking and driving patrols, and have removed over 800 graffiti tags from storefronts, 

residences, and alleys.753

Other efforts to support San Francisco’s Chinatown communities during the pandemic include the 

Delta Chinatown Initiative, which works to ensure that residents, businesses, and visitors of San 

Francisco’s Chinatown are safe and thriving.754 The organization was formed in 2020 to deter 

746 United Against Hate, “How To Respond To Hate,” https://www.unitedagainsthateweek.org/how-to-respond-tohate. 

747 California Civil Rights Department, “CA vs Hate,” https://calcivilrights.ca.gov/ca-vs-hate-page/ (accessed Jan. 

23, 2022).

748 Ibid.

749 Ibid.

750 California Civil Rights Department, “CA vs Hate,” https://calcivilrights.ca.gov/ca-vs-hate-page/ (accessed Jan. 

23, 2022).

751 California Civil Rights Department, “CA Resources to Address Hate Crimes,” Oct. 31, 2022, 

https://oag.ca.gov/system/files/media/dcr-presentation-103122.pdf. 

752 United Peace Collaborative, “About Us,” https://unitedpeacecollaborative.org/about-us (accessed Jan. 27, 2023). 

753 United Peace Collaborative, “About Us,” https://unitedpeacecollaborative.org/about-us (accessed Jan. 27, 2023).

754 Delta Chinatown Initiative, “Delta Chinatown Initiative,” https://www.deltachinatownsf.com/ (accessed Jan. 27, 

2023). 
Local Level Responses to Anti-Asian Hate Crimes 125

crime and support law enforcement in holding criminals accountable. In 2021, through a 

collaboration with Chinatown Merchants Association and SF Safe, security cameras were installed 

at the most trafficked corridors. The Delta Chinatown Initiative is currently fundraising to install 

additional security cameras at other locations.755 The Initiative also works to raise awareness for 

the over 300 families living in Single Room Occupancies (SROs) in Chinatown, advocating for 

support for the families to transition into better living conditions.756 Additionally, the group is 

pushing for culturally competent, in-language resources from victim services throughout 

government agencies to help victims feel empowered to report crimes, be fully aware and engaged 

in the legal process, and receive the types of wraparound services they are entitled to as victims.757

New York

State and Local Measures

New York created a Hate Crimes Task Force in 2018 to address the increase in bias-motivated 

threats, harassment, and violence throughout the state.758 The Task Force works with local law 

enforcement and prosecutors, and is run by the State Police with assistance from the State Division 

of Human Rights, and the Division of Criminal Justice Services.759 In 2021, the state created a $10 

million fund to combat Asian American discrimination, in which grants would be distributed to 

community and social services groups. 760 A key component of the focus includes bystander 

training programs, and also potentially funding civilian patrols.761 In 2022, it was announced that 

funding will be allocated through three organizations: the Asian American Federation ($6.8 million 

to be directed to 59 organizations), the Coalition for Asian American Children and Families ($1 

million), and the Chinese-American Planning Council ($700,000).762

In 2022, New York Governor Kathy Hochul signed two bills into law: one requires New Yorkers 

convicted of a hate crime to go through counseling on hate crime prevention and education as part 

755 Ibid.

756 Ibid.

757 Delta Chinatown Initiative, “Delta Chinatown Initiative,” https://www.deltachinatownsf.com/ (accessed Jan. 27, 

2023).

758 New York State, “Hate Crimes Task Force,” https://www.ny.gov/programs/hate-crimes-task-force (accessed Dec. 

2, 2022).

759 Ibid.

760 Carl Campanile and Bernadette Hogan,” Albany deal creates $10M fund to combat bigotry against AsianAmericans,” New York Post, Apr. 2, 2021, https://nypost.com/2021/04/02/albany-creates-10-million-fund-to-repelasian-american-assaults/. 

761 Carl Campanile and Bernadette Hogan,” Albany deal creates $10M fund to combat bigotry against AsianAmericans,” New York Post, Apr. 2, 2021, https://nypost.com/2021/04/02/albany-creates-10-million-fund-to-repelasian-american-assaults/.

762 New York State, “Governor Hochul Announces Funding to Assist Asian American Community Organizations 

Across New York State,” Feb. 20, 2022, https://www.governor.ny.gov/news/governor-hochul-announces-fundingassist-asian-american-community-organizations-across-new. 
126 The Federal Response to Anti-Asian Racism in the United States

of their sentence, and the second creates a statewide campaign run by New York’s Division of 

Human Rights to promote acceptance and understanding of diversity among New Yorkers.763

In New York City, the issue of anti-Asian hate incidents became a campaign topic in the Mayoral 

and the Manhattan District Attorney’s races, with all candidates, including the winners of those 

races, pledging to invest more resources and attention to combating hate.764 In August 2020, the 

NYPD formed an Asian Hate Crime Task Force following a spike in anti-Asian attacks.765 The 

Task Force hoped that by having a team dedicated to building rapport with the community, victims 

would be less reluctant to speak with police during investigations.766 The team included 25 Asian 

American officers who spoke a second language.767 Part of the Task Force was an undercover unit 

of plainclothes NYPD officers of Asian descent who would frequent areas where there had been 

anti-Asian violence.768 The Task Force employed several strategies, including more undercover 

and plainclothes officers posted strategically around the city, speaking one-on-one with 

community members, conducting anti-hate seminars and workshops, and connecting victims of 

hate crimes or general incidents with aid, like to the New York City Human Rights Commission,769

which is charged with the enforcement of the Human Rights Law, Title 8 of the Administrative 

Code of the City of New York.770 The Commission’s Law Enforcement Bureau (LEB) enforces 

the NYC Human Rights Law. Service providers, community organizations, elected officials, or 

individuals may bring specific incidents or potential patterns of discrimination to LEB’s attention, 

and LEB can initiate its own investigation.771

According to a report published by the Asian American Bar Association of New York, “[a]fter 

Asian Pacific American Heritage Month in May 2021, public attention to anti-Asian violence 

largely waned for the rest of the year. The number of statements made and initiatives implemented 

by local and national politicians decreased, notwithstanding the continually rising tide of anti763 Alejandra O’Connel-Domenech, “New Yorkers convicted of hate crimes must now go through hate crime 

prevention training,” The Hill, Nov. 22, 2022, https://thehill.com/changing-america/respect/diversityinclusion/3747112-new-yorkers-convicted-of-hate-crimes-must-now-go-through-hate-crime-prevention-training/. 

764 Asian American Bar Association of New York, Endless Tide: The Continuing Struggle to Overcome Anti-Asian 

Hate in New York, May 2022, p. 9 

https://cdn.ymaws.com/www.aabany.org/resource/resmgr/aavtf/Endless_Tide_Report_2022_FIN.pdf

765 Taylor Romine, “NYPD creates Asian Hate Crime Task Force after spike in anti-Asian attacks during Covid-19 

pandemic,” CNN, Aug. 18, 2020, https://www.cnn.com/2020/08/18/us/nypd-asian-hate-crime-task-force/index.html. 

766 Ibid.

767 Taylor Romine, “NYPD creates Asian Hate Crime Task Force after spike in anti-Asian attacks during Covid-19 

pandemic,” CNN, Aug. 18, 2020, https://www.cnn.com/2020/08/18/us/nypd-asian-hate-crime-task-force/index.html.

768 Michael Sisak, “NYPD adding undercover patrols to combat anti-Asian attacks,” AP News, Mar. 25, 2021, 

https://apnews.com/article/new-york-police-coronavirus-pandemic-crime-hate-crimes87ea322ab8a4ebbc72748838698efabf. 

769 Zoe Christen Jones, “NYPD Asian Hate Crimes Task Force chief says attacks are “absolutely not new”,” CBS 

News, May 13, 2021, https://www.cbsnews.com/news/asian-hate-crimes-nypd-not-new/. 

770 NYC, “Inside the NYC Commission on Human Rights,” https://www.nyc.gov/site/cchr/about/inside-cchr.page. 

771 NYC, “Enforcement,” https://www.nyc.gov/site/cchr/enforcement/enforcement.page. 
Local Level Responses to Anti-Asian Hate Crimes 127

Asian incidents.”772 The report continued to state that the NYPD also appeared to be winding down 

certain programs aimed at combating anti-Asian violence. 773 For instance, the department 

continued to maintain a Hate Crimes Task Force, but the undercover unit ceased activity in May 

2021 after officers faced threats of violence. 774 In one instance, an undercover officer was 

approached by a man on a train platform, who waved his hand and hat in the officer’s face and 

said, “That’s why you peoples [sic] are getting beat up,” according to a police report.775 Another 

officer was approached by a man who shouted anti-Asian slurs at him, and said, “Go back to China 

before you end up in the graveyard,” using an expletive.776

In February 2022, the commanding officers of both the Special Victims Division and the Hate 

Crime Task Force were replaced as part of reshuffling in a new administration.777 New mayor Eric 

Adams indicated that he “thought we were too slow in designating, investigating something as a 

potential hate crime. And I wanted to make sure that someone was in charge of the unit that 

understood my vision.”778

In addition to the NYPD overhaul, the mayor is calling for prosecutors to stop offering plea 

bargains to people accused of hate crimes, and is looking to put together an emergency task force 

to address the intersection of public safety, mental health and homelessness, and make 

recommendations for policy changes.779 Although the Asian Hate Crimes Task Force still provides 

support for Anti-Asian incident investigations, such as language services and facilitating cultural 

understanding, the Task Force remains comprised of volunteer members of the NYPD.780 The 

Asian American Bar Association of New York (AABANY) has called for full funding of the 

NYPD and New York City DA’s offices to combat hate crimes, but as of the writing of this report, 

no action has been taken on such funding proposals.781

772 Asian American Bar Association of New York, Endless Tide: The Continuing Struggle to Overcome Anti-Asian 

Hate in New York, May 2022, p. 11, 

https://cdn.ymaws.com/www.aabany.org/resource/resmgr/aavtf/Endless_Tide_Report_2022_FIN.pdf

773 Asian American Bar Association of New York, Endless Tide: The Continuing Struggle to Overcome Anti-Asian 

Hate in New York, May 2022, p. 11, 

https://cdn.ymaws.com/www.aabany.org/resource/resmgr/aavtf/Endless_Tide_Report_2022_FIN.pdf.

774 Ali Watkins and Jonah E. Bromwich, “’No Vaccine for Racism’: Asian New Yorkers Still Live in Fear of 

Attacks,” Oct. 15, 2021, https://www.nytimes.com/2021/07/14/nyregion/asian-hate-attacks-police.html. 

775 Ibid.

776 Ali Watkins and Jonah E. Bromwich, “’No Vaccine for Racism’: Asian New Yorkers Still Live in Fear of 

Attacks,” Oct. 15, 2021, https://www.nytimes.com/2021/07/14/nyregion/asian-hate-attacks-police.html.

777 CeFaan Kim, “NYPD shake-up: Head of Hate Crimes unit reassigned amid complaints from community 

activists,” ABC7 New York, Feb. 16, 2022, https://abc7ny.com/nypd-hate-crimes-special-victimsreplacement/11571260/. 

778 Erin Durkin, New York Asian hate crime spike puts pressure on new mayor,” Politico, Mar. 26, 2022, 

https://www.politico.com/news/2022/03/26/asian-hate-crimes-new-york-adams-00019365.

779 Erin Durkin, New York Asian hate crime spike puts pressure on new mayor,” Politico, Mar. 26, 2022, 

https://www.politico.com/news/2022/03/26/asian-hate-crimes-new-york-adams-00019365.

780 Asian American Bar Association of New York, Endless Tide: The Continuing Struggle to Overcome Anti-Asian 

Hate in New York, May 2022, pp. 11-12, 

https://cdn.ymaws.com/www.aabany.org/resource/resmgr/aavtf/Endless_Tide_Report_2022_FIN.pdf.

781 Ibid, at 12. 
128 The Federal Response to Anti-Asian Racism in the United States 

In 2022, the city’s budget invested a record $1.7 million in the Manhattan District Attorney’s 

Hate Crimes Unit.782 The funding, which Manhattan DA Alvin Bragg requested, will allow the 

office to ramp up their language capacity with translators, hire more investigative analysts, 

assistant district attorneys, community partnership coordinators and victim services advocates.783

The office relies heavily on its Witness Aid Services Unit and Community Partnerships Unit 

to provide educational programming, counseling services, referrals to immigration assistance, 

and more. These types of services are offered to victims in general, but the office is looking to 

fill in some key gaps when it comes to victims of hate crimes, such as counselors speaking AAPI 

languages as well as an AAPI advocate position that could connect victims to resources.784

The new funding also includes expanded training for the NYPD by the DA’s office in how to 

recognize and handle hate crimes. For example, in April 2022, the office conducted two trainings 

for 85 rookie officers and 15 field training sergeants that included a review of the state’s 

hate crimes law and approaches to identifying bias-related evidence when responding to potential 

hate crime incidents.785 Officials indicated this was the first time the office conducted formalized 

hate crimes training of this scale for officers across multiple precincts.786

Nonprofit/Community Organization Efforts 

The Asian American Federation (AAF) is a nonprofit organization based in New York City with 

a mission to raise the influence and well-being of the pan-Asian American community through 

research, policy advocacy, public awareness, and nonprofit support.787 AAF produces research 

reports and briefs to draw attention to the needs of Asian American communities, and 

urges policymakers to make changes that will allow the Asian community to get essential 

services more easily.788 Some of their recent reports and briefs have highlighted Asian American 

employment, poverty, older adults, mental health services for Asian New Yorkers, contributions 

and challenges of Asian small businesses, and city government funding for Asian 

communities.789 

782 Anna Lucente Sterling, “City provides ‘historic’ funding for Manhattan DA Hate Crimes Unit,” Spectrum News 

NY 1, Aug. 26, 2022, https://www.ny1.com/nyc/all-boroughs/news/2022/08/24/city-provides--historic--fundingfor-manhattan-d-a--hate-crimes-unit. 

783 Ibid.

784 Ibid.

785 Ibid.

786 Anna Lucente Sterling, “City provides ‘historic’ funding for Manhattan DA Hate Crimes Unit,” Spectrum News 

NY 1, Aug. 26, 2022, https://www.ny1.com/nyc/all-boroughs/news/2022/08/24/city-provides--historic--fundingfor-manhattan-d-a--hate-crimes-unit.

787 Asian American Federation, “About Us,” https://www.aafederation.org/about-us (accessed Feb. 9, 2023). 

788 Asian American Federation, “Our Work,” https://www.aafederation.org/aaf-our-work/research.

789 Ibid. 
Local Level Responses to Anti-Asian Hate Crimes 129

In response to attacks on Asian New Yorkers, AAF launched the Hope Against Hate Campaign, 

offering community safety programs, safe zones, victim support services, and safety trainings.790

The campaign includes a Community Companion program, in which companions are responsible 

for escorting older adults and other vulnerable community members to and from home, work, and 

appointments; receiving and responding to phone calls from safety network organizations when 

protective accompaniment is requested; and de-escalating verbal anti-Asian bias incidents as 

needed when providing protective accompaniment.791 The campaign has created “Safe Zones” in 

communities throughout New York City houses of worship, small businesses and other locations 

to provide safety information to impacted Asian Americans, and set up support services to connect 

victims to “culturally competent mental health support and pro-bono legal services.”792 Jo-Ann 

Yoo, executive director of the Asian American Federation, stated in her written testimony to the 

Commission that the Hope Against Hate campaign has provided over 100 safety trainings to over 

2,400 community members, reached out to 3,775 small businesses and faith centers for Safe Zones, 

and trained over 2,700 youth in topics such as anti-bullying initiatives.793

The Asian American Federation also provides numerous resources for community members as 

well as nonprofit organizations in responding to COVID-19 and the rise in anti-Asian hate 

crimes.794 Its website provides a portal to report experiencing or witnessing a hate crime, resources 

for individuals affected by COVID-19, and compiles information about funding opportunities as 

well as free remote work resources for nonprofit organizations to utilize.795 AAF also provides an 

unemployment report, which provides data compiled on the impact of the pandemic on Asian 

employment in New York City and includes recommendations for private and public leadership.796

Additionally, four different “safety one-pagers” are available for download in multiple Asian 

languages, which include verbal de-escalation strategies, physical self-defense strategies, nonviolent communication strategies, and the 5 “D’s”797 of being an bystander.798 AAF is currently 

working with the U.S. Attorney for the Eastern District of New York to meet with community 

leaders and develop outreach ideas.799

790 Asian American Federation, “Hope Against Hate,” https://www.aafederation.org/hope-against-hate/ (accessed 

Feb. 9, 2023). 

791 Asian American Federation, “Community Safety Program,” https://www.aafederation.org/community-safetyprogram/. 

792 Jo-Ann Yoo, Executive Director, Asian American Federation (AAF), Written Statement for The Federal 

Response to Anti-Asian Racism in the United States Briefing before the U.S. Comm’n on Civil Rights, Mar. 24, 

2023, at 3 (hereinafter Yoo Statement). 

793 Yoo Statement, at 3-4. 

794 Asian American Federation Covid-19 Resource Center, “Community Resources.” 

795 Ibid. 

796 Ibid. 

797 The “5Ds” of bystander intervention methodology as developed by the organization Right To Be are: distract, 

delegate, document, delay, and direct.

798 Asian American Federation Covid-19 Resource Center, “Safety Resources.” 

799 Yang Statement, at 12. 
130 The Federal Response to Anti-Asian Racism in the United States

The Commission heard from Jennifer Wu, a lawyer in New York City that became a civil rights 

attorney during the pandemic. 800 She and other pro bono attorneys partnered with the Asian 

American Bar Association of New York, Asian Americans for Equality, and the Alliance for Asian 

American Justice to provide “wraparound” services to victims of anti-Asian violence, a key service 

being advocating for victims before the District Attorney as well as during interactions with the 

police.801 Wu explained that private practices often have more resources to find a good interpreter 

compared to a District Attorney’s office, and that “there are very few court-certified interpreters 

in a particular dialect who are available to translate live for court proceedings and meetings.”802

Wu and colleagues were invited to give a training on best practices for interviewing Asian victims 

for the Hate Crimes Unit at the Manhattan DA’s Office.803

Karlin Chan, a local community board member, started the Chinatown Block Watch in February 

2020, in which three times a week, he and a group of volunteers went on patrol in Chinatown to 

look out for their neighbors.804 The group states that it is “just an extra set of eyes and ears” and a 

“visual deterrent to anything happening.”805 The group explained that if bias-motivated incidents 

decreased and things improved, they might be able to disband; however, if they got worse, the 

group might increase the frequency of patrols or add evening shifts.806 Every time a new incident 

occurs, Chan explained that he receives more inquiries about joining the group, which by April 

2021, had a roster of 40 volunteers.807

Another organization focused on helping to protect Asian residents is Soar Over Hate which was 

formed to equip members of the community to protect themselves and fight back against antiAsian violence. Since March 2021, the organization has distributed over 31,000 personal alarms, 

whistles, and pepper spray across New York (as well as California).808 Soar Over Hate has also 

organized “AAPI Care Fairs,” that provides self-defense classes, puppy therapy, meditation 

classes, group therapy, mental health referrals, hepatitis B screenings, and other vital 

community resources.809

800 Jennifer Wu, Founding Partner, Groombridge, Wu, Baughman & Stone LLP, Written Statement for The Federal 

Response to Anti-Asian Racism in the United States Briefing before the U.S. Comm’n on Civil Rights, Mar. 24, 

2023 (hereinafter J. Wu Statement).

801 J. Wu Statement, at 2.

802 Ibid.

803 Ibid, 3.

804 Mary Harris, “A Very New York Response to Anti-Asian Hate,” Slate Magazine, Apr. 8, 2021, 

https://slate.com/business/2021/04/chinatown-block-watch-karlin-chan-anti-asian-hate-new-york-city.html. 

805 Eveline Cho, “The Chinatown Block Watch, One Year Later,” New York Magazine, Apr. 1, 2021, 

https://www.curbed.com/2021/04/chinatown-block-watch-one-year-later.html.

806 Ibid. 

807 Eveline Cho, “The Chinatown Block Watch, One Year Later,” New York Magazine, Apr. 1, 2021, 

https://www.curbed.com/2021/04/chinatown-block-watch-one-year-later.html.

808 Soar Over Hate, “Our Story,” https://www.soaroverhate.org/about (accessed Feb. 9, 2023).

809 Soar Over Hate, “Our Story,” https://www.soaroverhate.org/about (accessed Feb. 9, 2023).
Local Level Responses to Anti-Asian Hate Crimes 131

Another volunteer group focusing on self-defense is the Dragon Combat Club (DCC). The teacher, 

Henry Zhang, pitched the club as “self-defense against violent racists” and founded it after his 

fiancée was harassed and called “coronavirus” early in the pandemic.810 Zhang stated that he 

started the club because he was “sick of the inaction of the system,” the lack of condemnation of 

anti-Asian attacks, and the increase of anti-Asian incidents around New York City.811 Zhang 

estimates that DCC has trained hundreds of people. Classes are taught virtually three days a week, 

and as one student describes: “This is the least we can do as far as immediate response.”812

Texas

State and Local Measures

In March 2021, Texas House Representative Gene Wu filed a resolution in the 87th Texas 

Legislative session condemning racism against Asian Americans and Pacific Islanders, and calling 

on “state law enforcement officials, working with federal and local officials, to investigate and 

prosecute all credible reports of hate crimes and incidents and threats against AAPIs in Texas; 

and... express its support for public and private efforts to eradicate anti-AAPI racism in all 

its forms.”813

Despite the lack of a reported increase in anti-Asian hate crimes in the city, the Houston Police 

Department did increase patrols in the city’s Asian community at the mayor’s request. 814

Following the Atlanta-area spa shootings,815 Houston mayor Sylvester Turner published a press 

released stating:

It is not enough to condemn these acts of violence against Asian-Americans and hold the 

victims’ families in our hearts. We must act to protect them. I am calling on all Houstonians 

to recognize our AAPI brothers and sisters’ pain and fear and do what you can to ease those 

810 Esther Wang, “How to Hit Back: The desperate, confused, righteous campaign to stop Asian hate,” New York 

Magazine, Sept. 26, 2022, https://nymag.com/intelligencer/article/stop-asian-hate-crimes-politics.html.

811 Esther Wang, “How to Hit Back: The desperate, confused, righteous campaign to stop Asian hate,” New York 

Magazine, Sept. 26, 2022, https://nymag.com/intelligencer/article/stop-asian-hate-crimes-politics.html. 

812 “Self-defense classes preparing Chinatown residents for rise in violent crimes,” ABC7 New York, Feb. 19, 2022, 

https://abc7ny.com/new-york-city-self-defense-classes-chinatown-asian-american-hate-crime/11579310/. 

813 H.C.R. 66, 2021 Reg. Sess. (Tex. 2021), 

https://capitol.texas.gov/billlookup/History.aspx?LegSess=87R&Bill=HCR66

814 City of Houston Office of the Mayor, “Mayor Sylvester Turner’s Statement on Attacks Against Asian American 

and Pacific Islander Community,” Mar. 17, 2021, https://www.houstontx.gov/mayor/press/2021/statement-attacksasians-pacific-islanders.html. 

815 Tim Craig, Mark Berman, Hannah Knowles, and Marc Fisher, “A nationwide horror: Witnesses, police paint a 

picture of a murderous rampage that took 8 lives,” The Washington Post, Mar. 18, 2021, 

https://www.washingtonpost.com/national/what-happened-atlanta-shooting/2021/03/18/163e4de8-8733-11eb-8a8b5cf82c3dffe4_story.html. 
132 The Federal Response to Anti-Asian Racism in the United States

feelings. Please do your part to make them feel safe, whether it’s by reporting a hate crime 

or calling out anti-Asian sentiment when you see it. The attacks on the Asian American 

community are an outrage, and it’s on all of us to stop it.816

Nonprofit/Community Organization Efforts

In Houston, the Asian Chamber of Commerce provides Stop Asian Hate business resources, 

including information on how to support the Asian community, and also lists other organizations 

to report incidents, view action guides on responding to incidents, and Houston-specific hate crime 

phone lines.817 The OCA818–Greater Houston Chapter board members, along with key community 

volunteer members, states that they are working to implement programs to empower the AAPI 

community by utilizing arts and culture to advocate for social justice and provide leadership 

training; education workshops; arts, cultural, and advocacy awareness; legal clinics; internships; 

scholarships; mentoring and civic engagement; and monitoring our national and local advocacy, 

policy positions, and initiatives. 819 OCA chapters have implemented free online bystander 

intervention situational awareness trainings, self-defense classes. 820 In February 2023, the 

University of Houston (UH) hosted a Global Communication Summit with a focus on anti-Asian 

racism in everyday communication.821 Communications professor Zhiwen Xiao, who organized 

the event, remarked that 

Asians have been mocked for the way they look or talk, they have been blamed for COVID19, they have often been dismissed in lots of everyday situations, and they have been 

victims of anti-Asian hate crimes. One of the purposes of this year’s summit is to raise 

awareness among the public that Asians are not immune to racism.822

Yali Zou, director of the UH Asian American Studies Center and University Endowed Professor 

for Global Leadership Studies, discussed how derogatory terms used by politicians and journalists, 

816 City of Houston Office of the Mayor, “Mayor Sylvester Turner’s Statement on Attacks Against Asian American 

and Pacific Islander Community,” Mar. 17, 2021, https://www.houstontx.gov/mayor/press/2021/statement-attacksasians-pacific-islanders.html.

817 Asian Chamber of Commerce Houston, “Stop Asian Hate Business Resources,” https://module.asianchamberhou.org/blog/acc-in-the-news-and-media-5238/post/stop-asian-hate-business-resources-28723. 

818 OCA was founded in 1973 as Organization of Chinese Americans and has evolved to become OCA-Asian Pacific 

American Advocates. In 2013, the organization rebranded to be OCA-Asian Pacific American Advocates and 

advocate on behalf of all Asian Americans and Pacific Islanders. Today, OCA continues to do business as OCA –

Asian Pacific American Advocates.

OCA, “About,” https://www.ocanational.org.

819 OCA Houston, “About Us,” https://www.ocahouston.org/about-us. 

820 Deborah Chen, OCA National Executive Vice President and OCA-Greater Houston Programs Director, Written 

Statement to the Commission, May 15, 2023.

821 University of Houston, “Global Communication Summit on Anti-Asian Racism,” Feb. 13, 2023, 

https://uh.edu/news-events/stories/2023/february-2023/02132023-global-communication-summit-anti-asianracism.php. 

822 Ibid.
Local Level Responses to Anti-Asian Hate Crimes 133

“played a significant role in fostering bigotry.”823 The summit featured peer-reviewed research 

presentations with hopes to increase awareness of the issues, develop an open dialogue, and 

increase collaboration among researchers, educators, students, journalists, and activists in the 

creation of environments free of anti-Asian racism.824 The following section discusses overall 

challenges regarding capturing true numbers of hate crimes, accurate reporting, and prosecuting 

bias-motivated incidents. 

Challenges in Reporting and Prosecuting Hate Crimes

At a national level, from 2015-2019, 42 percent of hate crime victimizations were not reported to 

police.825 Almost a quarter of these victimizations that were not reported involved victims who 

believed the police could not or would not do anything to help, and in 16 percent of the 

victimizations not reported to the police, the victim believed the crime was not important enough 

to report.826 There are many reasons that hate crime victims choose not to report. For instance, 

many people in LGBTQ communities may feel that police sympathize with the offenders, and new 

immigrants not only fear law enforcement and deportation, but often face language barriers when 

reporting.827 Research funded by the National Institute of Justice (NIJ) found that 85 percent of 

anti-LGBT incidents were not reported to law enforcement.828 Another NIJ-funded study of Latinx 

adults, researchers found that non-immigrants were significantly more likely to report bias 

victimization than immigrants.829

Asian Americans specifically may be reluctant to report crimes due to language barriers, concerns 

about immigration status, fears of retaliation, or they “simply do not want to make trouble.”830 The 

lack of hate crime prosecutions may also be a contributing factor. The Asian American Bar 

Association of New York (AABANY) analyzed 233 anti-Asian incidents in New York City in the 

823 Ibid.

824 University of Houston, “Global Communication Summit on Anti-Asian Racism,” Feb. 13, 2023, 

https://uh.edu/news-events/stories/2023/february-2023/02132023-global-communication-summit-anti-asianracism.php.

825 Grace Kena and Alexandra Thompson, Hate Crime Victimization, 2005-2019, Bureau of Justice Statistics, Sept. 

2021, https://bjs.ojp.gov/sites/g/files/xyckuh236/files/media/document/hcv0519_1.pdf.

826 Ibid.

827 Ronald Davis and Patrice O’Neill, “The Hate Crimes Reporting Gap: Low Numbers Keep Tensions High,” 

Police Chief Magazine, May 2016, https://www.policechiefmagazine.org/the-hate-crimes/.

828 Besiki Luka Kutateladze, “Anti-LGBTQ Hate Crimes in Miami: Research Summary and Policy 

Recommendations,” Sept. 2020, https://www.ojp.gov/ncjrs/virtual-library/abstracts/anti-lgbtq-hate-crimes-miamiresearch-summary-and-policy. 

829 Carlos Cuevas, Amy Farrell, Jack McDevitt, Sheldon Zhang, Jeff Temple, Jesenia Robles, and Sarah Lockwood, 

“Understanding and measuring bias victimization against Latinos,” Sept. 2019, 

https://nij.ojp.gov/library/publications/understanding-and-measuring-bias-victimization-against-latinos.

830 Nicole Hong and Jonah E. Bromwich, “Asian-Americans Are Being Attacked. Why Are Hate Crime Charges So 

Rare?” The New York Times, Mar. 18, 2021, http://www.nytimes.com/2021/03/18/nyregion/asian-hatecrimes.amp.html.
134 The Federal Response to Anti-Asian Racism in the United States

first three quarters of 2021 and found that only seven led to hate crime convictions.831 Of the 233 

incidents, 91 led to an arrest, and of those, 41 were charged as hate crimes by local prosecutors. 

Of those 41, seven ended up with a disposition of guilt to a hate crime charge.832

In a 2018 roundtable hosted by the DOJ, law enforcement practitioners identified four leading 

barriers to hate crime reporting from their agencies: poor law enforcement-community 

relationships, the view that law enforcement is unable to affect hate crimes, citizenship status/fear 

of deportation, and lack of training among law enforcement.833

Community advocates argue that even if victims report an incident, it may not be recorded and 

reported as such. Stanley Mark of the Asian American Legal Defense and Education Fund 

explained that “[t]he police take racial slurs as a tipping point.... And if it’s not there, then, despite 

the murder, or assault or the underlying crime, they may not find enough evidence to classify it as 

a hate crime that’s racially motivated.”834 Diane Yap, founding member of Lowell Foundation 

testified to the Commission about heinous crimes that occurred in New York recalling that “70-

year-old Mrs. Ren was shoved to the floor, beaten, kicked in the head by three teens and an 11-

year-old; two elderly women were stabbed with a machete while waiting for a bus; a 15-year-old 

was stabbed in the neck on the bus by a 12-year-old boy. However, none of these brutal attacks 

have been classified as hate crimes.”835

Additionally, responding police officers may have an unclear understanding of what constitutes a 

crime that is motivated by bias if they have not received specific training to recognize a hate crime 

for what it is.836 Los Angeles Police Department’s Hate Crimes Coordinator Detective Orlando 

Martinez testified before the Commission that the majority of determinations (of whether a crime 

is motivated by bias) are made by officers or supervisors in the field, or investigators after they 

receive the case, and that most crime victims are not calling 911 indicating that they are victims of 

a hate crime, because “most people don’t know these things.”837

831 Asian American Bar Association of New York, Endless Tide: The Continuing Struggle to Overcome Anti-Asian 

Hate in New York, May 2022, 

https://cdn.ymaws.com/www.aabany.org/resource/resmgr/aavtf/Endless_Tide_Report_2022_FIN.pdf.

832 Asian American Bar Association of New York, Endless Tide: The Continuing Struggle to Overcome Anti-Asian 

Hate in New York, May 2022, 

https://cdn.ymaws.com/www.aabany.org/resource/resmgr/aavtf/Endless_Tide_Report_2022_FIN.pdf.

833 Federal Bureau of Investigation, Interrogatory Responses to U.S. Commission on Civil Rights, Mar. 15, 2023.

834 Kiara Alfonseca, “Hate crimes are hard to prosecute, but why?” ABC News, Apr. 13, 2021, 

https://abcnews.go.com/US/hate-crimes-hard-prosecute/story?id=76926458.

835 Diane Yap, Founding Member, Friends of Lowell Foundation; Board Member, The Lowell Alumni Association, 

Anti-Asian Racism Briefing, p. 30.

836 Ronald Davis and Patrice O’Neill, “The Hate Crimes Reporting Gap: Low Numbers Keep Tensions High,” 

Police Chief Magazine, https://www.policechiefmagazine.org/the-hate-crimes/.

837 Detective Orlando Martinez, Hate Crimes Coordinator, Los Angeles Police Department, Anti-Asian Racism 

Briefing, pp. 143-44.
Local Level Responses to Anti-Asian Hate Crimes 135

Robert Boyce, a retired chief of detectives from the New York Police Department, said that law 

enforcement officers tasked with investigating a crime’s motivation face many obstacles in finding 

evidence of hate. 838 Boyce, describing investigating potential hate crimes, said that 

[w]hile there are some easy identifiers –– like hate speech, a victim’s religious garb or if 

hateful symbols like a swastika or a noose is present at a crime scene –– a deeper 

investigation into perpetrators can help solidify the case.... If none of the common signs 

of hate are present, officers may search closed-circuit television footage, social media

platforms, past criminal records, license plates, and more to connect the dots to a hate 

crime charge.839

Deputy Legal Director Scott McCoy of the Southern Poverty Law Center said that clear signs of 

bigotry or intolerance such as a slur, racist vandalism, or a perpetrator’s association with an 

extremist group can lead to a charge of a hate crime, but that those clearer-cut cases are rare.840

There are also potential issues regarding whether or not police departments record a crime as 

motivated by bias and report that to federal authorities. In 2020, nearly 25 percent of large cities 

did not report any hate crimes; however, research suggest that for large cities to actually experience

zero hate crimes that year is “a statistical near-impossibility.”841 Additionally, local and state 

numbers may differ from federal numbers due to definitional issues. New Jersey, for example, 

reported significantly more hate crimes than the FBI.842 New Jersey has reported a 400 percent 

increase in bias incidents since 2015 largely due to harassment incidents, which is a category that 

the FBI does not include. 843 In another example, the Orlando Police Department reported to 

ProPublica that it had reported five hate crimes to the Florida Department of Law Enforcement 

(FDLE) for 2015, but the FBI data showed no Orlando hate crimes that year.844 Orlando police 

said FDLE acknowledged their data had not been sent to FBI due to a system error, while an FDLE 

spokesperson reported that Orlando had not submitted data on time. 845 The ProPublica 

investigation also found that:

838 Kiara Alfonseca, “Hate crimes are hard to prosecute, but why?” ABC News, Apr. 13, 2021, 

https://abcnews.go.com/US/hate-crimes-hard-prosecute/story?id=76926458.

839 Kiara Alfonseca, “Hate crimes are hard to prosecute, but why?” ABC News, Apr. 13, 2021, 

https://abcnews.go.com/US/hate-crimes-hard-prosecute/story?id=76926458.

840 Ibid.

841 Beatrice Jin, “Biden signed a new hate crimes law – but there’s a big flaw,” Politico, May 20, 2021, 

https://www.politico.com/interactives/2021/state-hate-crime-laws/. 

842 Sergio Olmos, “Researchers say the FBI’s statistics on hate crimes across the country are flawed,” NPR, Jan. 1, 

2023, https://www.npr.org/2023/01/01/1145973412/researchers-say-the-fbis-statistics-on-hate-crimes-across-thecountry-are-flawed. 

843 Sergio Olmos, “Researchers say the FBI’s statistics on hate crimes across the country are flawed,” NPR, Jan. 1, 

2023, https://www.npr.org/2023/01/01/1145973412/researchers-say-the-fbis-statistics-on-hate-crimes-across-thecountry-are-flawed.

844 Ken Schwencke, “Why America Fails at Gathering Hate Crime Statistics,” ProPublica, Dec. 4, 2017, 

https://www.propublica.org/article/why-america-fails-at-gathering-hate-crime-statistics.

845 Ibid. 
136 The Federal Response to Anti-Asian Racism in the United States

According to FBI data, the Anne Arundel County Police in Maryland, which polices half 

a million people between Baltimore and Washington, D.C., reported no hate crimes 

between 2012 and 2015. But the department sent [] 68 pages of reports for the past 5 years, 

showing that county police responded to well over 100 incidents, including many in which 

there was evidence of crimes motivated by bias.... Officials with the Maryland State Police 

said many of these cases weren’t reported to the FBI because the Anne Arundel County 

Police — unsure if they were hate crimes — had flagged them as “inconclusive” 

in paperwork.846

In addition to challenges in accounting for the true number of reported hate crimes, the burden 

of proving the accused acted out of racial-based motived is a difficult for prosecutors to meet.847

LAPD Detective Martinez testified that “bias motivation is a thought crime. It is the suspect’s 

intent. We have to prove that through direct evidence or circumstantial evidence beyond 

a reasonable doubt that the suspect committed the crime because of the bias against the 

protected characteristic.”848

This burden of proof “severely limits the number of charges brought and convictions obtained.”849

According to a 2015 report, federal prosecutors turn down about 87 percent of hate crime cases 

since the passage of the HCPA, and the most cited reason is insufficient evidence.850 A 1991 legal 

commentary on the issue of hate crime motives explained:

Prosecutors must prove a complex set of factors in order to secure a criminal conviction 

under existing hate crimes statutes. Like any criminal statute, a typical hate crimes act 

requires proof by the government of the accused’s mens rea or “guilty mind.” Traditional 

mens rea elements consist of purpose, knowledge, recklessness, or criminal negligence. 

Hate crimes statutes also require proof that the accused attacked his or her victim “because 

of” or “by reason of” that person’s race, religion, or national origin. This requirement of 

proof severely undermines the efficacy of existing statutes and has discouraged prosecutors 

from charging individuals under the statutes. Prosecutors often find it impossible to 

demonstrate by proof beyond a reasonable doubt that the accused acted out of racist 

846 Ibid.

847 James Morsh, (1991), “Problem of Motive in Hate Crimes: The Argument Against Presumptions of Racial 

Motivation,” Journal of Criminal Law and Criminology, 82, 3: 

https://scholarlycommons.law.northwestern.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=6710&context=jclc

848 Detective Orlando Martinez, Hate Crimes Coordinator, Los Angeles Police Department, Anti-Asian Racism 

Briefing, p. 144.

849 James Morsh, (1991), “Problem of Motive in Hate Crimes: The Argument Against Presumptions of Racial 

Motivation,” Journal of Criminal Law and Criminology, 82, 3: 

https://scholarlycommons.law.northwestern.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=6710&context=jclc

850 Transactional Records Access Clearinghouse, “Convictions in Federal Hate Crime Cases Since FY 2010,” June 

25, 2015, http://trac.syr.edu/tracreports/crim/393/.ho
Local Level Responses to Anti-Asian Hate Crimes 137

motives.851 Thus, since motive exists within an individual’s own knowledge can often 

undermine a prosecutor’s ability to prove a hate crime case in all but egregious cases.852

Many of the hate crime cases which are prosecuted and result in convictions include the perpetrator 

using hateful language while committing the act, thus proving intent. 853 Without some clear 

demonstration of bias or bigotry proving the crime was motivated by bias beyond a reasonable 

doubt is difficult.854

The prosecution of hate crimes is difficult, even in states with comprehensive hate crime legislation 

–– like California –– because there is no one legal standard to which courts have agreed. For 

instance, the California Penal Code defines a hate crime as “a criminal act committed, in whole or

in part, because of one or more of the following actual or perceived characteristics of the victim:

(1) disability, (2) gender, (3) nationality, (4) race or ethnicity, (5) religion, (6) sexual orientation,

(7) association with a person or group with one or more of these actual or perceived 

characteristics.”855 This is an easier legal standard for proving intent than the federal HCPA, which 

requires that the crime was committed almost entirely because of the victim’s protected status.856

As a result, in California from 2020 to 2021, the number of cases filed for prosecution by state 

DAs and city attorneys involving hate crime charges increased by 30.1 percent, of which 14.7 

percent received a conviction.857 For further discussion regarding DOJ hate crime cases during the 

COVID-19 pandemic, see Chapter 3 of this report.

Increasing Law Enforcement Presence 

Due to the national uptick in anti-Asian incidents, some major cities such as Chicago, New York, 

Philadelphia, and San Francisco, have all directed police officers to step up their presence.858 In 

San Francisco’s Chinatown, many older merchants have indicated feeling safer with the increase 

of police, but others argue the increase in policing is a temporary and ineffective answer to solve 

851 James Morsh, (1991), “Problem of Motive in Hate Crimes: The Argument Against Presumptions of Racial 

Motivation,” Journal of Criminal Law and Criminology, 82, 3: 

https://scholarlycommons.law.northwestern.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=6710&context=jclc

852 James Morsh, (1991), “Problem of Motive in Hate Crimes: The Argument Against Presumptions of Racial 

Motivation,” Journal of Criminal Law and Criminology, 82, 3: 

https://scholarlycommons.law.northwestern.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=6710&context=jclc

853 See, e.g., 18 U.S.C. § 249(a)(1) and (2); Cal. Pen. Code § 422.55(a).

854 See U.S. Commission on Civil Rights, In The Name of Hate: Examining the Federal Government’s Role in 

Responding to Hate Crimes, Nov. 2019.

855 Cal. Pen. Code § 422.55(a).

856 18 U.S.C. § 249.

857 Rob Bonta, “Hate Crime in California,” Office of the Attorney General, California Dep’t of Justice, 2021, Table 

10, https://oag.ca.gov/system/files/attachments/press-docs/Hate%20Crime%20In%20CA%202021%20FINAL.pdf 

858 Vivian Ho, “Police patrols have increased in Asian areas. Not everyone is feeling safer,” The Guardian, Mar. 19, 

2021, https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2021/mar/19/atlanta-shooting-asian-police-violence. 
138 The Federal Response to Anti-Asian Racism in the United States

the increase in violence against Asian communities.859 Similarly, some advocacy groups argue that 

increased law enforcement is not the proper response to the rising anti-Asian hate crimes. The 

Massachusetts State Advisory Committee to the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights held a virtual 

briefing on May 6, 2021, to discuss hate incidents and hate crimes against people of AAPI descent, 

and Alvina Yeh, executive director of the Asian Pacific American Labor Alliance, testified that:

[c]alling for policing, offering cash rewards, asking for hate crime-related legislation or 

stricter punishments, [doesn’t] solve the problems of violence in our community and only 

creates more racial division ... the safest communities don’t have more police. They don’t 

have more surveillance. They are abundantly resourced [so that] all members 

of our community are thriving, and that’s the community safety plan we should all be 

working towards.860

Sammie Ablaza Willis, director of a nonprofit group for the Asian and Pacific Islander transgender 

and queer community in northern California, described the fear among the community but that 

“while we feel that fear, policing is not the thing that is going to alleviate it.”861 Particularly among 

transgender and queer Asian American communities, increased police presence may not always 

make everyone feel safer. Advocates against increased policing have suggested that instead of law 

enforcement officers, the community can patrol the neighborhood and escort older adults on their 

daily errands.862 Manjusha Kulkarni, executive director of AAPI Equity Alliance and co-founder 

for Stop AAPI Hate testified that “truly combatting anti-Asian hate requires a comprehensive 

approach and not simply one that primarily relies upon criminal law enforcement.”863

Moreover, some advocates within the Asian community argue against increased policing strategies 

as a method to reduce hate crimes due to the history of racial injustice in policing.864 More than 

100 Asian American organizations signed a joint statement rejecting the COVID-19 Hate Crimes 

Act because the legislation “relies on anti-Black, law enforcement responses to the recent rise in 

anti-Asian bias incidents across the US” that contradict the Asian solidarity with BIPOC (Black, 

Indigenous, People of Color) and other marginalized groups. 865 The coalition states that the 

COVID-19 Hate Crimes Act “assumes that police are safe,” and they are calling on a shift in 

859 Vivian Ho, “Police patrols have increased in Asian areas. Not everyone is feeling safer,” The Guardian, Mar. 19, 

2021, https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2021/mar/19/atlanta-shooting-asian-police-violence. 

860 Massachusetts Advisory Committee to the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights, Hate Crimes Against Asian 

American Pacific Islander Communities in Massachusetts, Aug. 2021, p. 16, https://www.usccr.gov/files/2021-

10/ma-sac-aapi-hate-crimes.pdf. 

861 Vivian Ho, “Police patrols have increased in Asian areas. Not everyone is feeling safer,” The Guardian, Mar. 19, 

2021, https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2021/mar/19/atlanta-shooting-asian-police-violence.

862 Ibid; see also supra, note 791.

863 Kulkarni testimony, at 49-50.

864 Tiffany Bui, Ha-Kyung Kim, Megan Munce, and Praveena Somasundaram, “For Asian American activists, 

police brutality, anti-Asian hate are two sides of the same coin,” Voices, Accessed Feb. 28, 2023, 

https://voices.aaja.org/index/2021/8/25/asian-americans-challenge-policing-as-answer-to-anti-asian-attacks

865 GAPIMNY, “75+ Asian and LGBTQ Organizations’ Statement In Opposition To Law Enforcement-Based Hate 

Crime Legislation,” Last Modified May 18, 2021, https://gapimny.org/75-asian-and-lgbtq-organizations-statementin-opposition-to-law-enforcement-based-hate-crime-legislation/ 
Local Level Responses to Anti-Asian Hate Crimes 139

resources from law enforcement to investing in community-based interventions and non-carceral 

alternatives, non-coercive mental healthcare services, neighborhood-based trauma centers, and 

community food banks.866

After footage of a pedestrian being assaulted in Oakland went viral in February 2021, Carl Chan, 

president of the Oakland Chinatown Chamber of Commerce, became a fixture in mainstream 

media for championing more policing in response to robberies and assaults continuing across the 

country.867 The Washington Post reported that while the solution (of increased police presence) 

has been challenged by racial justice advocates, “it was embraced by politicians eager to look 

tough on crime and acts of racial hatred.”868 The argument for ramping up police presence is 

supported by some because it is a resource that older people in the community are familiar with 

and able to trust, compared to newer volunteer escort programs.869 Carl Chan stated that he asked 

“all of our seniors in Chinatown and basically all of our businesses: Do you want to see police in 

this community? So far, I haven’t heard anybody say no.”870

For some Asian activists, forming alliances with other marginalized groups is seen as an approach 

to tackling anti-Asian hate crimes.871 Stop AAPI Hate released a statement in May 2022 following 

the Justice Department’s publication of guidelines on combatting hate crimes and hate incidents 

across the country,872 insisting that:

we cannot address anti-AAPI racism without addressing anti-Black racism, xenophobia 

and white supremacy. The safety of communities of color is interconnected. Therefore, 

we urge the Justice Department to look beyond law enforcement approaches given the 

long history of police violence against Black communities, racism in the ranks, and 

connections to white nationalism.873

Sentiments regarding the use of law enforcement among Asian Americans may find generational 

differences. A 2016 exit poll of almost 14,000 Asian Americans assessed the extent to which voters 

felt police departments treated racial and ethnic groups equally, and half of voters indicated that 

866 GAPIMNY, “75+ Asian and LGBTQ Organizations’ Statement In Opposition To Law Enforcement-Based Hate 

Crime Legislation,” Last Modified May 18, 2021, https://gapimny.org/75-asian-and-lgbtq-organizations-statementin-opposition-to-law-enforcement-based-hate-crime-legislation/

867 Jing Luo, Crystal, “Anti-Asian violence is a serious problem. But policing isn’t the solution,” The Washington 

Post, Mar 16, 2022, https://www.washingtonpost.com/outlook/2022/03/16/anti-asian-violence-is-serious-problempolicing-isnt-solution/.

868 Ibid.

869 Li Zhou, “Asian American communities grapple with whether police are the right answer to recent attacks,” Vox, 

Mar. 15, 2021, https://www.vox.com/22308407/attacks-asian-americans-police.

870 Ibid.

871 Tiffany Bui, Ha-Kyung Kim, Megan Munce, and Praveena Somasundaram, “For Asian American activists, 

police brutality, anti-Asian hate are two sides of the same coin,” Voices, Accessed Feb. 28, 2023, 

https://voices.aaja.org/index/2021/8/25/asian-americans-challenge-policing-as-answer-to-anti-asian-attacks

872 See infra notes 1146-1148 (discussing DOJ guidance).

873 Stop AAPI Hate, “Stop AAPI Hate Responds to DOJ Guidelines on Combatting Hate During the Pandemic,” 

May 22, 2022, https://stopaapihate.org/statement-doj-guidelines/. 
140 The Federal Response to Anti-Asian Racism in the United States

they did not.874 Importantly, a generational divide exists among these responses. Voters aged 18-

29 were the most likely to indicate that police did not treat racial and ethnic groups equally (68 

percent responding “no”), and responses shifted to be more positive toward police as ages 

increased, with only 32 percent of voters aged 70 and older indicating that they did not think police 

treat groups equally (see Figure 7 below).875 Additionally, a 2020 post-election poll of Asian 

American youth (aged 18-29) voters found that respondents ranked racism as one of the top three 

issues influencing their Presidential vote, second highest of all eleven priorities to choose from 

(following providing a COVID-19 vaccine).876 Eighty-seven percent of respondents agreed or 

strongly agreed that it was important to correct social and economic inequalities, and 85 percent 

agreed or strongly agreed that certain racial or ethnic groups have fewer chances to get ahead.877

Figure 7 2016 Exit Poll of Asian American Voters Regarding Police Treatment of Racial and 

Ethnic Groups, Broken Out by Age

Source: Hansi Lo Wang, “On Police Treatment, Asian-Americans Show Ethnic, Generational Splits,” NPR, Apr. 18, 

2017, https://www.npr.org/sections/thetwo-way/2017/04/18/524556485/on-police-treatment-asian-americans-showethnic-generational-splits; Asian American Legal Defense Fund, The Asian American Vote 2016,

https://www.aaldef.org/uploads/pdf/TheAsianAmericanVote2016-AALDEF.pdf.

874 Asian American Legal Defense and Education Fund, “Multilingual exit poll of 13,846 Asian American voters 

shows strong support for Democratic candidates in 2016 elections,” Apr. 18, 2017, https://www.aaldef.org/pressrelease/new-aaldef-report-the-asian-american-vote-in-2016/. 

875 Hansi Lo Wang, “On Police Treatment, Asian-Americans Show Ethnic, Generational Splits,” NPR, Apr. 18, 

2017, https://www.npr.org/sections/thetwo-way/2017/04/18/524556485/on-police-treatment-asian-americans-showethnic-generational-splits; Asian American Legal Defense Fund, The Asian American Vote 2016,

https://www.aaldef.org/uploads/pdf/TheAsianAmericanVote2016-AALDEF.pdf. 

876 Circle at Tufts University, “Driven by Key Issues, Asian Youth Increased their Political Participation,” Jul. 8, 

2021, https://circle.tufts.edu/latest-research/driven-key-issues-asian-youth-increased-their-political-participation.

877 Circle at Tufts University, “Driven by Key Issues, Asian Youth Increased their Political Participation,” Jul. 8, 

2021, https://circle.tufts.edu/latest-research/driven-key-issues-asian-youth-increased-their-political-participation. 

15%

23%

28%

30%

34%

40%

68%

54%

45%

41%

39%

32%

17%

24%

27%

29%

27%

28%

0% 10% 20% 30% 40% 50% 60% 70% 80% 90% 100%

18-29

30-39

40-49

50-59

60-69

70+

"Do you think that police departments treat racial and 

ethnic groups equally?"

Yes No Don't Know
Local Level Responses to Anti-Asian Hate Crimes 141

Evidence that hiring more police officers as the best way to reduce crime is mixed at best, as it 

may help some agencies in some circumstances, but not all research supports it to be the solution 

to a crime problem. Dr. Aaron Chalfin and colleagues, examining the impact of annual police 

employment on homicides in large U.S. cities from 1981 through 2018, found that police force 

size had an unequal effect. Each additional police officer abated between 0.06 and 0.1 

homicides.878 An examination of COPS program879 hiring grants from 1990 to 2001 found that the 

increase in police added to the force by the grants generated reductions in four index crimes: thefts, 

burglaries, robberies, and aggravated assaults, but not other crimes. 880 Another study –– a 

systematic review of 62 studies from 1971 through 2013 –– found that the overall effect size for 

police force size on crime was negative, small, and not statistically significant.881 The causes of 

crime can vary from place to place, and it is challenging to disentangle the benefits of hiring more 

officers with other contributing factors. As law enforcement experts have found, actual outcomes 

can be more dependent on the strategies law enforcement officers deploy.882

Best Practices for Law Enforcement and Prosecutors

The International Association of Chiefs of Police (IACP) and Lawyers’ Committee for Civil Rights 

Under Law published a 2019 report following several meetings of civil rights and law enforcement 

experts regarding community organizations and law enforcement response to hate crimes. 

Committee members identified five critical issues that can help enhance response practices and an 

action agenda for community organizations and law enforcement to address. The five critical 

issues were: 

1) increasing community-law enforcement collaboration to address hate crimes; 

2) enhancing training and education about hate crimes for law enforcement, prosecutors, and 

community members; 

3) strengthening data collection, reporting, and analysis; 

4) improving hate incident and crime management policies; and 

5) the role of prosecutors: early and ongoing communication with law enforcement and 

proactive engagement with the community.883

878 Aaron Chalfin, Benjamin Hansen, Emily K. Weisburst & Morgan C. Williams, 2020, “Police Force Size and 

Civilian Race,” National Bureau of Economic Research, https://www.nber.org/papers/w28202.

879 https://cops.usdoj.gov/aboutcops

880 Evans, William N., and Emily G. Owens. “COPS and Crime.” Journal of public economics 91.1 (2007): 181–

201.

881 Lee, Y., Eck, J.E. & Corsaro, N. Conclusions from the history of research into the effects of police force size on 

crime—1968 through 2013: a historical systematic review. J Exp Criminol 12, 431–451 (2016). 

https://doi.org/10.1007/s11292-016-9269-8

882 Li Zhou, “Asian American communities grapple with whether police are the right answer to recent attacks,” Vox, 

Mar. 15, 2021, https://www.vox.com/22308407/attacks-asian-americans-police.

883 International Association of Chiefs of Police and Lawyers’ Committee for Civil Rights Under Law, Action 

Agenda for Community Organizations and Law Enforcement to Enhance the Response to Hate Crimes, Apr. 1, 

2019, https://www.theiacp.org/sites/default/files/2019-04/IACP_Hate%20Crimes_Full%20Report.pdf. 
142 The Federal Response to Anti-Asian Racism in the United States

The IACP maintains that increased collaboration between community and law enforcement 

involves coming together to discuss community response to hate crimes before a crisis occurs. The 

organization recommends that law enforcement invite community leaders to serve on an advisory 

board or other agency sponsored event and report regularly to the agency liaison. Community 

groups could also invite local law enforcement to community functions to provide informal 

opportunities to engage with community members.884

The IACP also recommends enhancing training by developing law enforcement training on 

recognizing and classifying hate crimes, improving cultural competency, and avoiding bias and 

discriminatory stereotypes, and continuing on an annual basis. 885 The IACP also stresses the 

importance of improving data collection that will require agencies to track and report both hate 

incidents and hate crimes, ensure reporting forms are easy to mark an incident or crime as 

a suspected hate incident or crime, and recognize barriers some communities face in reporting 

hate crimes.886

The organization also suggests that law enforcement agencies should work to recognize and 

identify bias indicators where present to accurately identify hate crimes, and in the immediate 

aftermath of an alleged hate crime, ensure that comments from the department to the media or 

public do not rule out bias motivation.887 They should also develop policies maintaining a strong 

leadership role in the aftermath of a hate crime and thoroughly investigate and accurately report 

all incidents that might be hate crimes.888 Additionally, prosecutors and law enforcement should 

engage in joint training on hate crimes and community engagements and law enforcement agencies 

may even consider recommending that the prosecutor’s office have a designated attorney to 

prosecute hate crimes in the community.889 Below are some examples of these critical issues put 

into practice across the nation:

• Police and community engagement: Unidos is a Hispanic community outreach program, 

hosted by the Arlington (Texas) Police Department and other city agencies, that 

specifically targets Spanish-speaking residents in Arlington, Texas. Quarterly meetings 

conducted entirely in Spanish include police officers, as well as individuals from other 

professions, from across the community. These professionals engage a population that 

884 Ibid., 9.

885 Ibid., 12.

886 Ibid., 15.

887 Ibid., 19.

888 Ibid.

889 Ibid, 22.
Local Level Responses to Anti-Asian Hate Crimes 143

might not otherwise reach out to law enforcement, facilitating a “two-way communication 

and the promotion of trust between the police and the community we serve.”890

• Training: The Lawyers’ Committee, Matthew Shepard Foundation, and Civil Rights 

Enforcement Associates (CREA) have developed hate crimes training programs designed 

for law enforcement officers and prosecutors. The training instructors have experience at 

the DOJ’s Civil Rights Division and Community Relations Service, as well as the FBI’s 

Civil Rights Unit. The training programs focus on key areas of knowledge and practice that 

are essential for investigators and prosecutors confronted with hate crime cases, and 

also explores ways that law enforcement officers and community leaders can build 

relationships to better prepare for the report of a hate incident. The training is available to 

other interested jurisdictions by reaching out to the Lawyers’ Committee or the Matthew 

Shepard Foundation.891

• Collecting and sharing data: The National Policing Institute (formerly Police Foundation) 

provides a best practices guide for law enforcement agencies on released open data on hate 

crimes.892 Recommendations include: obtaining any necessary permissions, deciding on a 

web platform for data hosting, designing a data set, determining a data extraction process, 

and launching the data set.893 As the Institute says, “[b]y releasing open hate crime data, 

tribal, local, state, and federal jurisdictions can immediately improve the public’s 

understanding of hate crime nationwide and encourage official reporting of these crimes 

on the part of citizens as well as the police. As a result, policymakers and law enforcement 

agencies alike will be empowered to assign appropriate resources for the prevention and 

resolution of these often violent crimes.”894

The National Policing Institute suggests that improving the identification of hate crimes within an 

agency may start with written policies. The organization states that a written policy can “serve as 

a bridge between hate crime legislation and implementation of that law by providing officers with 

information and a standard that the agency expects them to follow.”895 Research supports the 

positive impact of a written policy, with a study of California police agencies finding that the 

890 International Association of Chiefs of Police and Lawyers’ Committee for Civil Rights Under Law, Action 

Agenda for Community Organizations and Law Enforcement to Enhance the Response to Hate Crimes, Apr. 1, 

2019, p. 10, https://www.theiacp.org/sites/default/files/2019-04/IACP_Hate%20Crimes_Full%20Report.pdf. 

891 International Association of Chiefs of Police and Lawyers’ Committee for Civil Rights Under Law, Action 

Agenda for Community Organizations and Law Enforcement to Enhance the Response to Hate Crimes, Apr. 1, 

2019, p. 12, https://www.theiacp.org/sites/default/files/2019-04/IACP_Hate%20Crimes_Full%20Report.pdf.

892 National Policing Institute, “Releasing Open Data on Hate Crimes: A Best Practices Guide for Law Enforcement 

Agencies,” Jan. 2018, https://www.policinginstitute.org/publication/releasing-open-data-on-hate-crimes-a-bestpractices-guide-for-law-enforcement-agencies/. 

893 Ibid.

894 National Policing Institute, “Releasing Open Data on Hate Crimes: A Best Practices Guide for Law Enforcement 

Agencies,” Jan. 2018, https://www.policinginstitute.org/publication/releasing-open-data-on-hate-crimes-a-bestpractices-guide-for-law-enforcement-agencies/.

895 William Johnson, “The Importance and Structure of a Written Hate Crime Policy,” Police Chief Magazine, 

https://www.policechiefmagazine.org/the-importance-and-structure-of-a-written-hate-crime-policy/. 
144 The Federal Response to Anti-Asian Racism in the United States

existence of a written policy on hate crime increased reporting by 38 percent.896 Clear hate crime 

policies that are made public also have the potential to increase reporting by communicating clearly 

that the department’s policy includes responding to and investigating these incidents.897

IACP also published a “model policy” for the investigation of hate crimes in March 2021. 

According to IACP:

Agencies should employ all necessary resources and vigorous law enforcement action to 

identify and arrest hate crime perpetrators. Also, recognizing the particular fears and 

distress typically suffered by victims, the potential for reprisal and escalation of violence, 

and the far-reaching negative consequences of these crimes on the community, agencies 

should be mindful of and responsive to the security concerns of victims and their 

families.898

The model policy outlines the importance of preparation, communications personnel procedures, 

initial response procedures, supervisor and investigator responsibilities, community relations, data 

collection and reporting, and training.899

Other best practices include law enforcement agencies sponsoring programs or special activities 

to publicly condemn hate crimes and support efforts to prevent them.900 Many tools and programs 

are available through Not In Our Town, which is a movement to stop hate, racism, and bullying.901

The tools available for law enforcement agencies to utilize includes various topical guides, roll 

call videos,902 and case studies of successful community partnerships.903

The FBI relies on participating agencies to submit accurate data according to the technical 

specification and NIBRS User Manual.904 The FBI stated to the Commission that the best practices 

for accurate data reporting are regular submissions, low error rates in data, and open 

communication between data submitters and the UCR program. 905 A newly established Hate 

896 Ibid.

897 William Johnson, “The Importance and Structure of a Written Hate Crime Policy,” Police Chief Magazine, 

https://www.policechiefmagazine.org/the-importance-and-structure-of-a-written-hate-crime-policy/.

898 International Association of Chiefs of Police, “Investigation of Hate Crimes,” Model Policy, Mar. 2021, 

https://www.theiacp.org/sites/default/files/2021-03/Hate%20Crimes%20Formatted%202021-03-23.pdf. 

899 International Association of Chiefs of Police, “Investigation of Hate Crimes,” Model Policy, Mar. 2021, 

https://www.theiacp.org/sites/default/files/2021-03/Hate%20Crimes%20Formatted%202021-03-23.pdf.

900 Ronald Davis and Patrice O’Neill, “The Hate Crimes Reporting Gap: Low Numbers Keep Tensions High,” 

Police Chief Magazine, https://www.policechiefmagazine.org/the-hate-crimes/.

901 Not In Our Town, “About Us,” https://www.niot.org/about-us. 

902 Roll call is an informal briefing prior to the start of a shift where supervisors take attendance and inform the 

oncoming shift of any outstanding incidents.

Robert Stering (2004), Police Officer’s Handbook: An Introductory Guide, Jones and Bartlett.

903 Not In Our Town, “Not In Our Town + COPS,” https://www.niot.org/cops.

904 Federal Bureau of Investigation, Interrogatory Responses to U.S. Commission on Civil Rights, Mar. 15, 2023.

905 Ibid.
Local Level Responses to Anti-Asian Hate Crimes 145

Crime Statistics Task Force will be working with law enforcement agencies to establish a best 

practice in terms of reporting data to the FBI.906 The FBI will also conduct a joint NIBRS Trainthe-Trainer and Hate Crime Symposium in August 2023 to engage participants and demonstrate 

the importance and benefits of reporting hate crime data..907

Community and Public Policy Organizations Efforts 

Asian Americans, with wide ideological differences across dozens of ethnicities, are divided over 

best measures to curb the violence against their communities. Some have called for lowering the 

bar to bring hate crime charges, toughening penalties, and boosting funding police departments to 

investigate attacks against Asians.908 Others have opposed these proposals, saying more policing 

could harm their own communities, worsen racial tensions, and disproportionately target minority 

communities that have long dealt with aggressive policing.909 Most resources trying to provide the 

public with ways to combat anti-Asian violence include encouraging reporting hate incidents and 

hate crimes to local law enforcement as well as to organizations collecting data (such as Stop AAPI 

Hate), learning about the history of Asian American discrimination, and encouraging elected 

officials to pass anti-hate legislation.910

Another national organization fighting to advance the civil and human rights for Asian Americans 

and promote a fair and equitable society for all is the nonprofit Asian Americans Advancing Justice 

(AAJC).911 AAJC has been “working to raise awareness about increased racism and discrimination 

against Asian Americans who are being wrongly blamed for the coronavirus.”912 AAJC launched 

a website called Stand Against Hatred that includes a reporting site for hate incidents against Asian 

Americans.913 As stated by John Yang, president and executive director of AAJC, as long as some 

people of color and immigrants remain distrustful of law enforcement and the government, there 

906 Ibid.

907 Ibid.

908 Nicole Hong and Jonah E. Bromwich, “Asian-Americans Are Being Attacked. Why Are Hate Crime Charges So 

Rare?” The New York Times, Mar. 18, 2021, http://www.nytimes.com/2021/03/18/nyregion/asian-hatecrimes.amp.html. 

909 Nicole Hong and Jonah E. Bromwich, “Asian-Americans Are Being Attacked. Why Are Hate Crime Charges So 

Rare?” The New York Times, Mar. 18, 2021, http://www.nytimes.com/2021/03/18/nyregion/asian-hatecrimes.amp.html.

910 Tiffany Liu, “Texas ranks 4th in anti-Asian incidents; how to stop the hate,” WFAA, Mar. 23, 2021, 

https://www.wfaa.com/article/news/local/texas/texas-ranks-4th-in-anti-asian-racist-incidents-how-to-stop-the-aapihate/287-6f10e1f8-64c4-4434-8be3-71fca2eb8a3e; Vignesh Ramachandran, “What you can do to fight violence and 

racism against Asian Americans,” PBS, Mar. 18, 2021, https://www.pbs.org/newshour/nation/what-you-can-do-tofight-violence-and-racism-against-asian-americans. 

911 Asian Americans Advancing Justice, “Who We Are,” https://www.advancingjustice-aajc.org/who-we-are. 

912 Asian Americans Advancing Justice, “Anti-Asian Hate,” https://www.advancingjustice-aajc.org/anti-asian-hate. 

913 John Yang, President & Executive Director, Asian Americans Advancing Justice (AAJC), Written Statement for 

The Federal Response to Anti-Asian Racism in the United States Briefing before the U.S. Comm’n on Civil Rights, 

Mar. 24, 2023 (hereinafter Yang Statement).
146 The Federal Response to Anti-Asian Racism in the United States

is a need for community reporting sites for hate incidents in addition to data collection by local 

police departments and the FBI.914

AAJC and Right To Be, a nonprofit organization dedicated to raising awareness and combatting 

harassment, provides bystander intervention trainings, including a specific training to stop antiAsian and xenophobic harassment. 915 The one-hour virtual training discusses how identities 

impact how public spaces can be experienced, and provides current examples of harassment and 

violence Asian American communities have been facing during the pandemic.916 The program 

teaches the “5Ds” of bystander intervention methodology: distract, delegate, document, delay, and 

direct.917 The sessions are available in several languages, and have reached more than 150,000 

people since the partnership launched in April 2020.918

The Asian American Foundation’s (TAAF) Anti-Hate and Belonging Initiative includes an AntiHate National Network, which coordinates a diverse set of organizations working to combat antiAsian hate.919 As the website describes, “[t]he solutions are already in our community. Let’s show 

the rest of the nation how to step up with us.”920 TAAF created a Rapid Response Toolkit as a 

resource where Asian communities and allies can mobilize at scale across nonprofits, media 

outlets, and advocacy and public safety groups.921 The toolkit includes a flowchart checklist for 

individual victims of a hate crime or incident, as well as a Community Response Playbook for 

individuals and community leaders. Community leaders are encouraged to mobilize their 

communities, push the media to be accountable in accurately reporting stories about the Asian 

community, use social media as a tool for narrative change, and get elected officials involved to 

use their platform to elevate community leaders and join solidarity efforts.922

Community stakeholders and experts posit that a final item of importance in the response to and 

prevention of anti-Asian hate crimes is the development of an accurate understanding of these hate 

incidents. TAAF formed a coalition with Stop Asian Hate (SAH) to draft standards and practices 

for community-based data collection, with an overarching goal to build trust, transparency, and 

accountability in improving anti-AAPI hate data quality.923 The two organizations have issued a 

codebook on documenting anti-AAPI hate, which focuses on the need to standardize definitions 

914 Yang Statement, at 11.

915 Right To Be, “Bystander Intervention To Stop Anti-Asian/American And Xenophobic Harassment,” 

https://righttobe.org/trainings/bystander-intervention-to-stop-anti-asian-american-and-xenophobic-harassment/. 

916 Yang Statement, at 12.

917 Right To Be, “Bystander Intervention To Stop Anti-Asian/American And Xenophobic Harassment,” 

https://righttobe.org/trainings/bystander-intervention-to-stop-anti-asian-american-and-xenophobic-harassment/. 

918 Yang Statement, at 12.

919 The Asian American Foundation, “TAAF Anti-Hate & Belonging Initiative,” https://www.taaf.org/antihate. 

920 Ibid.

921 The Asian American Foundation, “Rapid Response Toolkit,” https://www.taaf.org/toolkit. 

922 Ibid.

923 The Asian American Foundation and Stop AAPI Hate, Documenting Anti-AAPI Hate Codebook, Aug. 2021, 

https://assets.websitefiles.com/6052778abbcfe534ba5c5dcf/6123fec14bbdaa571bae03f9_SAH%20x%20TAAF%20Codebook%20FINA

L.pdf.
Local Level Responses to Anti-Asian Hate Crimes 147

of “anti-AAPI hate,” “race,” “racism,” as well as definitions related to incident reporting.924 The 

codebook also provides four recommendations:

1) Decide and design data collection with the community.

o Experiences of hate incidents are traumatic, and reporting can be re-traumatizing, 

and data should not be collected for the sake of data. In deciding to collect and 

designing the data collection, the collaboration with communities as collaborators 

– not subjects – is critical. This process should include conversations about the 

values, objectives, and goals of the data collection; and they should guide what type 

of questions and definitions are used to collect information.

2) Be mindful about who is reporting the hate incident.

o The working definitions in the draft are designed around first-person reports of hate 

incidents, which assume that the reporter has specific knowledge about both the 

incident and the person targeted. Witnesses (i.e., those who were not targeted but 

were present at the scene) or acquaintances of the person targeted (i.e., family and 

friends) may also submit reports. For example, people report on behalf of their 

children or elderly parents.

3) Carefully consider the reporting categories to avoid missing data.

o Missing data (i.e., missing information on characteristics, such as age, gender, and 

ethnicity) can lead to inaccurate and inappropriate conclusions and inferences. 

Thus, it is important to think beforehand about missing data. For example, consider 

the “age” variable. Many of those reporting incidents on the SAH reporting site 

were reluctant to answer the direct question, “How old are you? (in years).” As a 

result, the SAH decided to collect age information by presenting age categories to 

reduce the missing information on this variable. It is important to note that it can 

be difficult to implement a new set of categories once data collection begins.

4) Prioritize the reporting experience first.

o Think about the costs (e.g., respondent fatigue) and benefits (e.g., more 

information) when designing a report form. While more information can be helpful 

for the objectives of documenting anti-AAPI hate, the reporting form must be easy 

924 The Asian American Foundation and Stop AAPI Hate, Documenting Anti-AAPI Hate Codebook, Aug. 2021, 

https://assets.websitefiles.com/6052778abbcfe534ba5c5dcf/6123fec14bbdaa571bae03f9_SAH%20x%20TAAF%20Codebook%20FINA

L.pdf.
148 The Federal Response to Anti-Asian Racism in the United States

to use and minimize fatigue. If the reporter gets tired of the questions, they may 

abandon the report before submitting it.925

This chapter examines anti-Asian hate crimes in three selected states (California, New York, and 

Texas), and three cities within those states that have sizeable Asian populations (i.e., San 

Francisco, New York City, and Houston) from 2018 through 2021. In California, the proportion 

of anti-Asian bias-motivated events more than doubled from 2020 to 2021, and the proportion of 

anti-Asian events in San Francisco also increased significantly. In New York, there was a clear 

uptick in anti-Asian hate crime incidents from 2019 through 2021. In New York City, the data also 

showed that the number of anti-Asian hate crimes increased through 2020 and 2021. According to 

the Texas Department of Public Safety, the proportion of anti-Asian hate crimes in Texas rose very 

slightly during the time period studied, and due to a low number of reported hate crimes overall, 

Houston did not see a noticeable increase in official anti-Asian hate crimes during the examined 

years. Discrepancies between various official sources highlighted reporting issues between federal 

and state or local databases, which made addressing the magnitude of hate crimes difficult. This 

chapter also illustrates challenges in reporting and prosecuting hate crimes, best practices for law 

enforcement and prosecutors, and community organizations’ efforts to combat the rise in antiAsian incidents occurring on the local, state, and national levels. The following final chapter, 

Chapter 3, discusses the federal response to the rise of anti-Asian hate crimes and its responsibility 

to enforce federal laws protecting all U.S. citizens.

925 The Asian American Foundation and Stop AAPI Hate, Documenting Anti-AAPI Hate Codebook, Aug. 2021, 

https://assets.websitefiles.com/6052778abbcfe534ba5c5dcf/6123fec14bbdaa571bae03f9_SAH%20x%20TAAF%20Codebook%20FINA

L.pdf. 
Federal Enforcement and Strategies 149

Chapter 3: Federal Enforcement and Strategies

Chapter 3 examines the federal government’s role in documenting, investigating, and prosecuting 

anti-Asian hate crimes. Specifically, this chapter assesses federal agencies’ anti-Asian hate crimes 

prevention, investigation, and prosecution practices and analyzes the gaps in the federal response 

to hate violence in the United States during the COVID-19 pandemic.926

Department of Justice

As discussed in Chapter 1, the DOJ began prosecuting federal hate crimes after the enactment of 

the Civil Rights Act of 1968.927 As part of the DOJ’s efforts to combat hate crimes and enforce 

federal and anti-discrimination laws, the agency developed a strategic plan that includes an 

objective of combatting discrimination and hate crimes including through implementing the 

federal statutes that respond to and protect against hate, xenophobia, and violence. 928 The 

Department outlined strategies for other civil rights violations, including: 

1) Strategy 1: Enforce Federal Anti-Discrimination Laws.

2) Strategy 2: Deter and Prosecute Hate Crimes.

3) Strategy 3: Leverage Resources to Prevent Hate Crimes.

4) Strategy 4: Support State and Local Partners in Combating Discrimination and Hate.929

In one of his first acts, Attorney General Merrick B. Garland issued a directive to the Department 

to conduct a 30-day expedited internal review to determine how the Department could deploy all 

the tools at its disposal to counter the recent rise in hate crimes and hate incidents.930

On May 27, 2021, following the review’s completion and the passage of the COVID-19 Hate 

Crimes Act and Jabara-Heyer NO HATE Act, the Attorney General issued a memorandum

announcing immediate steps to deter hate crimes and bias-related incidents, address them when 

they occur, support victims, and reduce the pernicious effects these incidents have on our 

society.931 In the memorandum, the Attorney General directed the Associate Attorney General to 

926 The Commission sent formal requests for information and documentation to the Civil Rights Division of the DOJ

regarding their hate crimes prevention, investigation, and prosecution practices and analyzes the gaps in the federal 

response to hate violence in the United States. The Commission also sent requests to the Office for Civil Rights to 

analyze how the Department investigates and addresses hate crimes. The Commission requested information and 

documentation from the FBI regarding that agency’s investigative and reporting practices.

927 18 U.S.C. § 245, https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/18/245.

928 U.S. Department of Justice, DOJ Strategic Plan, Objective 3.2: Combat Discrimination and Hate Crimes, 

https://www.justice.gov/doj/doj-strategic-plan/objective-32-combat-discrimination-and-hate-crimes.

929 Ibid.

930 Office of the Attorney General, Memorandum for Department of Justice Employees, Hate-Based Violence and 

Incidents, Mar 30, 2021, https://www.justice.gov/ag/page/file/1381396/download.

931 Office of the Attorney General, Memorandum for Department of Justice Employees, Improving the Department’s 

Efforts to Combat Hate Crimes and Hate Incidents, Mar 30, 2021, https://www.justice.gov/media/1143466/dl?inline.
150 The Federal Response to Anti-Asian Racism in the United States

assign a Deputy Associate Attorney General to lead the coordination of the Department’s anti-hate 

crime and incident resources. Rachel Rossi served as the Department’s first Anti-Hate Crimes 

Resources Coordinator until May 2022, when Saeed Mody was designated.932

The Coordinator’s responsibilities include: 

• Helping focus, streamline, and maximize the effectiveness of the Department’s resources, 

including by ensuring that USAOs and local partners have access to relevant training and 

outreach materials;

• Serving as the “central hub” for Department’s attorneys, law enforcement partners, 

community organizations, and other stakeholders;

• Overseeing and be responsible for the Department’s implementation of the COVID-19 

Hate Crimes Act’s provisions concerning law enforcement agency guidance, hate crime 

reporting, grant-making, information collection, and Congressional reporting; and

• Working with the Civil Rights Division and the Executive Office for U.S. Attorneys to 

compile an online toolkit that provides USAO Civil Rights Coordinators with customizable 

community outreach materials, information about DOJ’s grants and technical assistance, 

and other materials that may improve local reporting of potential hate crimes 

and incidents.933

The DOJ states that it does not investigate or prosecute people based upon views they may hold, 

and the agency’s priority is to uphold federal statutes that protect individuals against 

discriminatory action and other civil rights violations.934 Key performance indicators, which will 

be discussed in further detail below, included the following:

• Number of Limited English Proficiency individuals who access department-funded 

materials in their native language to understand federal hate crimes and anti-discrimination 

laws;

• Percent of United States Attorney’s Offices that meet at least annually with local law 

enforcement partners and community stakeholders to collaborate on efforts to prevent hate 

crimes and incidents;

• Percent of criminal cases addressing civil rights violations, including hate crimes, 

favorably resolved.935

932 Office of Public Affairs, Justice Department Announces New Initiatives to Address and Prevent Hate Crimes and 

Hate Incidents, May 20, 2022, https://www.justice.gov/opa/pr/justice-department-announces-new-initiativesaddress-and-prevent-hate-crimes-and-hate.

933 Office of the Attorney General, “Memorandum for Department of Justice Employees,” May 27, 2021, 

https://www.justice.gov/d9/2022-12/attorney_general_memorandumimproving_the_departments_efforts_to_combat_hate_crimes_and_hate_incidents.pdf.

934 Ibid.

935 U.S. Department of Justice, DOJ Strategic Plan, Objective 3.2: Combat Discrimination and Hate Crimes, 

https://www.justice.gov/doj/doj-strategic-plan/objective-32-combat-discrimination-and-hate-crimes.
Federal Enforcement and Strategies 151

Civil Rights Division 

The Civil Rights Division (CRT) is a function of the Department of Justice that was established 

within the Civil Rights Act of 1957, and is responsible for upholding the law and constitutional 

rights of all persons in the United States.936 The Division is responsible for enforcing statutes 

prohibiting discrimination on the basis of race, sex, religion, and national origin; and has grown 

expeditiously in size and scope.937 CRT is also responsible for working with law enforcement in 

the investigation and prosecution of hate crimes. At a Congressional hearing, “Combatting the 

Rise in Hate Crimes” on March 8, 2022, Assistant Attorney General Kristen Clarke indicated that 

the office has taken several steps to be more proactive in the prosecution of hate crimes. For 

instance, CRT is working with “its federal and other partners to identify and disrupt criminal plots 

that may constitute hate crimes and acts of domestic terror before they come to fruition.”938

Additionally, AG Garland designated the Chief of CRT’s Criminal Section to “facilitate the 

expedited review of hate crimes and reports of any such crimes to Federal, State, local, and Tribal 

law enforcement agencies.”939

As a component of the Commission’s investigation of the federal role in investigating and 

prosecuting hate crimes from 2019 to 2021, staff sent interrogatories and document requests to 

DOJ to inquire about the steps the agency takes in addressing them. According to the Justice 

Department, since January 2021, CRT has charged more than 40 defendants in over 30 cases and 

obtained more than 35 convictions of defendants charged with bias-motivated crimes.940 These 

cases are documented in Table 31 below, which also provide information about the bases of the 

charges (e.g., race, gender, religion) and the results of the prosecution. The text below also includes 

analysis of trends in federal prosecution efforts.941 While most of the cases related to racial bias, 

only three involved an individual of Asian descent (highlighted below). 

Most of these cases involve charges under the Hate Crime Prevention Act (HCPA) which 

criminalizes willfully causing bodily injury, or attempting to do so through the use of fire, a 

firearm, dangerous weapons, or an explosive or incendiary device: (1) because of the actual or 

perceived race, color, religion, national origin of any person or (2) because of the actual or 

perceived religion, national origin, gender, sexual orientation, gender identity, or disability of any 

person and the crime affected interstate commerce or occurred within the special maritime or 

936 U.S. Department of Justices, Civil Rights Division, About, https://www.justice.gov/crt/about-division.

937 Ibid.

938 Questions for the Record from Senator Charles E. Grassley Hearing on “Combating the Rise in Hate Crimes, 

March 8, 2022, https://www.judiciary.senate.gov/imo/media/doc/QFR%20Responses%20-%20Clarke%20-

%202022-03-08.pdf.

939 Jabara-Heyer NO HATE Act, Pub. L. 117–13, §5,135 Stat. 266 (Codified at 34 U.S.C. 30507), 

http://uscode.house.gov/view.xhtml?req=(title:34%20section:30507%20edition:prelim)%20OR%20(granuleid:USCprelim-title34-section30507)&f=treesort&edition=prelim&num=0&jumpTo=true#sourcecredit.

940 U.S. Dep’t of Justice, Civil Rights Division, Interrogatory Responses to U.S. Commission on Civil Rights, Mar. 

16, 2023.

941 See, e.g., Chart 18 and infra notes 973-979.
152 The Federal Response to Anti-Asian Racism in the United States

territorial jurisdiction of the United States.942 However, the HCPA also provides that there may be 

no federal prosecution, “except under the certification in writing of the Attorney General, or a 

designee, that –

• the State does not have jurisdiction; 

• the State has requested that the Federal Government assume jurisdiction;

• the verdict or sentence obtained pursuant to State charges left demonstratively unvindicated 

the Federal interest in eradicating bias-motivated violence; or

• a prosecution by the United States is in the public interest and necessary to secure 

justice.”943

As discussed in Chapter 2, it is difficult to prosecute hate crimes.944 Bias motivation is a statutory 

element of criminal hate crimes law,945 but showing bias “beyond a reasonable doubt” requires 

clear evidence. We outline the cases DOJ prosecuted from 2020-2022 in Table 31, noting key 

evidence of intent. The cases that DOJ has litigated are egregious and the evidence was clear, with 

intent typically shown through racist symbols, speech, and actions of defendants in the execution 

of the crimes.

The Division prosecuted three cases identified as anti-Asian bias-motivated crimes. U.S. v. Thuran 

Johnson (aka Turan Johnson) in the District of New Mexico, U.S. v. Jose Gomez in the Western 

District of Texas; and U.S. v. Scott Eli Harris in the District of Maryland.946

In the case of Thuran Johnson, the defendant attacked a person of Indian descent outside of a Post 

Office and vandalized an Indian restaurant.947 The defendant was charged with interfering with 

federally protected rights and assault within the special maritime and territorial jurisdiction of the 

United States.948 On October 4, 2022, Johnson was sentenced to 348 days in prison and three years 

of supervised release.949 

In the case of U.S. v. Jose Gomez, the defendant attacked an Asian family he believed to be Chinese 

and therefore responsible for the COVID-19 pandemic. The defendant attacked the family with a 

knife in a grocery store and perceived them as a “threat” because they (he believed) were “from

the country who started spreading that disease around.”950 Gomez punched and cut the father in 

942 18 U.S.C. § 249(a).

943 18 U.S.C. § 249(b).

944 See supra notes 847-852 (discussing challenges in prosecuting of hate crimes).

945 18 U.S.C. § 249.

946 DOJ Responses to U.S. Commission on Civil Rights Interrogatories, Mar. 16, 2023, at 5 [on file].

947 Ibid.

948 See 18 U.S.C. § 245(b)(2)(C)) and 18 U.S.C. §113. See DOJ Responses to U.S. Commission on Civil Rights 

Interrogatories, Mar. 16, 2023, at 5 [on file].

949 Ibid.

950 U.S. Dep’t of Justice, “Texas Man Sentenced on Hate Crime Charges for Attacking Asian Family,” Aug. 4, 2022, 

https://www.justice.gov/opa/pr/texas-man-sentenced-hate-crime-charges-attacking-asian-family.
Federal Enforcement and Strategies 153

the face and slashed open the face of one of the two small children. Gomez also attacked a grocery 

store employee as the employee attempted to stop the attack against the family.951 Gomez had 

pleaded guilty to three counts of committing a hate crime and was sentenced to 25 years in prison 

on hate crime charges.952

In the case of U.S. v. Scott Eli Harris, the defendant sent threatening messages to an Asian 

American medical doctor who publicly advocated for the COVID-19 vaccine.953 In the threatening 

messages, Harris referenced the doctor’s race and national origin. Harris pled guilty to transmitting 

in interstate commerce threatening communications954 and was sentenced to six months in federal 

prison and three years of supervised release.955 U.S. Attorney Erek L. Barron, who prosecuted the 

case, stated, “threats and intimidation should not be tolerated.”956 Special Agent in Charge Thomas 

J. Sobocinski of the FBI’s Baltimore office stated, “these threats are taken very seriously ... no 

one should live in fear for doing their job. Posting a threat online, through mail or over the phone 

is a crime and comes with consequences, whether or not the person intended to carry out 

the threat.”957

Table 31 Table 30 USCCR staff summary of DOJ Reported Hate Crime Cases (2020-2022)

Defendant, state, 

and year 

Facts Evidence of intent Outcome

Franklin, Iowa, 

2021

4:21-cr-00070

(S.D. Iowa)

D attempted to kill the 

victims, two children, by 

driving her car over them.

D believed the first child 

to be either Middle 

Eastern or Black and the 

second to be Mexican, 

and D attacked them for 

that reason.

Convicted, 

plea agreement

951 DOJ Responses to U.S. Commission on Civil Rights Interrogatories, Mar. 16, 2023, at 5.

952 U.S. Dep’t of Justice, “Texas Man Sentenced on Hate Crime Charges for Attacking Asian Family,” Aug. 4, 2022, 

https://www.justice.gov/opa/pr/texas-man-sentenced-hate-crime-charges-attacking-asian-family.

953 Ibid.

954 See 18 USCA § 875(c) – Whoever transmits in interstate or foreign commerce any communication containing 

any threat to kidnap any person or any threat to injure the person of another, shall be fined under this title or 

imprisoned not more than five years, or both.

954 U.S. Dep’t of Justice, “Texas Man Pleads Guilty to Threatening a Medical Doctor Who Publicly Advocated for 

the Covid-19 Vaccine,” Feb. 7, 2022, https://www.justice.gov/usao-md/pr/texas-man-pleads-guilty-threateningmedical-doctor-who-publicly-advocated-covid-19.

955 Ibid.; DOJ Responses to U.S. Commission on Civil Rights Interrogatories, Mar. 16, 2023, at 5. 

956 U.S. Dep’t of Justice, “Texas Man Pleads Guilty to Threatening a Medical Doctor Who Publicly Advocated for 

the Covid-19 Vaccine,” Feb. 7, 2022, https://www.justice.gov/usao-md/pr/texas-man-pleads-guilty-threateningmedical-doctor-who-publicly-advocated-covid-19.

957 Ibid.
154 The Federal Response to Anti-Asian Racism in the United States

Defendant, state, 

and year 

Facts Evidence of intent Outcome

Leo, Maine, 

2021958

2:18-cr-00122 (D. 

Maine)

D conspired to commit and 

committed a series of 

assaults on Black men.

D specifically targeted 

Black men and attacked 

them unprovoked.

Convicted, 

plea agreement

Joseph, Ohio, 

2021

3:19-cr-00048 

(N.D. Ohio)

D attempted to provide ISIS 

with material support and 

also planned an attack on a 

synagogue.

D posted photographs and 

messages on social media 

in support of ISIS. D told 

undercover agents that he 

wanted to specifically 

attack Jewish people.

Convicted, 

plea agreement

Hari, Minnesota, 

2021959

0:18-cr-00150 (D. 

Minn.)

D bombed the Dar alFarooq Mosque in 2017.D was a part of the 

terrorist militia group 

“The White Rabbits” and 

targeted this mosque 

specifically to terrorize 

Muslims out of the 

country.

Convicted, 

federal jury

Jenkins, Texas, 

2021

3:18-cr-00406 

(N.D. Tex.)

D used the internet to target 

victims and attack them via 

kidnapping and carjacking.

D used Grindr to find his 

victims and admitted to 

targeting them due to their 

perceived or actual sexual 

orientation.

Convicted, 

plea agreement

McGee, Oregon, 

2021

6:21-cr-00445 (D. 

Ore.)

D allegedly used the 

internet to target, assault, 

and attempt to kill a victim.

D allegedly used Grindr, a 

dating app primarily used 

by gay men, to target gay 

men.

Ongoing, 

charged

Tobin, New 

Jersey, 2021

1:21-cr-00173 

(D.N.J.)

D conspired to threaten and 

intimidate Black and Jewish 

people by vandalizing their 

property.

D was a part of white 

supremacist hate group

Convicted, 

plea agreement

Hougen, D attacked a Black man D screamed racial slurs at Convicted, 

958 United States v. Leo, 2019 WL 7340135, (D. Me., 2019).

959 United States v. Hari, 2019 WL 7838275, (D. Minn., 2019)
Federal Enforcement and Strategies 155

Defendant, state, 

and year 

Facts Evidence of intent Outcome

California, 2021

5:20-cr-00432 

(N.D. Cal.)

with a knife. the victim while stabbing 

the victim. At the time of 

the attack, D was already 

on probation for a 

different raciallymotivated assault.

bench trial

Earnest, 

California, 2021

3:19-cr-01850 

(S.D. Cal.)

D entered a mosque and 

open-fired, killing one, 

injuring three, and 

attempting to kill a total of 

fifty.

D admitted to being 

motivated by religious 

hatred.

Convicted, 

plea agreement

Shea, 

Washington, 2021

2:20-cr-00032 

(W.D. Wash.)

D (in collaboration with the 

below) sent threatening mail 

and committed acts of 

cyber-stalking against 

journalists and advocates 

who threatened to expose 

anti-Semitism.

D and co-defendants 

created Nazi posters to 

send to the victims. D is 

also a leader of Neo-Nazi 

group Atomwaffen 

Division.

Convicted, 

plea agreement

Cole, 

Washington, 2022 

960

2:20-cr-00032 

(W.D. Wash.)

D sent threatening mail and 

committed acts of cyberstalking against journalists 

and advocates.

D committed these acts 

due to religious 

intolerance, as D is the 

leader of Neo-Nazi group 

Atomwaffen Division

Convicted, 

trial by federal 

jury

Vulchev, Maine, 

2022

3:22-cr-30001 (D. 

Mass.)

D allegedly committed 

arson at a predominantly 

Black church.

D’s vehicle allegedly 

contained evidence of his 

hatred toward Black 

people, including hateful 

photos, photos of Adolf 

Hitler, a “White Lives 

Matter” mural, and the 

use of slurs against Black 

people.

Ongoing, 

indicted

960 U.S. v. Cole, 465 F.Supp.3d 1175, (2020).
156 The Federal Response to Anti-Asian Racism in the United States

Defendant, state, 

and year 

Facts Evidence of intent Outcome

Donner, Kansas, 

2022

2:20-cr-20075 (D. 

Kan.)

D intimidated the victim by 

threatening him with a 

knife. 

D threatened the victim 

due to his race and to 

interfere with his access to 

fair housing.

Convicted, 

plea 

agreement.

Douglas Fox, 

Tennessee, 2022

3:21-cr-00196 

(M.D. Tenn.)

D committed arson at four 

churches.

D intentionally set fire to 

various churches of 

different Christian 

denominations due to 

their religious practices.

Convicted, 

bench trial 

McMichael, 

McMichael, and 

Bryan, Georgia, 

2022 961

2:21-cr-00022 

(S.D. Ga.)

Ds attempted to intimidate 

and kidnap a Black man 

who was jogging.

Ds hold beliefs 

associating Black people 

with criminality and made 

racist comments and used 

racial slurs.

Convicted, 

trial by federal 

jury

Stepanyan and 

Chalikyan, 

California, 2022

2:21-cr-00188 

(C.D. Cal.)

Ds attacked five victims 

inside a Turkish restaurant 

and threatened to kill them.

Ds shouted ethnic slurs 

during the attack.

Convicted, 

bench trial

Sechriest, Texas, 

2022

1:22-cr-0053 

(W.D. Tex.)

D allegedly set fire to a 

synagogue.

D allegedly targeted the 

synagogue due to 

religious practices.

Ongoing, 

charged

Hannon, Florida, 

2022

8:22-cr-00134 

(M.D. Fla.)

D threatened a member of 

the U.S. House of 

Representatives, Ilhan 

Omar.

D’s threats specifically 

mentioned the victim’s 

religious background.

Convicted, 

plea agreement

Marsh, New 

Jersey

D allegedly violated the 

Shepard and Byrd Act by 

D allegedly targeted the 

victims because they are 

Ongoing, 

charged

961 United States v. McMichael, 2022 WL 481447, (S.D. Ga., 2022).
Federal Enforcement and Strategies 157

Defendant, state, 

and year 

Facts Evidence of intent Outcome

3:22-mj-06027 

(D.N.J.)

causing bodily injury and 

attempting to kill the 

victims.

Jewish.

Pritchard, 

Missouri, 2022

1:22-cr-00060 

(E.D. Mo.)

D allegedly burnt down the 

Church of Jesus Christ of 

Latter-day Saints.

D allegedly intentionally 

targeted the church to 

prevent the exercise of 

their religious practices.

Ongoing, 

charged

Gendron, New 

York, 2022

1:22-cr-00109 

(W.D.N.Y.)

D allegedly violated the 

Shepard-Byrd Act in 

connection with a mass 

shooting at a grocery store, 

resulting in the death of ten 

Black people and the injury 

of three others.

D allegedly targeted the 

victims due to their race.

Ongoing, 

indicted

Pruden, 

Washington, 

D.C., 2022

1:22-cr-00231 

(D.D.C.)

D allegedly assaulted the 

victims in a park with a 

chemical irritant on five 

separate occasions.

D allegedly went to a 

known meeting place for 

men seeking consensual 

sex with other men.

Ongoing, 

indicted

Gomez, Texas, 

2022

7:22-cr-00026 

(W.D. Tex.)

D physically assaulted an 

Asian family of four in a 

grocery store using a knife 

— among the victims were 

a six-year-old child slashed 

in the face and the father.

D admitted to believing 

that the Asian family was 

Chinese and therefore 

responsible for the 

COVID-19 pandemic.

Convicted, 

plea agreement

Johnson and 

Killian, 

Oklahoma, 2022

22-cr-025 (W.D. 

Okla.)

Ds physically assaulted the 

victims, a Black man and 

his White friend.

Ds admitted to assaulting 

the victim due to his race.

Convicted, 

plea agreement

Genco, Ohio, D planned to shoot women D plotted to kill women Convicted, 
158 The Federal Response to Anti-Asian Racism in the United States

Defendant, state, 

and year 

Facts Evidence of intent Outcome

2022

1:21-cr-00085 

(S.D. Ohio)

at a university. due to his selfidentification as an 

“involuntary celibate.” D 

wrote a manifesto stating 

that he would “slaughter” 

women.

plea agreement

Torres, Texas, 

2022

3:22-cr-00398 

(N.D. Tex.)

D allegedly shot at the 

victims, killing one and 

attempting to kill four 

others.

D allegedly was 

motivated by the actual or 

perceived religion of the 

victims.

Ongoing, 

indicted

George, 

Washington, 2022

2:22-cr-00109 

(W.D. Wash.)

D threatened to shoot Black 

people at a store.

D specifically targeted 

people due to race and has 

done so on multiple 

incidences in the past as 

well.

Convicted, 

plea agreement

Kaonohi, Aki,

Hawaii, 2022962

1:20-cr-00136 (D. 

Hawaii)

Ds physically assaulted the 

victim twice outside his 

home.

Ds verbally attacked the 

victim as well, saying that 

the White victim did not 

belong in the Hawaiian 

neighborhood.

Convicted, 

trial by jury

Ruiz, Puerto Rico, 

2022 963

3:21-cr-00267

D acted with others to 

assault the victim based on 

her gender identity.

D admitted to attacking 

the victim due to her 

being and perceiving her 

to be transgender.

Convicted, 

plea agreement

Cox, Mississippi, 

2023

1:22-cr-00124 

(S.D. Miss.)

D attempted to intimidate 

his neighbors, a Black 

family, by burning a cross 

in his front yard, violating 

the Fair Housing Act.

D made racially 

derogatory remarks.

Convicted, 

plea agreement

Pilon, Michigan, 

2023

D attempted to intimidate 

citizens supporting Black 

D verbally attacked 

victims with racial threats 

Convicted, 

plea agreement

962 United States v. Alo-Kaonohi, 2022 WL 10082094, (D. Haw., 2022).

963 United States v. Lobos-Ruiz, 2022 WL 3602031, (D.P.R., 2022).
Federal Enforcement and Strategies 159

Defendant, state, 

and year 

Facts Evidence of intent Outcome

1:22-cr-20227 

(E.D. Mich.)

Lives Matter supporters. and also sent a note with a 

noose, a symbol with a 

racist background.

Starrett, 

Washington, 2022

3:21-cr-05334 

(W.D. Wash.)

D allegedly set fire to three 

Jehovah’s Witness 

Kingdom Halls.

D allegedly attacked 

religious property due to 

its religious nature.

Ongoing, 

charged

Foxworth, 

Georgia, 2022

1:22-cr-00176 

(N.D. Ga.)

D fired a pistol through two 

convenience stores with the 

intention to kill.

D made statements 

explaining that he targeted 

Black people and people 

who appeared Arab.

Convicted, 

plea agreement

Lehigh, Idaho, 

2022

1:23-cr-00012 (D. 

Idaho)

D allegedly attempted to 

injure the victims by driving 

his car at them.

Allegedly motivated by 

perceived and actual 

sexual orientation of the 

victims.

Ongoing, 

indicted

Harris, Maryland, 

2022

1:21-cr-00390 (D. 

Md.)

D threatened a medical 

doctor who advocated for 

the COVID-19 vaccine, 

referencing the doctor’s 

Asian American race and 

national origin.

D sent the victim a 

threatening message 

transmitted by interstate 

communication.

Convicted, 

pled guilty

Thuran Johnson, 

New Mexico, 

2022964

1:21-cr-01401 

(D.N.M.)

D attacked a person of 

Indian origin outside a U.S. 

Post Office and vandalized 

an Indian restaurant.

D used racial slurs during 

the incident.

Convicted, 

pled guilty

Seneca, 

Louisiana, 2023

D carried out an attempted 

kidnapping and murder 

D specifically chose to 

use a queer dating app. D 

Convicted, 

plea agreement

964 DOJ Responses to U.S. Commission on Civil Rights Interrogatories, Mar. 16, 2023, at 5.
160 The Federal Response to Anti-Asian Racism in the United States

Defendant, state, 

and year 

Facts Evidence of intent Outcome

6:21-cr-00043 

(W.D. La.)

scheme using Grindr, a 

queer dating app, to lure 

gay men.

admitted to planning to 

continue to target gay men 

until he was caught.

Lashley and 

Lashley, Florida, 

2023

5:22-cr-00027 

(M.D. Fla.)

Ds physically assaulted the 

victim outside a Family 

Dollar store where the 

victim was shopping.

Ds used racial slurs 

before, during, and after 

assault. Ds admitted to 

acting due to the victim's 

perceived race.

Convicted, 

plea agreement

DeSimas, Stanley, 

Smith, Dorson,

Washington, 2023

2:20-cr-00222 

(W.D. Wash.)

Ds assaulted a disc jockey 

at a local bar based on his 

racial appearance.

A group of approximately 

17 white supremacists 

gathered for an event in 

memory of a deceased 

white supremacist. Ds 

called victim racial slurs. 

Ds admitted to 

membership/prospective 

membership to white 

supremacist groups Crew 

38 and Hammerskins.

Convicted, 

plea agreement

Ritter, South 

Carolina, 2023

1:23-cr-24 

(D.S.C.)

D allegedly shot and 

murdered the transgender 

victim based on gender 

identity, proceeded to make 

false statements to law 

enforcement officers.

D used a phone to text and 

call to lure the victim the 

day of murder.

Ongoing, 

charged

Community Relations Services

Community Relations Services (CRS) is another component of the DOJ, which serves as 

“America’s Peacemaker” for communities that face tension and civil disturbances based on 
Federal Enforcement and Strategies 161

discriminatory action involving race, color, or national origin.965 According to CRS’ FY 2022 

Strategic Plan, the office list its top priorities as combatting hate crimes, promoting trust and 

accountability, and strengthening the relationships between law enforcement and the 

community.966 One of CRS’ goals is to protect individual’s civil rights, and the component adheres 

to its federal mandate by addressing these challenges. It also serves as a neutral party to help 

communities develop conflict resolution strategies to mitigate, prevent, and respond to any future 

disputes based upon its jurisdictional mandate.967

CRS does not have jurisdiction to investigate or prosecute hate crimes nor any law enforcement 

authority, rather this office works with all interested parties (e.g., state and local governments, 

private and public organizations, and civil rights groups) to prevent and resolve conflicts and 

facilitate mutual understanding and solutions to community challenges.968 CRS reports that it also 

helps community stakeholders “reduce fear, dispel misunderstandings or misperceptions, and 

increase cultural competency in the broader community.” 969 Moreover, the office provides 

technical assistance and training and offers solutions to prevent and resolve similar 

future challenges.970

In FY 2019, President Trump’s budget proposal called for an end to all CRS funding, the closing 

of all CRS regional offices, and the consolidation of a limited number of staff into one headquarters 

office in Washington, D.C. The budget stated that the DOJ would transfer CRS’ activities to 

CRT.971 These changes were also requested in the FY 2020 and FY 2021 President’s Budget 

requests,972 despite data reflecting that anti-Asian bias-motivated incidents and hate crimes had 

increased. The Justice Department wrote that the Civil Rights Division would subsume the role of 

CRS to “improve efficiency” and “reduce redundancies.”973 The FY 2020 and FY 2021 budget 

requests did not include adding any new positions and, instead, included a decrease of 54 positions. 

While CRS was appropriated $16.0 million by Congress for its continued operation in FY 2020, 

in the following year’s budget request, the Justice Department continued to pursue its plan to 

965 The Community Relations Service (CRS) was established by Title X of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 (42 U.S.C. §

2000g et seq.). With the passage of the Shepard-Byrd Act, the CRS’ jurisdiction expanded to protect communities.

That were not previously protected under the 1964 Civil Rights Act (e.g., LGBT communities, disability

community). See HCPA, 18 § 249, §6; Department of Justice, Community Relations Service (CRS),

https://www.justice.gov/crs.

966 U.S. Department of Justice, Community Relations Service Strategic Plan 2022-2026,

https://www.justice.gov/doj/book/file/1516901/download.

967 Ibid.

968 Title X of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, 42 U.S.C. § 2000g.

969 U.S. Dep’t of Justice, Community Relations Service, (last updated Feb. 14, 2017), 

https://www.justice.gov/crs/what-we-do. 

970 Ibid.

971 U.S. Department of Justice, “Community Relations Service (CRS): FY 2019 Budget Request At A Glance,” 

https://www.justice.gov/jmd/page/file/1033131/download.

972 U.S. Department of Justice, “Community Relations Service (CRS): FY 2020 Budget Request At A Glance,” 

https://www.justice.gov/jmd/page/file/1142416/download; U.S. Department of Justice, “Community Relations 

Service (CRS): FY 2021 Budget Request At A Glance,” https://www.justice.gov/doj/page/file/1246786/download.

973 Ibid.
162 The Federal Response to Anti-Asian Racism in the United States

consolidate CRS into CRT.974 However, pursuant to Executive Order 13985, “Advancing Racial 

Equity and Support for Underserved Communities Through the Federal Government,” issued on 

January 20, 2021,975 the Justice Department wrote that it planned to revitalize CRS in order for the 

office to continue its work with “communities in conflict to help rebuild relationships, facilitate 

understanding, and encourage the development of local solutions.”976

In response to the increase of hate incidents and hate crimes against AAPI communities, John 

Yang, president of Asian Americans Advancing Justice, stated that, “[o]ne of our requests (of the 

Biden administration) is to ensure that the CRS has adequate resources... CRS is one piece of the 

solution, but it is an important piece.”977

In the FY 2022 President’s Budget, CRS requested $20.0 million (an 11.3 percent increase over 

its enacted FY 2021 budget) and an increase of 16 new positions to continue serving as the 

“peacemaker for community conflicts and tensions arising from real or perceived discriminatory 

practices and help[ing] communities prevent and respond to alleged violent hate crimes.”978 Some 

of these actions have included: strengthening police and community partnerships, organizing bias 

incidents and hate crime forums, engaging and building relations with American Sikhs, law 

enforcement and transgender community training, and school-student problem identification and 

resolution of issues.979 Specifically, in terms of combating hate crimes, the FY22 budget request 

also stated that these additional resources would help AAPI and LGBTQ communities prevent and 

respond to bias incidents and hate crimes.980

In response to the Commission’s request regarding the office’s efforts to address anti-Asian hate 

crimes from 2020-2022, CRS wrote:

The Department of Justice’s Community Relations Service (CRS) maintains a digital case 

management system to store information related to casework conducted by CRS staff. Case 

summaries record services and outcomes of CRS’s actions and activities for a given case. 

CRS conducted a query of its digital case management system using the following 

parameters: “HCPA” and both “HCPA” and “CRA” and “Asian,” “Asian American,” 

974 U.S. Department of Justice, “Community Relations Service (CRS): FY 2021 Budget Request At A Glance,” 

https://www.justice.gov/doj/page/file/1246786/download.

975 The White House, “Executive Order on Advancing Racial Equity and Support for Underserved Communities 

Through the Federal Government,” Jan. 20, 2021, https://www.whitehouse.gov/briefing-room/presidentialactions/2021/01/20/executive-order-advancing-racial-equity-and-support-for-underserved-communities-through-thefederal-government/.

976 U.S. Department of Justice, Equity Action Plan Summary: U.S. Department of Justice, 

https://www.whitehouse.gov/wp-content/uploads/2022/04/DOJ-EO13985-equity-summary.pdf

977 Kevin Johnson, “From $15 million to $0: As racial tensions simmered, Trump administration sought to defund 

DOJ ‘peacemaker’ unit,” USA Today, Mar. 27, 2021, 

https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/politics/2021/03/27/trump-tried-defund-doj-peacemakers-used-repair-racerelations/6965530002/.

978 U.S. Department of Justice, “Community Relations Service FY 2022 Budget Requestion At A Glance,” 

https://www.justice.gov/file/1399006/download.

979 Ibid.

980 Ibid.
Federal Enforcement and Strategies 163

“Native Hawaiian,” “Pacific Islander,” and “Arab American” as possible primary 

jurisdictional groups. 

This query yielded data indicating CRS involvement in 78 cases during the five-year period 

from January 1, 2018, through December 31, 2022. Eight (8) of these cases occurred during 

the period from January 1, 2018, through December 31, 2019. Seventy (70) cases occurred 

during the following three-year period from January 1, 2020, through December 31, 

2022.981

In 2019, CRS responded to reports of growing racial tension and repeated incidents of biasmotivated bullying, harassment, and petty crimes targeting Seattle’s AAPI students. 982 CRS 

worked with community leaders to raise awareness, improve relations between law enforcement 

and local AAPI youth, encourage reporting, and conduct prevention workshops with service 

organizations and the Seattle Police Department.983

Due to the rise in bias-motivated incidents against AAPI communities during the pandemic, in 

early 2020, CRS began meeting with national AAPI organizations to hear the communities’ 

concerns.984 In March 2020, CRS formed the AAPI COVID-19 Related Incidents of Bias Working 

Group (CRIB) to serve as a channel for communications between government agencies and 

communities across the regions and address the bias-based incidents in the AAPI communities.

985

The working group’s mission is to coordinate internal casework focused on AAPI communities, 

to engage with regional response organizations and work with national advocacy groups, to build 

internal and external response capacity and sustainable response mechanisms.986

According to the 2020 Annual Report during the Spring of 2020, CRS implemented 

comprehensive virtual programing to focus on coordinating a national response to address an 

increase in hate crimes targeting AAPI communities.987 In response to the Commission’s inquiries, 

CRS wrote that:

Amid the nationwide wave of anti-AANHPI bias incidents and hate crimes, CRS provided 

services to AANHPI communities in 35 cases across seven states. CRS also appointed a 

special assistant for AANHPI issues to provide support across the regions and represent 

CRS in meetings involving related issues, including at the White House Initiative on Asian 

Americans and Pacific Islanders (WHIAANHPI) events.988

981 DOJ Responses to U.S. Commission on Civil Rights Interrogatories, Mar. 16, 2023, at 6.

982 Ibid., 7.

983 Community Relations Service, Annual Report, 2019, U.S. Dep’t of Justice, at 75, 

https://www.justice.gov/file/1376351/download.

984 Community Relations Services, “Responding to Hate Crimes Against Asian Americans and Pacific Islanders,” 

June 4, 2021, https://www.justice.gov/crs/highlights/AAPI-hate-crimes.

985 U.S. Department of Justice, Community Relations Services, Fiscal Year 2020 Annual Report, 

https://www.justice.gov/file/1461451/download.

986 Ibid., 32.

987 DOJ Responses to U.S. Commission on Civil Rights Interrogatories, Mar. 16, 2023, at 7.

988 Ibid.
164 The Federal Response to Anti-Asian Racism in the United States

For example, CRS worked with local police, a local advocacy group, the FBI, and the U.S. 

Attorney’s Office for the Southern District of New York to ease community anxieties and tensions 

caused by a series of incidents targeting New York City’s Asian community.989 Similarly, after the 

Atlanta spa shootings in 2020, CRS also worked to provide outreach, facilitations, and consultation 

efforts to respond to tension and outcries from the Atlanta-area Asian community.990

CRS also worked with local district attorney’s offices, law enforcement, and community leaders 

following several assaults against AAPI individuals in New York and New Jersey. These meetings 

created a virtual Bias Incidents and Hate Crimes forum of 100 participants who shared information 

about these occurrences and provided education for better reporting practices. Following these 

events, in 2020, the NYPD launched its own Asian Hate Crimes Task Force (see Chapter 2 of this 

report for further details). 

As of the writing of this report, CRS has continued its Bias Incidents and Hate Crimes forum,

which is intended to promote a dialogue between community members and law enforcement, 

provide education and information related to federal, state, and local hate crime laws, and engage 

community advocacy organizations and law enforcement in developing methods to respond to and 

combat bias-motivated incidents and hate crimes.991

In early 2021, after dozens of reports of anti-Asian bias incidents, which included racial slurs, 

vandalism, threats, assaults, and two deaths of AAPI older adults across the San Francisco Bay 

Area, CRS worked with local law enforcement, AAPI community leaders, Black and Latino faith 

leaders, AAPI youth, and other community leaders to educate and facilitate information about how 

to report and investigate hate crimes.992 CRS stated that while not all the incidents have been 

prosecuted as hate crimes, in many cases, the communities have perceived these incidents as 

racially motivated.993 In response to these incidents, community members began organizing citizen 

patrol groups amid growing retaliatory violence concerns. CRS also worked with leaders to deescalate tensions and produced a public service announcement in multiple AAPI languages with 

information to report hate crimes.994 CRS indicated that: 

To help promote peace in these communities, conciliation specialists established 

connections between non-AAPI organizations and AAPI groups to develop and release 

statements against bias and hate and lead solidarity events. CRS worked with law 

enforcement to improve methods on how to engage with AAPI communities in culturally 

989 Ibid.

990 Ibid.

991 Community Relations Services, “Bias Incidents and Hate Crimes Forum,” Dec. 20, 2022, 

https://www.justice.gov/crs/our-work/facilitation/bias-incidents-hate-crimes.

992 Ibid.

993 Ibid.

994 U.S. Department of Justice, Responding to Hate Crimes Against AAPI Communities, 

https://www.justice.gov/crs/highlights/AAPI-hate-crimes.
Federal Enforcement and Strategies 165

appropriate ways. This included identifying language access needs, making connections 

with community leaders, and assisting with navigating cultural sensitivities.995 

In 2021, following these meetings with national and local Asian American, Native Hawaiian, and 

Pacific Islander (AANHPI) organizations to address concerns about the COVID-19-related rise in 

anti-AANHPI hate crimes, CRS released a “best practices” guide that can be utilized by working 

groups to develop community response plans to combat racism and hate violence.996 These best 

practices were used to help during challenging conversations, enable communities to address 

difficult conversations, and find a common good. Some of these practices include:

• Having smaller meetings and breakout sessions;

• Allowing members share their perspectives; and

• Using co-facilitators to address the participants’ concerns.997

Office for Victims of Crime

The Office for Victims of Crime (OVC) is one of the six program offices in the Office of Justice 

Programs (OJP) at the Justice Department. According to OVC’s website, the office’s role is to 

assist crime victims and provide leadership regarding changing attitudes, policies, and practices to 

promote justice and healing for all victims of crime.998 OVC also provides technical assistance 

to law enforcement999 and administers the Crime Victims Fund, which is paid through fines and 

penalties by convicted federal offenders (including all offenses), and through private gifts 

and donations.1000

As of December 2022, the Crimes Victims Fund was over $1.8 billion.1001 OVC gives money to 

states so they can develop programs to partner with community members and assist victims of 

crime.1002 Funding also may go to community organizations and/or states to raise awareness 

concerning victims’ issues, help in compliance with victims’ rights laws, and offer training and 

technical assistance to victim assistance professionals.1003

995 Ibid.

996 Community Relations Service, “Preventing and Responding to Bias and Hate Incidents Against Asian American, 

Native Hawaiian, and Pacific Islander (AANHPI) Communities,” Aug. 20, 2021, 

https://www.justice.gov/file/1426866/download. 

997 Ibid.

998 Office of Victims of Crime, “About OVC,” U.S. Dep’t of Justice, https://ovc.ojp.gov/about.

999 34 U.S.C. § 20103.

1000 Office for Victims of Crime, “Crime Victims Fund,” U.S. Dep’t of Justice, Office of Justice Programs, 

https://www.ovc.gov/about/victimsfund.html.

1001 Ibid.

1002 Ibid. 

1003 Ibid.
166 The Federal Response to Anti-Asian Racism in the United States

In FY 2020, $133,896,000 was allocated to the Victims of Crime Act (VOCA) 1004 Victim 

Assistance Formula Grant Program, representing a 3.5 percent decrease from FY 2019. In FY 

2020, 54 states and territories received VOCA grants, and four of the State Administering 

Agencies (SAAs) provided $361,677,837, a 9.5 percent decrease from FY 2019, and provided 

compensation to 218,090 claims.1005 Of the individuals who applied for compensation in 2020, 38 

percent were White Americans, 27 percent were Black Americans, and 26 percent were Latino 

Americans. By comparison, Asian Americans made up 2 percent.1006

According to its annual report, VOCA SAAs witnessed a decline in the number of applications for 

compensation due to challenges imposed by the pandemic to its standard public outreach 

procedures. Additionally, SAAs had suffered from a lack of volunteers, decreased funding, and 

the shifting of funds because of the pandemic.1007 In FY 2020, there were 44,117 claims paid to 

specific victimization types. In terms of victims, when indicated, the types of victimization 

included bullying, domestic and family violence, elder abuse/neglect, hate crimes, and mass 

violence (see Table 32).1008 Assault was the most common crime type indicated to victimization 

with 28,378 claims paid.1009 Furthermore, assault was also one of the top two crime types related 

to each of the victimization categories. The largest decrease of victimization categories was 

bullying, followed by mass violence (42 and 27 percent, respectively). Of the 486 hate crime

applications made, 382 were assault claims and 43 were homicide claims.1010 In 2020, there were 

a total of 486 applications due to hate crime victimization. Comparatively, in 2019, there were 481 

reported hate crime victimizations, and the majority were due to assault (379 claims).1011

Table 32 Numbers of Applicants Across Type of Victimization (2020)

Domestic & Family Violence 40,252

Mass Violence 1,543

Elder Abuse/Neglect 1,153

Bullying 683

Hate Crimes 486

1004 Victims of Crime Act, P.L. 98-473.

1005 Booz Allen Hamilton, Victims of Crime Act: Victim Assistance Formula Grant Program Fiscal Year 2020, Data 

Analysis Report, Office for Victims of Crime, Office of Justice Programs, U.S. Dep’t of Justice, at 1, 

https://ovc.ojp.gov/program/victims-crime-act-voca-administrators/performance-reports/fy-2020-vocacompensation-performance-report.pdf. 

1006 Ibid., 3.

1007 Ibid., 4.

1008 Ibid., 6. 

1009 Booz Allen Hamilton, Victims of Crime Act: Victim Compensation Formula Grant Program, Fiscal Year 2020, 

Data Analysis Report, Office for Victims of Crime, Office of Justice Programs, U.S. Dep’t of Justice, at 6.

1010 Ibid.

1011 Booz Allen Hamilton, Victims of Crime Act: Victim Compensation Formula Grant Program, Fiscal Year 2019, 

Data Analysis Report, Office for Victims of Crime, Office of Justice Programs, U.S. Dep’t of Justice, at 7.
Federal Enforcement and Strategies 167

Source: Booz Allen Hamilton, Victims of Crime Act: Victim Compensation Formula Grant Program, Fiscal Year 

2020, Data Analysis Report, Office for Victims of Crime, Office of Justice Programs, U.S. Dep’t of Justice.

Despite the increase in overall reported hate crimes to the FBI, in FY 2020 there were no claims 

paid for hate crime victims.1012 As of the writing of this report, the FY 2021 annual performance 

report has yet to be released.

OVC, through its mandate under VOCA, also provides supplemental funding to state programs 

that offer financial assistance and reimbursement to individuals who have incurred expenses as a 

direct result of a crime.1013 However, over the past several years, federal funding under VOCA for 

the Crime Victims Fund (CVF) has decreased which has caused issues for victim support 

organizations. 1014 For example, in a letter to Maryland Governor Larry Hogan, a Maryland 

congressional delegation wrote that: 

In FY 2018, receipts into the CVF began to diminish – by some estimates by more than 

90% – resulting in roughly 70% reduction in funding for victims’ assistance programs, 

grants, and organizations. Some of the reasons for this decline include an increased use of 

deferred and non-prosecution agreements, in particular under the 

Trump Administration.1015 

In light of these concerns, President Biden signed the VOCA Fix to Sustain the Crime Victims 

Fund Act of 2021 on June 22, 2021.1016 The bipartisan legislation is intended to make long-term 

changes to preserve VOCA funding and provide immediate support to states to prevent 

programming cuts.1017

Office of Juvenile Justice and Delinquency Prevention

The prevention of youth hate crimes and identity-based bullying falls under the U.S. Department 

of Justice, Office of Justice Program’s Office of Juvenile Justice and Delinquency Prevention

1012 Booz Allen Hamilton, Victims of Crime Act: Victim Compensation Formula Grant Program, Fiscal Year 2020, 

Data Analysis Report, Office for Victims of Crime, Office of Justice Programs, U.S. Dep’t of Justice, at 12.

1013 The annual grant amount is based on 60 percent of each state’s compensation payments from the previous two 

years and is set by statute. See Booz Allen Hamilton, Victims of Crime Act: Victim Compensation Formula Grant 

Program, Fiscal Year 2017, Data Analysis Report, Office for Victims of Crime, Office of Justice Programs, U.S. 

Dep’t of Justice, at 1, https://ojp.gov/ovc/grants/vocanpr_vc17_508.pdf.

1014 See e.g., Center for Domestic Peace, “Understanding VOCA Cuts,” 

https://www.cdpjaxcountync.org/understanding-vocacuts/#:~:text=Over%20the%20last%20few%20years,which%20most%20victim%20services%20rely.

1015 Jamie Raskin, “Maryland Congressional Delegation Letter to Hogan Details Federal Action to Replenish 

Victims of Crime Funds,” Nov. 3, 2021, https://raskin.house.gov/2021/11/maryland-congressional-delegation-letterto-hogan-details-federal-action-to-replenish-victims-of-crime-funds.

1016 VOCA Fix to Sustain the Crime Victims Fund Act, P.L. 117-27, 117th Congress (2021-2022), 

https://www.congress.gov/bill/117th-congress/house-bill/1652/all-actions?overview=closed#tabs.

1017 Id.
168 The Federal Response to Anti-Asian Racism in the United States

(OJJDP). 1018 The OJJDP program operates from a youth-based lens of prevention and early 

intervention. 1019 This includes increasing awareness against hate-based and bias-motivated 

bullying and incidents among youth, while providing communities with strategies and tools to help 

prevent this behavior.

1020

On October 27, 2021, the program office launched a comprehensive national initiative to prevent 

identity-based bullying and youth hate crimes and incidents.1021 According to the DOJ,

false information and harmful statements about Asian American and Pacific Islander 

communities have led to increasing acts of intolerance across the nation — from verbal 

harassment to violence. In schools around the country, AAPI students have reported 

bullying and harassment by classmates because of their race or national origin, including 

their ethnicity, ancestry, and language.1022

Language Access 

As discussed in Chapter 1, language access is a significant obstacle in reporting hate crimes among 

AAPI communities. 1023 Beginning on August 11, 2000, Executive Order 13166: “Improving 

Access to Services for Persons with Limited English Proficiency” was signed by President 

Clinton.1024 This order requested that federal agencies carefully examine the services they already 

provide to individuals with limited English proficiency (LEP), identify any gaps in services, and 

develop and implement systems to provide necessary services to those with LEP to ensure they 

can access the necessary assistance. 1025 The Justice Department issued a LEP guidance: 

“Enforcement of Title VI of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 - National Origin Discrimination against 

Persons with Limited English Proficiency” (LEP Guidance) that Federal financial assistance must 

abide by guidelines to ensure the programs and activities do not violate Title VI's prohibition 

against national origin discrimination.1026

1018 Office of Juvenile Justice and Delinquency Prevention, “Preventing Youth Hate Crimes Identity-Based Bullying 

Initiative,” https://ojjdp.ojp.gov/programs/preventing-youth-hate-crimes-bullying-initiative#about-the-initiative

1019 Ibid.

1020 Ibid.

1021 Office of Juvenile Justice and Delinquency Prevention, “Preventing Youth Hate Crimes Identity-Based Bullying 

Initiative, Nov 17, 2021, https://ojjdp.ojp.gov/programs/preventing-youth-hate-crimes-bullying-initiative#about-theinitiative.

1022 U.S. Dep’t of Justice and U.S. Dep’t of Education, “Confronting COVID-19-Related Harassment in Schools,” 

May 2021, https://www.justice.gov/crt/page/file/1392041/download.

1023 See supra notes 464-490 (discussing underreporting of hate crimes).

1024 Exec. Order No. 13166, 65 Fed. Reg. 50123 (Aug. 16, 2000), 

https://www.federalregister.gov/documents/2000/08/16/00-20938/improving-access-to-services-for-persons-withlimited-english-proficiency. 

1025 The United States Department of Justice, “Executive Order 13166,” https://www.justice.gov/crt/executive-order13166.

1026 Id.
Federal Enforcement and Strategies 169

Individuals with limited English proficiency not only are less likely to report a crime when one 

occurs but are also less likely to receive the services that they need after being victimized.1027 For 

example, Jennifer Wu, founding partner with Groombridge, Wu, Baughman, & Stone who has 

represented many hate crime victims and their families in New York City wrote in her statement 

to the Commission that the lack of trained interpreters to aid victims leads to distrust of law 

enforcement and government officials. Wu explained that:

it is not always easy for DAs [District Attorneys] to find proficient translators. For 

example, we attended a meeting with the Assistant District Attorney (ADA) in a murder 

case where the victim’s widow spoke only Mandarin Chinese. The ADA brought along a 

retired Detective who spoke Cantonese but represented that he could translate between 

English and Mandarin. That turned out not to be the case. Because I speak Mandarin 

myself, I could tell that the Detective’s translations were not accurate, including important 

facts like how the grand jury process would work and whether it was open to the public. 

And because this was the very first meeting between the ADA and the victim’s widow, the 

lack of a competent translator led to distrust and miscommunication.1028

Under the COVID-19 Hate Crimes Act, funding is provided for state and local incident reporting 

hotlines.1029 However, at the Commission’s briefing, panelists testified the local reporting hotlines, 

victim services, and law enforcement were not accessible to victims with limited English 

proficiency. For instance, Jo-Ann Yoo, executive director of the Asian American Federation 

(AAF), states that:

Over 50 percent of Asian New Yorkers have limited English proficiency. I have heard from 

seniors [] that they try to report a hate attack only to be turned away because there was no 

police officer could take a report in the language the victim spoke. We must invest in 

language services and resources.1030

In an ongoing effort to aid in reducing barriers for individuals with LEP, the Department created 

the first-ever Language Access Coordinator position, housed in the Office for Access to Justice 

1027 See e.g., Ninez Ponce, Alexander Adia, Rachel Banawa, Sean Tan, and Melanie D. Sabado-Liwag, “Measuring 

Asian hate: Discordant reporting of race-based hate incidents and unfair treatment and association with measures of 

wellbeing,” Frontiers in Public Health, vol. 10, Oct. 2022, 

https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fpubh.2022.958857/full; Gibert Gee and Ninez Ponce, “Associations 

Between Racial Discrimination, Limited English Proficiency, and Health-Related Quality of Life Among 6 Asian 

Ethnic Groups in California,” American Journal of Public Health, vol. 100, no. 5, May 2010, 

https://ajph.aphapublications.org/doi/pdf/10.2105/AJPH.2009.178012?role=tab; Leiyu Shi, Lydie Lebrun, and Jenna 

Tsai, “The influence of English proficiency on access to care,” Ethnicity & Health, vol. 14, no. 6, Dec. 2009, 

https://www.jhsph.edu/research/centers-and-institutes/johns-hopkins-primary-care-policycenter/Publications_PDFs/2009%20EH.pdf.

1028 Wu statement pp. 2-3.

1029 COVID-19 Hate Crimes Act, https://www.congress.gov/117/bills/s937/BILLS-117s937enr.pdf.

1030 Yoo testimony, Anti-Asian Racism Briefing, p. 29.
170 The Federal Response to Anti-Asian Racism in the United States

(ATJ).1031 The Attorney General announced the creation of this role in May 2021, due to language 

access being a key barrier to reporting hate crimes and incidents.1032 Additionally, in April 2021, 

the Department’s Hate Crimes Enforcement and Prevention Initiative moved forward in alleviating 

language access issues by announcing the first phase of the newly translated resource websites on 

hate crimes in the most frequently spoken AAPI languages: Chinese, Japanese, Korean, Tagalog, 

and Vietnamese. 1033 These updated websites provide basic information about hate crimes, 

resources, and instructions on how to report hate crimes to the FBI with interpreter assistance. In 

May 2022, DOJ expanded their language services to be available in 18 of the most frequently 

spoken AAPI languages across the nation.1034

San Francisco Chief of Police William Scott acknowledges that providing language access to 

victims of hate incidents and hate crimes is essential. Scott testified that:

We have stepped up our efforts to encourage community members to report hate incidents, 

and one of the ways we do that is to make sure we can communicate with the very diverse 

community we have in our city. We have multiple languages that are accessible by members 

of our community, and despite the ability of some people with limited English proficiency, 

we encourage them to report hate incidents as well as hate crimes, and that information can 

prove to be valuable down the line in the event that arrests are made, and prosecutions are 

at play. Those hate incidents sometimes prove motives.1035

Since the hiring of the Language Access Coordinator, ATJ has continued to expand its Language 

Access Team, and to engage in a number of initiatives, including:

• hosting various listening sessions with leaders and members of nationally prominent 

AANHPI organizations to discuss the language access needs for AANHPI communities, 

including in the context of hate crimes and incidents;1036

1031 U.S. Dep’t of Justice, “Justice Department Announces New Initiatives to Address and Prevent Hate Crimes and 

Hate Incidents,” May 20, 2022, https://www.justice.gov/opa/pr/justice-department-announces-new-initiativesaddress-and-prevent-hate-crimes-and-hate.

1032 Office of Attorney General, Memorandum for Department or Justice Employees, Improving the Department 

Efforts to Combat hate Crimes and Hate Incidents, May 21, 2021. https://www.justice.gov/d9/2022-

12/attorney_general_memorandumimproving_the_departments_efforts_to_combat_hate_crimes_and_hate_incidents.pdf.

1033 U.S. Dep’t of Justice, Interrogatory Responses to U.S. Commission on Civil Rights, Mar. 16, 2023, p. 14 [on 

file].

1034 Ibid.

1035 Scott Testimony, p. 152.

1036 United States Department of Justice and United States Department of Health and Human Services, Raising 

Awareness of Hate Crimes and Hate Incidents During the COVID-19 Pandemic, (2021), p. 

2, https://www.justice.gov/hatecrimes/resource/raising-awareness-hate-crimes-and-hate-incidents-during-covid-19-

pandemic, https://www.justice.gov/file/1507346/download; U.S. Department of Justice, “Readout of Justice 

Department, HHS Listening Session on the Bipartisan COVID-19 Hate Crimes Act with Organizations Representing 

Communities Impacted by Hate,” Oct. 6, 2021, https://www.justice.gov/opa/pr/readout-justice-department-hhslistening-session-bipartisan-covid-19-hate-crimes-act.
Federal Enforcement and Strategies 171

• convening the DOJ Language Access Working Group (DOJ LAWG), chaired by the 

Language Access Coordinator, which provides a platform to support, guide and oversee 

implementation of and compliance with Executive Orders 13166 and 13985, and aims to 

increase meaningful and equal language access across DOJ services, activities, and 

programming;1037

• developing strategies and solutions to remove barriers for individuals with LEP to reporting 

crimes and accessing DOJ activities and programs, including by:

1. expanding access to telephonic interpreting services within the Department;

2. creating awareness about language assistance services available to DOJ 

components;1038

3. translating DOJ public-facing content that is most relevant to communities with 

LEP;

1039

4. providing training and technical assistance to components on best practices 

including when conducting outreach and engaging with communities with LEP in 

non-English languages;

1040

5. working to develop a Language Access One-Stop-Shop to centralize language 

access resources, language access guidance and best practices, and language access 

policies, protocols and standards.1041

In November 2022, Attorney General Garland issued a Memorandum on Strengthening the 

Federal Government’s Commitment to Language Access, which required all federal agencies to 

work with the Justice Department’s Civil Rights Division to determine: (i) whether agencies can 

further update their language access policies and plans; (ii) whether agencies are effectively 

reaching individuals with limited English proficiency when disseminating information about 

federal resources, programs, and services; (iii) whether agencies have considered updates or 

modifications to guidance to federal financial assistance recipients regarding their obligations to 

provide meaningful language access under the requirements of Title VI of the Civil Rights Act of 

1964 and its implementing regulations; and (iv) whether agencies can adapt their digital 

communications to welcome individuals with limited English proficiency.1042

The Justice Department told the Commission that the Language Access Coordinator, in 

collaboration with the DOJ Language Access Working Group, is working to implement the 

1037 United States Department of Justice, “Language Access,” Nov. 30, 2022, 

https://www.justice.gov/open/language-access.

1038 Ibid.

1039 United States Department of Justice, “Hate Crimes,”, Nov. 30, 2022, https://www.justice.gov/hatecrimes.

1040 United States Department of Justice, “Hate Crimes,”, Nov. 30, 2022, https://www.justice.gov/hatecrimes.

1041 See United States Department of Justice, Limited English Proficiency, “Videos,” accessed July 13, 2023, 

https://www.lep.gov/videos?page=0.

1042 Department of Justice, Memorandum on Strengthening the Federal Government’s Commitment to Language 

Access, https://www.justice.gov/file/1553196/download.
172 The Federal Response to Anti-Asian Racism in the United States

Attorney General’s Memorandum across the Justice Department. This process has included a series 

of stakeholder engagement sessions with individuals, community-based organizations, legal aid 

organizations, and organizations whose mission is to eradicate hate crimes and hate incidents and 

increase access to victims and survivors.1043

On December 19, 2022, the Justice Department also launched the Law Enforcement Language 

Access Initiative nationwide to help provide language assistance to limited English proficient 

(LEP) individuals, intended to aid federal agencies to comply with their language access 

obligations. 1044 DOJ stated that this initiative was led by CRT’s Federal Coordination and 

Compliance Section in partnership with the U.S. Attorneys’ Offices. The Initiative will specifically 

focus on: 

• Developing technical assistance resources and tools that can assist local and state law 

enforcement agencies in their efforts to provide meaningful language access to LEP 

individuals and populations within their jurisdiction.

• Affirmatively engage law enforcement agencies that want to review, update, and/or 

strengthen their language access policies, plans, and training.

• Leverage collaboration with U.S. Attorneys’ Offices to conduct trainings in communities 

across the country to increase awareness of language access obligations and encourage 

widespread adoption of best practices by law enforcement agencies.

• Strengthen the department’s ties and engagement with LEP community stakeholders and 

LEP populations.1045

While these initiatives are a positive step, John Yang, president and executive director of Asian 

Americans Advancing Justice, testified that federal agencies need to review their compliance with 

Title VI in Executive Order 13166. He states that it is essential for federal agencies to comply with 

Title VI to prevent discrimination and ensure that all individuals are treated fairly and equally 

under the law.1046 Yang emphasized the need for federal agencies to take proactive steps to address 

1043 Dep’t of Justice, Response to Affected Agency Review, June 22, 2023 [on file].

1044 U.S. Attorney’s Office district of Colorado, “Justice Department Announces New Language Access Law 

Enforcement Initiative” December 9, 2022, https://www.justice.gov/usao-co/pr/justice-department-announces-newlanguage-access-law-enforcement-initiative. Note: The federal government provides a standard for language access 

provisions via Executive Order 13166. This guidance is published in the Federal Register, Vol. 65, No. 159 

(Notices), August 16, 2000, at 50123-25. The standard looks at the number or proportion of limited English 

proficient individuals served by the agency’s service area or population and resources available. The U.S. Census 

Bureau provides publicly available data on the most spoken languages and rates of limited English proficiency for 

each city.

1045 U.S. Attorneys’ Office, “Justice Department Announces New Language Access Law Enforcement Initiative,” 

U.S. Dep’t of Justice, Dec. 19, 2022, https://www.justice.gov/usao-co/pr/justice-department-announces-newlanguage-access-law-enforcement-initiative.

1046 Yang testimony p. 38.
Federal Enforcement and Strategies 173

any potential violations of Title VI and ensure that they provide language access services to 

individuals who need them.1047

U.S. Attorneys’ Office 

On April 6, 1953, Executive Order No. 8-53 established a liaison between the DOJ and the 93 U.S. 

Attorneys’ Offices (USAO) throughout the 50 states, the District of Columbia, Puerto Rico, Guam, 

the Marianas Islands, and the U. S. Virgin Islands.1048 The U.S. State Attorneys are appointed by 

the President to one of the 94 federal districts (the Northern Mariana Islands and Guam are separate 

but share a United State Attorney) and serves as the chief law enforcement officer in 

their district.1049

U.S. Attorneys’ Offices are also responsible for enforcing federal and local laws for hate and biasrelated crimes.1050 USAOs play a critical role in determining when to bring federal prosecution 

charges against an alleged perpetrator of a hate crime. When an officer suspects a crime has 

occurred, it is brought to the attention of the local USAO district for prosecution.1051 In response 

to the Commission’s inquiry or document requests, the FBI explained that if their investigation 

determines that a crime has violated a federal hate crime statute, the FBI coordinates their 

investigation with DOJ’s CRT and the local U.S. Attorneys’ Office who will make the final 

determination as to whether to charge the suspect with a federal hate crime.1052 In addition, these 

offices play a collaborative role in combatting hate crimes and incidents by ensuring their agencies 

are in constant contact regarding AAPI bias incidents and working together on civil rights issues 

intensified by the pandemic.1053

In partnership with USAOs, the Justice Department launched the United Against Hate (UAH) 

Community Outreach Program which aims to improve hate crime reporting by teaching 

community members how to identify, report, and help prevent hate crimes; and building trust 

between law enforcement and communities.1054 According to the Justice Department, during the 

program 

participants may work through hypotheticals about hate crimes and bias incidents. Through 

video clips featuring real stories, participants can learn about the impact of hate crimes and 

1047 Ibid.

1048 Office of the United States Attorneys, “Mission and Functions,” U.S. Department of Justice, Nov. 14, 2022, 

https://www.justice.gov/usao/eousa/mission-and-functions.

1049 Ibid.

1050 United States Attorney’s Office, Hate/Bias-Related Crimes, https://www.justice.gov/usao-dc/hatebias-relatedcrimes.

1051 Ibid.

1052 Federal Bureau of Investigation Interrogatory Responses to U.S. Comm’n on Civil Rights, Mar. 15, 2023, pp. 2-

3 [on file].

1053 Ibid., 16.

1054 U.S. Dep’t of Justice, “U.S. Attorneys’ Offices are Uniting Against Hate with Communities Across the 

Country,” Updated Mar. 22, 2023, https://www.justice.gov/hatecrimes/spotlight/united-against-hate.
174 The Federal Response to Anti-Asian Racism in the United States

bias incidents on communities. Facilitators lead rich discussions that help participants 

reflect on concrete actions they can take to identify, report, and, most importantly, help 

prevent acts of hate.1055

One of the first UAH events was held on September 29, 2022 by the Western District of New York 

Attorneys’ Office, alongside the FBI and local law enforcement, following the heinous hate crime 

attack in Buffalo, New York that occurred on May 14, 2022. 1056 The event had about 100 

community members in attendance, 1057 and focused on providing hypothetical scenarios and 

videos to further educate community members about hate crimes and hate incidents and the 

importance of reporting these crimes.1058

Trini Ross, U.S. attorney for the Western District of New York, who hosted the event stated “we 

all need to look for hate and expose it, so we stomp it out. This event, ‘United Against Hate,’ is 

designed to [] bring us together in a meaningful way, to unite us against hate, because there is 

strength in numbers.” 1059 While the USAO aims to further connect with communities in the 

district, some community members expressed skepticism about the effectiveness of the 

program.1060 For example, James Ponzo II, clinical assistant professor at the University of Buffalo, 

explained that “I think any type of program or legislation towards addressing hate crimes [] is a 

start. But far too often, which we already know, things seem to start but stall and die out. Time 

will tell whether or not it’s really effective or whether it’s a publicity stunt.”1061

Other Federal Efforts

Listening Sessions

In March 2021, the Justice Department hosted a listening session with over a dozen Asian 

American and Pacific Islander (AAPI) community groups to provide resources to support, address, 

1055 Ibid.

1056 Jonathan Franklin, “After a Deadly Mass Shooting, the DOJ Is Launching an Anti-Hate Initiative in Buffalo,” 

National Public Radio, October 6, 2022, https://www.npr.org/2022/10/06/1126831912/federal-united-against-hateprogram-buffalo-doj.

1057 Harold McNeil, “Federal Initiative to Combat Hate Crimes Launched in Western New York,” Buffalo News, 

September 29, 2022, https://buffalonews.com/news/local/federal-initiative-to-combat-hate-crimes-launches-inwestern-new-york/article_6a9844fe-4026-11ed-bf3a-d7479581b23d.html.

1058 Federal Bureau of Investigation, “Buffalo Launches United Against Hate Program,” Sept. 29, 2022, 

https://www.fbi.gov/contact-us/field-offices/buffalo/news/press-releases/assistant-attorney-general-for-civil-rightsclarke-and-us-attorney-ross-launch-united-against-hate-program-in-buffalo.

1059 Harold McNeil, “Federal Initiative to Combat Hate Crimes Launched in Western New York,” Buffalo News, 

September 29, 2022, https://buffalonews.com/news/local/federal-initiative-to-combat-hate-crimes-launches-inwestern-new-york/article_6a9844fe-4026-11ed-bf3a-d7479581b23d.html.

1060 Jonathan Franklin, “After a Deadly Mass Shooting, the DOJ Is Launching an Anti-Hate Initiative in Buffalo,” 

National Public Radio, October 6, 2022, https://www.npr.org/2022/10/06/1126831912/federal-united-against-hateprogram-buffalo-doj.

1061 Ibid.
Federal Enforcement and Strategies 175

and deter hate crimes and to provide data collection training manuals to state and local partners.1062

This meeting was hosted as part of DOJ’s continued efforts to combat anti-Asian hate crimes and 

bias-motivated incidents. Acting Deputy Attorney General John Carlin, who hosted the meeting, 

stated:

No one in America should fear violence because of who they are, what they look like, or 

what part of the world they or their families came from. The Department of Justice and our 

component agencies are committed to bringing all of our tools to bear in supporting AAPI 

communities as we address the horrific rise in hate and bias incidents occurring across the 

country.1063

The DOJ also hosted another listening session in July 2021with eight nationally prominent AAPI 

non-profit organizations’ executive directors to discuss the rise in acts of violence and intolerance 

against the AAPI community.1064

Additionally, in June 2021, CRT’s Federal Coordination and Compliance Section invited over 

140 stakeholders to five listening sessions regarding language access. The sessions focused 

on Asian American, Native Hawaiian and Pacific Islander communities. 1065 Over 60 people 

attended an internal listening session held by the department with its FBI linguists to translate or 

interpret cases.1066

Trainings 

In addition to the efforts outlined above, DOJ and the FBI hosted several trainings for law 

enforcement across the nation. DOJ informed the Commission that the number of trainings 

conducted by CRT employees varied during the pandemic based on several factors, such as the 

requests from other agencies and current events and trends. 1067 During the pandemic, CRT 

conducted several trainings specifically on reducing AAPI hate violence. 1068 In 2020, CRT 

conducted 16 hate crime trainings. O and f those two focused on issues affecting Asian Americans. 

In 2021, the Division conducted nine hate crime trainings, one of which focused on issues affecting 

Asian people. Then in 2022, the Division conducted approximately 15 hate crime trainings and 

three related to issues affecting Asian Americans.1069 Additionally, from January 1, 2022 to May 

31, 2023, OJP’s Bureau of Justice Assistance State and Local Anti-Terrorism Training (SLATT) 

Program also trained over 3,000 criminal justice professionals and law enforcement officials on 

1062 U.S. Department of Justice, “Readout of the White House’s Listening Session with Asian American and Pacific 

Islander Leaders on Rising Hate Crimes and Incidents Against Asian American Communities,” Mar. 5, 2021, 

https://www.whitehouse.gov/briefing-room/statements-releases/2021/03/04/readout-of-the-white-houses-listeningsession-with-asian-american-and-pacific-islander-leaders-on-rising-hate-crimes-and-incidents-against-asianamerican-communities/.

1063 Ibid.

1064 DOJ Responses to U.S. Commission on Civil Rights Interrogatories, Mar. 16, 2023, at 14.

1065 Ibid., 15.

1066 Ibid.

1067 Ibid., 9.

1068 Ibid.

1069 Ibid.
176 The Federal Response to Anti-Asian Racism in the United States

how to ethically identify, prohibit, prevent, and respond to acts of international and domestic 

terrorism, targeted violence, and hate crimes.1070

On June 9, July 20, and August 11, 2021, the FBI held regional conferences with over 100 law 

enforcement agencies in Denver, Louisville, and San Francisco, with additional end-of-year 

meetings. These conferences were held to help local police agencies better understand federal civil 

rights and hate crimes laws; encourage reporting; strengthen relationships between law 

enforcement and local civil rights organizations; and build trust within the diverse communities 

they serve.1071

CRS also hosted two webinars on responding to hate crimes on college campuses in September 

2021. The first, co-hosted by the Community Oriented Policing Services (COPS) Office, sought 

to educate campus law enforcement officials. The second focused on educators and college 

administrators. Additionally, in October 2021, the Office of Juvenile Justice and Delinquency 

Prevention (OJJDP) hosted a virtual symposium to increase knowledge on how to prevent youthrelated hate crimes and better identify bullying in recognition of Bullying Prevention Month, and 

one panel was entitled, “Combating Identity based Bullying in the AAPI Community.”1072 OJJDP 

also hosted a thirteen-part webinar series on preventing youth hate crimes and identity-based 

bullying, and a significant part of the series was geared towards educating law enforcement.1073

Along with hosting trainings, the FBI also launched an awareness campaign. On June 30, 2021, 

the FBI launched a Hate Crime Awareness Campaign in response to the increased number of 

attacks on people of Asian descent.1074 The awareness campaign was a nationwide effort to build 

public awareness of hate crimes and reporting avenues, to share information about victim services, 

and to encourage victims and witnesses to report crimes to law enforcement. The campaign uses 

traditional media outreach and interviews as well as a first-of-its-kind multi-million-dollar 

advertising campaign.1075

Following the launch of the Hate Crime Awareness Campaign, the NYPD and New York’s FBI 

Division joined forces to encourage individuals to stand in solidarity with Asian communities and 

1070 U.S. Dep’t of Justice, Response to USCCR Affected Agency Review, June 20, 2023 [on file].

1071 U.S. Department of Justice, Combatting Hate Crimes, March 30, 2021, https://www.justice.gov/opa/pressrelease/file/1428666/download.

1072 Office of Juvenile Justice and Delinquency Prevention, “Virtual Symposium: Understanding and Preventing 

Youth Hate Crimes and Identity-Base Bullying,” Sept. 8, 2021, https://ojjdp.ojp.gov/events/2021-virtual-symposium

1073 Office of Juvenile Justice and Delinquency Prevention, “Virtual Symposium, Preventing Youth Hate Crimes & 

Identity-Based Bullying Initiative,” https://ojjdp.ojp.gov/programs/preventing-youth-hate-crimes-bullyinginitiative#webinar-series.

1074 U.S. Department of Justice, Combatting Hate Crimes, March 30, 2021, https://www.justice.gov/opa/pressrelease/file/1428666/download.

1075 COPS Office, “FBI Hate Crimes Awareness Campaign Reaches Millions of Americans,” Feb. 2022, 

https://cops.usdoj.gov/html/dispatch/02-2022/hatecrimes_awareness.html
Federal Enforcement and Strategies 177

report any bias or hate crime incident.1076 FBI Assistant Director William F. Sweeney stated at the 

announcement of the public awareness campaign:

We each have a role to play to reverse the trends we’ve seen in New York City and beyond

— let’s set the example. Pay attention to what’s going on around you and do what’s right. 

You may be surprised how big of a role you can play in keeping our communities safe.1077

Grant Programs

In October 2021, the Justice Department announced that the Office of Justice Programs (OJP) 

would award more than $21 million to address hate crimes, including to support the investigation 

and prosecution of hate crimes.1078 OJP’s Bureau of Justice Assistance (BJA) made grant funds 

available to improve the investigation and prosecution of hate crimes through the Matthew Shepard 

and James Byrd, Jr. Hate Crimes Program which supports efforts by state, local, and tribal law 

enforcement and prosecution agencies and their partners in conducting outreach, educating 

practitioners and the public, enhancing victim reporting tools, and investigating and prosecuting 

hate crimes committed on the basis of a victim’s perceived or actual race, color, religion, national 

origin, sexual orientation, gender, gender identity, or disability.1079 Eligible applicants were state, 

local, and tribal law enforcement and prosecution agencies. As of April 2023, BJA has awarded 

over $12 million in funding through the Shepard-Byrd grant to 19 recipients for FY 2021 and FY 

2022. 1080 The Houston Police Department and the New York Police Department were each 

awarded $400,000 under the Shepard-Byrd grant.1081

BJA released $5 million for the Community-Based Approaches to Prevent and Address Hate 

Crimes Program.1082 This grant program provides funding to support comprehensive communitybased approaches to addressing hate crimes that promote community awareness and preparedness, 

increase victim reporting, and improve responses to hate crimes.1083 According to BJA: 

This program empowers community-based organizations and civil rights organizations to 

establish community-centered approaches for public awareness, education, and prevention 

1076 NYPD Newsroom, “NYPD and FBI New York Fight Asian Hate with New Joint Public Awareness Campaign,” 

July 14, 2021, https://www.nyc.gov/site/nypd/news/pr0714/nypd-fbi-new-york-fight-asian-hate-new-joint-publicawareness-campaign

1077 NYPD Newsroom, “NYPD and FBI New York Fight Asian Hate with New Joint Public Awareness Campaign,” 

July 14, 2021, https://www.nyc.gov/site/nypd/news/pr0714/nypd-fbi-new-york-fight-asian-hate-new-joint-publicawareness-campaign

1078 U.S. Dep’t of Justice, “Justice Department Will Award More Than $21 Million to Prevent and Respond to Hate 

Crimes,” Oct. 28, 2021, https://www.justice.gov/opa/pr/justice-department-will-award-more-21-million-preventand-respond-hate-crimes.

1079 Bureau of Justice Assistance, “FY 2022 Matthew Shepard and James Byrd Jr. Hate Crimes Program,” 

https://bja.ojp.gov/funding/opportunities/o-bja-2022-171092. 

1080 Ibid.

1081 Office of Justice Programs, Bureau of Justice Assistance, “BJA FY2022 Grant Awards,” 

https://data.ojp.usdoj.gov/stories/s/O-BJA-2022-171092/s6wb-ihnf/.

1082 U.S. Department of Justice, Bureau of Justice Assistance, “FY 2022 Community-based Approaches to Prevent 

and Address Hate Crimes,” May 19, 2022, https://bja.ojp.gov/funding/opportunities/o-bja-2022-171345.

1083 Ibid.
178 The Federal Response to Anti-Asian Racism in the United States

of hate crimes. The program is also designed to develop community-informed model 

policies, practices, and trainings for law enforcement and prosecution entities regarding 

how hate crimes are reported, investigated, and prosecuted.1084

As of April 2023, eight organizations were given grants to support their efforts to combat hate 

crimes with FY 2022 funding, three of which will focus their efforts on preventing and addressing 

anti-Asian hate crimes. The organizations funded under this program include: 

• The Committee of 100, Inc., a non-profit leadership organization of prominent Chinese 

Americans, received $400,000 to support their response to anti-Asian hate crimes, 

specifically for their project: “A Comprehensive and Coordinated Response to Address 

Anti-Asian Hate Crimes” in New York City;1085

• The Working Group, a nonprofit organization based in Oakland, CA, was awarded 

$500,000 to help support hate crime reporting and awareness campaigns through the Not 

In Our Town1086 program;1087

• South Asian Network Inc. was awarded $400,000 to provide materials to the South Asian 

community to increase awareness about hate crimes and hate crime reporting; and 

These organizations planned to utilize their funding in various ways. For instance, the Committee 

of 100, Inc. will use the awarded funds over three years for three main goals with their project: 

standardize community-based anti-Asian hate crime data, create a hate crime awareness campaign, 

and implement a curriculum for K-12 students focused on Asian American history and culture.1088

The organization’s NYC project also works with the AAPI community leaders to develop a set of 

criminal reporting standards for hate crimes. The Committee of 100 will work with other 

organizations, including The Anti-Defamation League, The Asian American Education Project, 

and The Yellow Whistle. 

Similarly, the South Asian Network, Inc. will use the money to fund its “Stop the Hate Project” in 

Artesia, CA. According to the grant application, the organization will survey community members 

on hate crimes and bias-related incidents they have experienced.1089 South Asian Network will use 

these data to inform their project, which includes goals such as: increasing awareness of hate 

crimes, educating low-income and limited-English speakers about reporting hate crimes, providing 

mental health therapy to help victims and survivors, creating community workshops on community 

1084 Ibid.

1085 Ibid.

1086 See supra note 901 (discussion of Not In Our Town in Ch 2).

1087 Bureau of Justice Assistance, “Mobilizing Communities and Building Hate and Bias Action Teams,” 

https://bja.ojp.gov/funding/awards/15pbja-22-gg-04858-adva. 

1088 “A Comprehensive and Coordinated Response to Addressing Anti-Asian Hate Crimes in NYC,” Bureau of 

Justice Assistance, September 30, 2022, https://bja.ojp.gov/funding/awards/15pbja-22-gg-04859-adva. 

1089 Bureau of Justice Assistance, U.S. Department of Justice, Stop The Hate Project, Bureau of Justice Assistance, 

September 29, 2022, https://bja.ojp.gov/funding/awards/15pbja-22-gg-04857-adva.
Federal Enforcement and Strategies 179

healing, and hosting bystander awareness training.1090 South Asian Network hopes to specifically 

support the low-income South Asian immigrant community to understand their rights, the 

importance of reporting hate crimes, self-protection, and how to seek redress. The organization 

states that it will partner with religious centers, engage older adults through community groups 

and reach young adults at colleges and universities throughout Southern California.1091

BJA also made funds available under the Emmett Till Unsolved Civil Rights Crimes 

Reauthorization Act of 2016 to help solve cold case civil rights murders that occurred before Dec. 

31, 1979.1092 For FY 2022, the City of Tulsa, Oklahoma was awarded $1,075,999 to pursue 

forensic genetic genealogy identifications for potential 1921 Tulsa Race Massacre (TRM) victims 

exhumed in the 2022 search of Tulsa Oaklawn Cemetery,1093 and Fulton County, Georgia was 

awarded $575,000 to hire a Victim Witness Advocate to discover incidents of missing persons 

never investigated.1094

All three of the above described BJA grants also currently have open grant solicitations for FY 

2023, with deadlines set for May and June 2023.1095

OVC also awarded more than $2 million in awards in FY 2022 for its “Jabara-Heyer No HATE Act 

State-Run Hate Crime Reporting Hotlines”, which seeks to fund states in establishing and running 

state-run hate crime reporting hotlines and ensuring that victims and witnesses are connected to 

law enforcement and local support services as needed. 1096 Two state agencies, the Illinois 

Department of Human Rights 1097 and the California Department of Fair Employment and 

1090 Ibid.

1091 Ibid.

1092 U.S. Dep’t of Justice, “Justice Department Will Award More Than $21 Million to Prevent and Respond to Hate 

Crimes,” Oct. 28, 2021, https://www.justice.gov/opa/pr/justice-department-will-award-more-21-million-preventand-respond-hate-crimes.

1093 Bureau of Justice Assistance, “Emmett Till Cold Case Investigations and Prosecution Program”, Sept. 30, 2022, 

https://bja.ojp.gov/funding/awards/15pbja-22-gg-01763-emme.

1094 Bureau of Justice Assistance, “Fulton County, Office of the District Attorney, home of the civil rights movement 

investigates cold cases,” Sept. 29, 2022, https://bja.ojp.gov/funding/awards/15pbja-22-gg-01764-emme. 

1095 U.S. Dep’t of Justice, “Open Grant Solicitations,” https://www.justice.gov/hatecrimes/grants (accessed Apr. 7, 

2023). 

1096 Office for Victims of Crime, “OVC FY 2022 Jabara-Heyer NO HATE Act State-Run Hate Crime Reporting 

Hotlines,” Oct. 12, 2022, https://ovc.ojp.gov/funding/opportunities/o-ovc-2022-171435Office for Victims of Crime, 

“OVC FY 2022 Building State Technology Capacity and Jabara-Heyer No HATE Act State-Run Hate Crime 

Reporting Hotlines,” https://ovc.ojp.gov/funding/opportunities/o-ovc-2022-171342. 

1097 Office for Victims of Crimes, Illinois Hate Crime and Bias Incident Hotline, Jan. 27, 2022, 

https://ovc.ojp.gov/funding/awards/15povc-22-gk-04987-noha.
180 The Federal Response to Anti-Asian Racism in the United States

Housing,

1098 were awarded more than $1 million each.1099 OVC issued a solicitation in 2023 to 

fund additional state-run hotlines under this program.1100

Previously, in FY 2021, OVC made an award for $2 million to Futures without Violence, Inc. 

(Futures), for the “Services to Support Victims of Hate Crime and Strengthen Communities” 

program.1101 During FY 2022, Futures provided subawards to twelve organizations throughout the 

country to implement field generated projects to address hate crimes in their communities.1102

Three of those projects specifically target Asian communities: 

• California Healthy Nail Salon Collaborative in Oakland, California, is partnering with 

Black Women for Wellness to develop healing programming and strengthen solidarity 

among Vietnamese and Black women survivors of hate crimes.

• Cia Siab, Inc. in La Crosse, Wisconsin, is educating the Hmoob (Hmong) community about 

hate crimes and enhancing responses through accessible reporting tools, trainings for 

service providers, and improved coordination with health and legal services.

• KAN-WIN in Chicago, Illinois, is bringing together Asian women from multiple 

generations for collective healing, community building, and public art creation.

OJP’s National Institute of Justice (NIJ)awarded grants in FY 2022 for “Research and Evaluation 

on Hate Crimes” as well as “Research and Evaluation on Domestic Radicalization and Violent 

Extremism.” Under the Research and Evaluation on Hate Crimes program, NIJ made three awards 

totaling $2,888,983.

1103

In FY 2022, NIJ awarded over $1.25 million for projects targeted toward developing a better 

understanding of the domestic radicalization phenomenon, and advancing evidence-based 

strategies for effective intervention and prevention. 1104 The RAND Corporation was awarded 

$749,087 for a project that will analyze social media discussions of financing strategies across a 

variety of mainstream and fringe online platforms as well as the dark web.1105 The University of 

Central Missouri was awarded $506,497 for its proposed project, “Understanding the Complete 

1098 Office for Victims of Crime, “The California vs. Hate Resources Line and Network,” Jan. 27, 2023, 

https://ovc.ojp.gov/funding/awards/15povc-22-gk-04986-noha.

1099 Office for Victims of Crime, “OVC FY 2022 Jabara-Heyer NO HATE Act State-Run Hate Crime Reporting 

Hotlines,” Oct. 12, 2022, https://ovc.ojp.gov/funding/opportunities/o-ovc-2022-171435

1100 Office for Victims of Crime, “OVC FY 2023 Jabara-Heyer NO HATE Act State-Run Hate Crime Reporting 

Hotlines,” May 31, 2023, https://ovc.ojp.gov/funding/opportunities/o-ovc-2023-171708.

1101 Office for Victims of Crime, “Community IMPACT: Imagining Multidisciplinary Pathways to Assist, Care & 

thrive,” Sept. 30, 2021, https://ovc.ojp.gov/funding/awards/15povc-21-gk-00658-nonf.

1102 Futures Without Violence, Community Impact, https://www.futureswithoutviolence.org/community-impact/.

1103 National Institute of Justice, “NIJ FY22 Research and Evaluation on Hate Crimes,” Feb. 2, 2022, 

https://nij.ojp.gov/funding/opportunities/o-nij-2022-171191. 

1104 National Institute of Justice, “NIJ FY22 Research and Evaluation on Domestic Radicalization and Violent 

Extremism,” Mar. 15, 2022, https://nij.ojp.gov/funding/opportunities/o-nij-2022-171193.

1105 National Institute of Justice, “Understanding and Responding to Domestic Extremism Financing,” Sept. 8, 2022, 

https://nij.ojp.gov/funding/awards/15pnij-22-gg-01119-domr.
Federal Enforcement and Strategies 181

Spectrum of the Left-Wing and Environmental Movement: A Data Driven Approach,” which aims 

to add to the knowledge surrounding the full spectrum of behavior perpetrated by those motivated 

by a violent left-wing or environmental ideology.1106

In addition to providing direct funding to justice agencies and community organizations, BJA also 

supports funding to each program’s comprehensive Training and Technical Assistance (TTA) 

providers. These TTA providers are expected to provide direct support to grantees and develop 

resources, tools, and training that the field may use at large, including translating lessons learned 

from grantee experiences into user-friendly field guides, tools, and webinars that may be 

instructive to peer institutions.1107

The total grant funds for community-based organizations were increased to $10 million in FY 

2023, but at the writing of this report, DOJ has not released these awards yet.1108 John Yang, 

president and executive director, Asian Americans Advancing Justice, testified that while 

providing funds to community organizations is critical, the 

grantmaking process is often opaque and cumbersome, especially for communities that 

really struggle and would benefit most from the money. Without focused outreach and local 

touchpoints, the federal government will not be trusted and will not be used by our 

community. Sustained commitment to engagement in culturally and linguistically sensitive 

matters is critical.1109

Additionally, Charles Lehman, fellow at the Manhattan Institute, testified that while the DOJ 

issues “tens of millions of dollars to anti-hate crime grants” which are:

substantial amounts, they don’t go that far. Fiscal year 2022 – covered just 22 awards, 

compared to roughly 2,300 state prosecutors’ offices. Many offices do not have specialists 

who focus on hate crime prosecutions. The challenge inherent in prosecuting bias 

motivated crime means the federal government could allocate more funding to, at least, 

coordinating between offices and articulating best practices, to increase the shockingly low 

rate of convictions.1110

Manjusha Kulkarni, executive director of AAPI Equity Alliance and co-founder of Stop AAPI 

Hate explained in her testimony to the Commission that the Justice Department needs to:

fund state and local government efforts in partnership with community groups to address 

discrimination and other hate incidents. Federal funding when it is not a hate crime is 

uneven. For example, the Department of Justice provides a number of federal grants to 

1106 National Institute of Justice, “Understanding the Complete Spectrum of the Left-Wing and Environmental 

Movement: A Data Driven Approach,” https://nij.ojp.gov/funding/awards/15pnij-22-gg-01120-domr.

1107 U.S. Dep’t of Justice, Response to USCCR Affected Agency Review, June 20, 2023 [on file].

1108 Bureau of Justice Assistance, “FY2022 Community-based Approaches to Prevent and Address Hate Crimes,” 

July 18, 2022, https://bja.ojp.gov/funding/opportunities/o-bja-2022-171345.

1109 Yang Testimony, p. 41.

1110 Lehman Testimony, p. 22.
182 The Federal Response to Anti-Asian Racism in the United States

support state, local, and tribal enforcement for victims of crimes. But there’s no such 

program to address hate incidents that are not crimes or specifically supporting state and 

local civil rights enforcement. Additional resources are needed if we want to truly address 

hate and prevent anti-Asian hate incidents.1111

The DOJ notes that while the federal grants are intended to address hate crimes and not incidents, 

BJA’s Shepard Byrd program encourages collaborations between law enforcement and community 

stakeholders and organizations. BJA’s Community-based Approaches to Preventing and 

Addressing Hate Crimes also encourage these collaborations.1112

Executive and Congressional Action

As this report has documented, one of the contributing factors to the spike of harassment, violence, 

discrimination, and xenophobia towards persons of Asian descent witnessed from 2019 through 

2021 was due to these communities being blamed for the pandemic.

1113 In the first few months of 

2020, FBI Director Christopher Wray warned of a potential surge in hate crimes against Asian 

Americans amid the pandemic, making the assessment “based on the assumption that a portion of 

the U.S. public will associate COVID-19 with China and Asian American populations.”1114

As a result of these rising hate incidents, on May 1, 2020, U.S. Sen. Mark R. Warner (D-VA) 

joined Sens. Mazie K. Hirono (D-HI), Cory Booker (D-NJ), and 13 other Senators wrote a letter 

to then-Assistant Attorney General Eric Dreiband asking the Civil Rights Division to inform 

Congress of the steps the Division has taken in response to the discrimination and hate crimes 

against Asian Americans and Pacific Islanders.1115 The senators stated that:

since the COVID-19 outbreak began, researchers have reported an alarming spike in antiAsian racism. On March 14, 2020, a man stabbed two Asian American children – a 2-yearold and a 6-year-old – and their father at a Sam’s Club in Texas because “he thought the 

family was Chinese, and infecting people with the coronavirus.” In the past month alone, 

the Asian Pacific Policy and Planning Council and its partners have received nearly 1,500 

reports of coronavirus-related harassment and discrimination against AAPI individuals 

across the country.1116

1111 Kulkarni Testimony, p. 103.

1112 U.S. Dep’t of Justice, Response to USCCR Agency Review, June 20, 2023.

1113 See supra notes 512-531 (discussing rise of anti-Asian hate crimes).

1114 Josh Margolin, “FBI warns of potential surge in hate crimes against Asian Americans amid coronavirus,” ABC 

News, Mar. 27, 2020, https://abcnews.go.com/US/fbi-warns-potential-surge-hate-crimes-asianamericans/story?id=69831920. 

1115 United States Senate, “Letter to U.S. Department of Justice Attorney General Dreiband,” May 20, 2020,

https://www.hirono.senate.gov/imo/media/doc/Letter%20to%20DOJ%20re%20anti-AAPI%20discrimination.pdf.

1116 Ibid.
Federal Enforcement and Strategies 183

In the letter to the CRT, the senators claimed that despite the warnings issued by the FBI, the 

Justice Department did not take necessary steps to counteract the rise in hate violence.1117 While 

the Justice Department hosted a briefing with Asian American advocacy groups, many community 

leaders maintain that the agency’s response was lacking.1118 The senators posited that the federal 

response to the pandemic, by both the CDC and DOJ, had been lackluster compared to the 2003 

SARS outbreak and after the 2001 terrorist attacks. The senators maintained that the “inadequate 

federal response to address these racist and xenophobia attacks [are] a sharp break from the efforts 

of past administrations, Republican and Democratic alike.”1119

In response, former Assistant Attorney General Eric Dreiband stated that “[t]he Justice Department 

will prosecute hate crimes and violations of anti-discrimination laws against Asian Americans, 

Asians, and others to the fullest extent of the law.”1120 At the Commission’s briefing, Dreiband 

testified that during his tenure:

the Justice Department's the Civil Rights Division and the United States Attorney 

partner[ed] across the country and led the Department’s efforts to investigate and address 

civil rights issues related to the pandemic and other issues, including issues about antiAsian discrimination.1121

On January 26, 2021, President Biden issued a Presidential Memorandum that condemned

Racism, Xenophobia, and Intolerance.1122 The memorandum stated that the DOJ is committed to 

deterring hate crimes and unlawful acts against AAPI communities and will use dedicated 

resources to support incident reduction across the country. In this memorandum, among other 

things, he mandated that the Attorney General explore opportunities to combat crimes against 

Asian American and Pacific Islander (AAPI) communities, along with the review of and 

supporting the accelerated review and prosecution of hate crimes. 1123 The memorandum called for 

the federal government to “combat racism, xenophobia, and intolerance against Asian Americans 

and Pacific Islanders and should work to ensure that all members of AAPI communities — no 

1117 Ibid.

1118 Ibid.

1119 Ibid.

1120 Eric Dreiband, “How the Justice Department is standing up for civil rights amid coronavirus pandemic,” 

Washington Examiner, Apr. 9, 2020, https://www.washingtonexaminer.com/opinion/op-eds/how-the-justicedepartment-is-standing-up-for-civil-rights-amid-coronavirus-pandemic. 

1121 Eric Dreiband, Former Assistant Attorney General, Civil Rights Division, Department of Justice; Partner, Jones 

Day, testimony, the Federal Response to Anti-Asian Racism in the United States, p. 130

1122 White House, “Memorandum Condemning and Combating Racism, Xenophobia, and Intolerance Against Asian 

Americans and Pacific Islanders in the United States,” Jan. 26, 2021, https://www.whitehouse.gov/briefingroom/presidential-actions/2021/01/26/memorandum-condemning-and-combating-racism-xenophobia-andintolerance-against-asian-americans-and-pacific-islanders-in-the-united-states/.

1123 U.S. Dep’t of Justice, “Readout of The Department of Justice’s Efforts to Combat Hate Crimes Against Asian 

American and Pacific Island Communities,” Mar. 5, 2021, https://www.justice.gov/opa/pr/readout-departmentjustice-s-efforts-combat-hate-crimes-against-asian-american-and-pacific.
184 The Federal Response to Anti-Asian Racism in the United States

matter their background, the language they speak, or their religious beliefs — are treated with 

dignity and equity.”1124

In March 2021, President Biden signed an Executive Order that established the White House 

Initiative for Asian Americans, Native Hawaiians, and Pacific Islanders (WHIAANHPI) 

interagency working group, which is intended to inform the President of policies focused on 

reducing hate bias in the AANHPI communities. The Executive Order also renewed the President’s 

Advisory Commission on Asian Americans, Native Hawaiians, and Pacific Islanders. 1125 The 

Advisory Commission’s mission is to advise the President on how public, private, and nonprofit 

sectors can collaborate to advance equity opportunities in these communities.1126

Other White House initiatives included a virtual listening session on March 4, 2021, that convened 

advocates and community leaders from AAPI communities nationwide to discuss their experiences 

with the rise in hate violence during the pandemic.1127 The meeting was hosted by the Domestic 

Policy Advisor Susan Rice, the White House Initiative on AAPIs Acting Director Laura Shine, the 

White House Public Engagement Director Cedric Richmond, and the Vice President’s Domestic 

Policy Advisor Rohini Kosoglu.1128

On March 23, 2021, Senator Mazie K. Hirono from Hawaii and Representative Grace Meng from 

Flushing, New York, introduced the COVID-19 Hate Crimes Act, which was signed into law by 

President Biden on May 20, 2021, 1129 in response to the rise in hate crimes against Asian 

Americans.1130 The bipartisan legislation aimed to improve the nation’s response to hate crimes 

and included a new initiative to advance equality and justice, and offered training opportunities 

1124 White House, “Memorandum Condemning and Combating Racism, Xenophobia, and Intolerance Against Asian 

Americans and Pacific Islanders in the United States,” Jan. 26, 2021, https://www.whitehouse.gov/briefingroom/presidential-actions/2021/01/26/memorandum-condemning-and-combating-racism-xenophobia-andintolerance-against-asian-americans-and-pacific-islanders-in-the-united-states/.

1125 The White House, “FACT SHEET: President Biden Establishes the White House Initiative on Asian Americans, 

Native Hawaiians, and Pacific Islanders,” May 28, 2021, https://www.whitehouse.gov/briefing-room/statementsreleases/2021/05/28/fact-sheet-president-biden-establishes-the-white-house-initiative-on-asian-americans-nativehawaiians-and-pacific-islanders/.

1126 Ibid.

1127 The White House, “Readout of the White House’s Listening Session with Asian American and Pacific Islander 

Leaders on Rising Hate Crimes and Incidents Against Asian American Communities,” Mar. 4, 2021, 

https://www.whitehouse.gov/briefing-room/statements-releases/2021/03/04/readout-of-the-white-houses-listeningsession-with-asian-american-and-pacific-islander-leaders-on-rising-hate-crimes-and-incidents-against-asianamerican-communities/.

1128 Ibid.

1129 S.937 - COVID-19 Hate Crimes Act, https://www.congress.gov/117/plaws/publ13/PLAW-117publ13.pdf

1130 Alana Wise, “Biden Announces Actions to Combat Anti-Asian Violence, Discrimination,” NPR, March 30, 

2021,

https://www.npr.org/2021/03/30/982736783/biden-announces-new-steps-to-tackle-anti-asian-violence-anddiscrimination.
Federal Enforcement and Strategies 185

for Asian American, Native Hawaiian, and Pacific Islander communities.1131 The bill requires that 

an officer of the Justice Department expedite the review to hate crimes stating the following:

DOJ must issue guidance for state, local, and tribal law enforcement agencies on 

establishing online hate crime reporting processes, collecting data disaggregated by 

protected characteristic (e.g., race or national origin), and expanding education campaigns. 

Additionally, DOJ and the Department of Health and Human Services must issue guidance 

aimed at raising awareness of hate crimes during the COVID-19 (i.e., coronavirus disease 

2019) pandemic.1132

The legislation also aimed to provide additional necessary actions in response to an increase in 

violence and offer support to state and local governments. Specifically,

the bill establishes grants for states to create state-run hate crimes reporting hotlines. It also 

authorizes grants for states and local governments to implement the National IncidentBased Reporting System and to conduct law enforcement activities or crime reduction 

programs to prevent, address, or respond to hate crimes.... The bill emphasizes a remedy 

for an individual convicted of a hate crime offense and placed on “supervised release,” 

otherwise known as the type of conditions imposed from the conviction. The bill allows 

the court to order that the individual convicted participate in educational classes and 

community service as a requirement of the sentencing option adopted in addition to the 

sentencing given by the state for the federal court to the guilty.1133

Senator Hirono argued that passing the COVID-19 Hate Crimes Act would send a clear message 

of solidarity to the AAPI community and would not have been possible without a bipartisan 

partnership.1134 On Thursday, April 22, 2022, the Senate overwhelmingly approved the legislation 

1131 Fact Sheet: President Biden Establishes the White House Initiative on Asian Americans, Native Hawaiians, and 

Pacific Islanders https://www.whitehouse.gov/briefing-room/statements-releases/2021/05/28/fact-sheet-presidentbiden-establishes-the-white-house-initiative-on-asian-americans-native-hawaiians-and-pacific-islanders/.

1132 S.937 – (COVID-19 Hate Crimes Act), S.937 – (COVID-19 Hate Crimes Act), 

https://www.congress.gov/117/plaws/publ13/PLAW-117publ13.pdf.

1133 Id.

1134 Jalen Wade, “Senate approves bill aimed at combating hate crimes against Asian Americans,” Capital News 

Service, Apr. 22, 2021,

https://cnsmaryland.org/2021/04/22/senate-approves-bill-aimed-at-combating-hate-crimes-against-asian-americans/
186 The Federal Response to Anti-Asian Racism in the United States

to strengthen federal efforts to address crime against Asian Americans;1135 as well as bolster the 

tracking system for gathering information about hate crimes.1136

Furthermore, the law supports interagency cooperation between multiple federal agencies, with an 

initiative led by HHS to advance equity and justice and expand language access and language 

assistance programs to help individuals navigate the resources available during the response and 

recovery of the pandemic.1137

In her written testimony to the Commission, Congresswoman Grace Meng stressed the necessity 

of the federal government to provide more tools to support law enforcement. 1138 She also 

highlighted the need to adopt community-based approaches to prevent and address crimes, the 

need for communities and law enforcement to work together, and the need to provide resources 

directly to advocates and community-based organizations. Meng explained that:

[h]ate crimes cause long-lasting harm not only to individual victims, but to their entire 

communities, [and] we must give law enforcement the necessary tools to address hate 

crimes and empower community organizations who are helping people impacted by hate

crimes rebuild their lives.1139

Jennifer Wu, a founding partner at Groombridge, Wu, Baughman & Stone LLP, shared that none 

of her clients who were victims of anti-Asian hate crimes had “ever reported a crime to the federal 

agencies, and ever heard from the U.S. government ... there has been no federal response, which 

is why private practitioners like myself have stepped in to help the victims and develop a 

response.”1140 Wu stated that this further highlights the need for more federal awareness and 

support for victims of hate crimes.1141

1135 Catie Edmondson, “Senate Resoundingly Passes Bill to Target Anti-Asian Hate Crimes,” The New York Times, 

Apr. 22, 2021,

https://www.nytimes.com/2021/04/22/us/politics/senate-anti-asian-hate-crimes.html; The White House, 

“Memorandum on Restoring the Department of Justice’s Access-to-Justice Function and Reinvigorating the White 

House Legal Aid Interagency Roundtable,” May 18, 2021, 

https://www.whitehouse.gov/briefing-room/presidential-actions/2021/05/18/memorandum-on-restoring-thedepartment-of-justices-access-to-justice-function-and-reinvigorating-the-white-house-legal-aid-interagencyroundtable/.

1136 Li Zhou, “The House passes bill to combat anti-Asian hate crimes,” May 18, 2021, 

https://www.vox.com/2021/4/22/22385461/senate-anti-asian-hate-crimes-bill

1137 Executive Order 14031 of Mary 28, 2021, “Advancing Equity, Justice, and Opportunity for Asian Americans, 

Native Hawaiians, and Pacific Islanders” https://www.govinfo.gov/content/pkg/FR-2021-06-03/pdf/2021-11792.pdf

1138 Congresswoman Grace Meng, Written Statement to U.S. Commission on Civil Rights, in response to the 

Federal Response to Anti-Asian Racism in the United States, Mar. 24, 2023, p. 2.

1139 Congresswoman Grace Meng, Written Statement to U.S. Commission on Civil Rights, in response to the 

Federal Response to Anti-Asian Racism in the United States, Mar. 24, 2023, p. 2.

1140 Wu Testimony, p. 82.

1141 Ibid.
Federal Enforcement and Strategies 187

The COVID-19 Hate Crimes Act and Jabara-Heyer NO HATE Act outlined several steps that the 

federal government needs to implement to combat anti-Asian hate crimes and called explicitly for 

the DOJ to:

• Expedite their review of hate crimes;

• Collect and disaggregate data along distinctive characteristics (e.g., race and national 

origin);

• Expand education programs;

• Establish state-run hotlines and set up state and local government grants; 

• Assist States and local jurisdictions to implement the National Incident-Based Reporting 

System;

• Conduct law enforcement activities or crime reduction programs to prevent, address, or 

respond to hate crimes; and

• Provide additional remedies for those convicted of the crime.1142

While there was widespread and bipartisan support for the bill, some hate crime experts argued 

that the bill was largely symbolic and would not deter people from committing hate crimes against 

people of Asian descent. Critics of the bill state that too often, the federal response focuses on what 

happens after hate crimes have already occurred, and there should be more attention to preventing 

the crime from happening in the first place.1143 Columbia University law professor Katherine 

Franke explained that:

enhancing criminal prosecutions of and requiring greater reporting on hate crimes are 

interventions that take place after bias incidents have taken place. Education, public 

messaging – particularly from elected officials – and other community-based programs 

aimed at reconciliation and repair are more likely to reduce the incidents of hate crimes.1144

While the COVID-19 Hate Crimes Act and Jabara-Heyer NO HATE Act authorized several new 

programs, there were no funds designated for them. The Justice Department told the Commission 

that OJP did not have discretionary funds available for these new programs and notes that almost 

all of its funding is prescribed by Congress through the appropriations process.1145

On May 20, 2022, on the first anniversary after the enactment of the COVID-19 Hate Crimes Act, 

the Department of Justice announced a series of actions that would aid in deterring and confronting 

related bias incidents, including issuing new guidance with the Department of Health and Human 

Services (HHS) aimed at raising awareness of hate crimes during the COVID-19 pandemic, 

releasing grant solicitations for programs to create state-run hate crime reporting hotlines and to 

1142 S.937 – (COVID-19 Hate Crimes Act), S.937 – (COVID-19 Hate Crimes Act), 

https://www.congress.gov/117/plaws/publ13/PLAW-117publ13.pdf.

1143 Li Zhou, “Hate crime laws won’t actually prevent anti-Asian hate crimes,” Vox, June 15, 2021, 

https://www.vox.com/2021/6/15/22480152/hate-crime-law-congress-prevent-anti-asian-hate-crimes.

1144 Ibid.

1145 U.S. Dep’t of Justice, Response to Affected Agency Review, June 20, 2023 [on file].
188 The Federal Response to Anti-Asian Racism in the United States

support community-based approaches to prevent and address hate crimes, and hiring the 

Department’s inaugural Language Access Coordinator.1146

The guidance issued with HHS covers federal and state hate crime laws, why public awareness of 

hate crimes and incidents is important and discusses the lack of data as well as underreporting seen 

for hate crimes.1147 The guidance includes 11 strategies to increase public awareness and prevent 

and respond to hate crimes and hate incidents. These efforts include: 

• Prioritizing Community Outreach – to provide useful information for engagement with law 

enforcement, government entities, elected officials, healthcare providers, and communitybased and non-profit organizations.

• Prioritizing Community-Based Responses and Partnerships – to improve the collection of 

data for anti-Asian hate crimes and improving training and education of the public 

education about eh anti-Asian hate crime.

• Engaging Healthcare Providers, Clinics, and Health Systems – to encourage healthcare test 

assessment tools that identify health systems associated with hate crime incidents.

• Prioritizing Cultural Competence and Language Access – to determine the best translations 

tools to reach people with different educational backgrounds and levels of experience with 

the legal system.

• Promoting Allyship and Understanding Intersectional Community Identities – to assist 

prosecutors in understanding the perpetrators’ motives in the groups subject to hate crimes.

• Actively Speaking Out Against Hate Crimes and Hate Incidents – to ensure the community 

understand that leaders and policy maker denounce hate crime and hate incidents.

• Creating Public Awareness Campaigns – to provide clear messages that include principles 

of language, cultural competence, and community education.

• Creating Alliances Against Hate – to create embedded infrastructure in communities to 

provide resources and rapid response.

• Promoting Greater Community, Cultural, and Historical Awareness – to provide resources 

to meet the needs of diverse groups targeted by hate incidents.

• Promoting Law Enforcement Education and Training – to train law enforcement to 

understand the intersectionality of the communities targeted by hate crime and hate 

incidents.

• Providing Resources for Individuals and Communities Experiencing Hate – to create 

resources tailored to the need of the affected communities.1148

1146 Department of Justice, Office of Public Affairs, “Justice Department Announces New Initiatives to Address and 

Prevent Hate Crimes and Hate Incidents,” May 29, 2022, https://www.justice.gov/opa/pr/justice-departmentannounces-new-initiatives-address-and-prevent-hate-crimes-and-hate

1147 U.S. Dep’t of Justice and U.S. Dep’t of Health and Human Services, Raising Awareness of Hate Crimes and 

Hate Incidents During the COVID-19 Pandemic, https://www.justice.gov/file/1507346/download. 

1148 Ibid.
Federal Enforcement and Strategies 189

Performance Efforts

In its FY2021 Annual Performance Report, DOJ lists Strategic Objective 3.2: Combat 

Discrimination and Hate Crimes, with four total measures: 

1) Number of Title VII, 42 U.S.C. § 2000e, and Uniformed Services Employment and 

Reemployment Rights Act of 1994 (USERRA) 38 U.S.C. §§ 4301–4335, investigations;

2) Number of limited English proficiency individuals who accessed department-funded 

materials in their native language to understand federal hate crimes and anti-discrimination 

laws;

3) Percent of U.S. Attorney’s Offices that meet at least annually with local law enforcement 

partners and community stakeholders to collaborate on efforts to prevent hate crimes and 

incidents; and

4) Percent of criminal cases addressing civil rights violations, including hate crimes, 

favorably resolved.1149

However, only three measures are directly related to hate crimes. One of the new performance 

measures for FY 2021 included tracking the number of LEP individuals who access departmentfunded materials in their native language to understand federal hate crimes and anti-discrimination 

laws.1150 In a July 2021 survey, 25 U.S. Attorney’s Offices indicated they coordinated or actively 

participated in district-wide allegiance against hate, representing 27 percent of offices.1151 The 

DOJ reported that in FY 2021, CRT favorably resolved1152 96 percent of the Department’s criminal 

cases addressing civil rights violations, including hate crimes. 1153 While 96 percent is a 

commendable proportion, this is the percent of resolved cases of all civil rights violations, and the 

report does not break down the various types of these cases; therefore, it is not possible to 

determine what percent of hate crime criminal cases were favorably resolved.1154 Additionally, the 

Commission was unable to compare these measures to the Department’s FY2020 Annual 

Performance Report, because it did not include addressing civil rights violations and hate crimes 

as any of its Strategic Goals.1155 Lastly, since the DOJ did not make these cases publicly available, 

the Commission was not able to investigate the outcomes further.

1149 U.S. Dep’t of Justice, FY2021 Annual Performance Report, 

https://www.justice.gov/d9/pages/attachments/2022/10/31/fy_2021_annual_performance_report_1.pdf.

1150 Ibid., 65.

1151 Ibid., 66.

1152 Favorably resolved: Disposition of a defendant’s case in which the defendant is found guilty, or any 

government-endorsed disposition, such as a motion to dismiss a case that the government files. See

U.S. Dep’t of Justice, FY2021 Annual Performance Report, p. 67, 

https://www.justice.gov/d9/pages/attachments/2022/10/31/fy_2021_annual_performance_report_1.pdf.

1153 Ibid.

1154 See infra Table 31 (summary of hate crime cases 2020-2022).

1155 U.S. Dep’t of Justice, FY 2020 Annual Performance Report, 

https://www.justice.gov/d9/pages/attachments/2021/04/22/fy_2020_annual_performance_report.pdf.
190 The Federal Response to Anti-Asian Racism in the United States

The true challenge in assessing whether the federal government is “doing enough” to combat a rise 

in hate crimes lies in the absence of proper performance measurements or a program matrix that 

reviews programs intended on addressing hate crimes. Moreover, the DOJ’s 2021 Performance 

Measures are ineffective in addressing the recent surge in hate crimes.1156 In Charles Lehman’s 

report, “Understanding and Reducing Hate Crimes in New York City,” Lehman detailed the scale 

of hate crimes in New York City and proposed a focused approach for reducing hate crimes in the 

city that may be scaled up to some extent to the federal level.1157 The approach entailed a zerotolerance strategy, a fully comprehensive messaging campaign, data transparency across the 

criminal justice system, and a focus on mental illness. Due to the lack of offender data and mental 

illness issues at the national level, the federal government could consider the first three items as 

overarching recommendations to address hate crime, while also working to improve data on mental 

illness concerns among offenders.1158

While these proposals may work on some levels, as discussed in Chapter 2, many community 

stakeholders expressed concern over an increase in police in their neighborhoods and 

communities.1159 For instance, Jennifer Wu testified to the Commission:

The Asian community cannot have trust in the local law enforcement if they are not 

represented and people do not speak their language. There are also mixed messages. When 

the ADA [Assistant District Attorney] tells someone that they are going to do something, 

the local police will sometimes say the opposite and say I don’t have faith in the ADA. 

There are problems there and distrust in the institutions. 

We need training and education. We have given training and educations to the DA’s office 

in Manhattan, but we need more of that.... The other thing that victims need is wraparound 

services... [Victims] need the ability to apply for U visas if they are undocumented. They 

need help with healthcare. They need help with the media.1160

Similarly, Manjusha Kulkarni, executive director of AAPI Equity Alliance and co-founder for Stop 

AAPI Hate explained: 

I can tell you that truly combating anti-Asian hate requires a comprehensive approach and 

not simply one that primarily relies upon criminal law enforcement. Rather, it must include 

civil rights enforcement, community safety measures, and education equity. Only then will 

the American promise of civil rights become reality for Asian Americans.1161

1156 Ibid.

1157 Charles F. Lehman, “Understanding and Reducing Hate Crimes in New York City,” Manhattan Institute, Mar. 

2022, https://media4.manhattan-institute.org/sites/default/files/lehman-understanding-reducing-hate-crimes-nyc.pdf.

1158 Ibid.

1159 See supra notes 858-882 (discussing increasing law enforcement presence).

1160 Wu testimony, Anti-Asian Racism Briefing, pp. 85-86.

1161 Kulkarni testimony, Anti-Asian Racism Briefing, p. 103.
Federal Enforcement and Strategies 191

As many of the panelists noted at the Commission’s briefing, law enforcement plays a critical role 

in combatting hate crimes, but only through collaboration with legislators, prosecutors, and 

community stakeholders can the nation hope to see an end to these heinous acts. SFPD Chief Scott

agrees with this necessity, stating:

Hate crimes convey a message to both the victims and their group or perceived group, that 

they are not welcome and not safe, and as such, these crimes are an attack on the 

fundamental rights of our communities at large. So, it’s vital that law enforcement 

agencies, prosecutors, and the community that tries to combat these types of crimes 

recognize what hate crimes are and respond appropriately.1162

At the Commission’s briefing, many panelists testified that to combat hate crimes and 

discrimination, there also needs to be a strong messaging campaign from local, state, and federal 

officials against anti-Asian sentiment. Nationally, we have seen government officials denounce 

acts of bigotry and intolerance, but without specific actions and follow through, these statements 

remain nothing more than political rhetoric. 

Jo-Ann Yoo, executive director for the Asian American Federation, explained to the Commission 

that: 

Concrete actions must begin today if we aim to prevent more attacks from occurring again. 

We urge the following: one, investing in the strengthening and expansion of local networks 

so victims have ready access to community-based places where they can report attacks, 

receive support services, and take safety trainings and workshops in their own languages. 

We need system changes to correctly label and track violence for every category including 

religious identification.... Statements of solidarity matter only if they are backed up with 

concrete action. Our leaders can and must do more.1163

As this report has shown, the federal government has made some effort to address the rise of antiAsian hate crimes during the pandemic. John Yang, president and executive director for Asian 

Americans Advancing Justice – AAJC, testified to these efforts and stated: 

Legislation such as the COVID-19 Hate Crimes Act, the Jabara-Heyer NO HATE Act, has 

been helpful to many in our community. It’s provided grants to our community groups 

fighting hate. It includes innovative models like restorative justice that many communities 

embrace. It recognizes that reporting hate should happen not only through law enforcement 

but health services. Those are examples of where the federal government is making a 

difference and responding. While the COVID-19 Hate Crimes Act does provide examples 

of where the federal government can help, federal government can do more.1164

1162 Scott testimony, Anti-Asian Racism Briefing, p. 149.

1163 Yoo testimony, Anti-Asian Racism Briefing, pp. 28-29.

1164 Yang testimony, pp. 41-42.
192 The Federal Response to Anti-Asian Racism in the United States

A persistent challenge when it comes to combatting hate crimes continues to be the lack of 

comprehensive and transparent data. At the federal level, DOJ’s official database lags behind many 

state and city databases when it comes to capturing and reporting hate crime numbers, especially 

as local agencies struggle with the transition to the NIBRS system.1165 In 2019, the Commission 

on Civil Rights provided recommendations on improving the quality of hate crime data: 

Congress should pass legislation and provide adequate funding that would incentivize local 

and state law enforcement to more accurately report hate crimes to the FBI, and promote 

greater transparency and accountability, which would aid in building community trust. 

Congress should also pass legislation to ensure that federal law enforcement agencies 

collect and report their hate crime data to the FBI and that states are accurately reporting 

hate crime data they receive from local law enforcement agencies in their jurisdiction. The 

federal government should require, as a condition for federal funding, that state and local 

law enforcement agencies report their data to the FBI, publish data on a quarterly basis, 

undergo data auditing for accuracy, and work with affinity groups to report hate crimes to 

the federal government even if a victim does not want to prosecute.1166

In the three plus years since the publication of that report, there has not been clear progress in 

the advancement of data collection. While the transition to the use of NIBRS may eventually 

provide a more in-depth look into reported hate crimes, as long as reporting remains voluntary, the 

picture at the federal level will be murky. Moreover, the lack of comprehensive data at the federal 

level makes developing appropriate performance measures to assess the federal response to hate 

crimes difficult. The improvement of data collection must become a mainstay priority for the FBI 

and the Justice Department. Following this, true data transparency is needed in which arrest and 

conviction data are made available to the public for research purposes as well as to be used as 

accountability measures.

Manjusha Kulkarni testified that there are many steps that federal, state, and territory agencies 

can do to combat anti-Asian hate crimes and protect individuals’ civil rights.1167 Kulkarni posited 

that agencies. 5

receive hundreds of thousands of complaints every year, yet few agencies engage in the 

type of public data collection, research, and reporting needed to inform effective civil rights 

enforcement.... By contrast, federal law requires the collection of hate crimes data and the 

data informs law enforcement administration operations managements and reveals ongoing 

1165 See supra note 434-444.

1166 U.S. Commission on Civil Rights, In the Name of Hate: Examining the Federal Government’s Role in 

Responding to Hate Crimes, Nov. 2019, p. 226, https://www.usccr.gov/files/pubs/2019/11-13-In-the-Name-ofHate.pdf.

1167 Kulkarni Testimony, p. 101.
Federal Enforcement and Strategies 193

and emerging trends. We for this reason strongly recommend requiring federal civil rights 

agencies to collect and report key data related to civil rights enforcement and the Attorney 

General to annually publish this data.1168

While hate crimes happen at the local level, the federal government plays a critical role in 

combatting, reporting, and preventing hate crimes. Additionally, Cynthia Choi, co-executive 

director for Chinese for Affirmative Action and co-founder for Stop AAPI Hate testified that:

The federal government has a duty and an obligation to step in to enforce civil rights and 

to ensure all American are afforded equal opportunities and are treated with dignity and 

respect regardless of race, ethnicity, and immigration status.... We strongly support efforts 

that entail auditing coordination across agencies to ensure our communities can benefit 

fully from these programs and policies, in particular that enforce our civil rights. Which 

also includes prioritizing language access. And finally, we want to stress that it’s important 

that we have sustained and resource collaborations with community partners so that our 

government engages meaningfully with our – and understands the community’s diverse 

experiences with bias and discrimination so that they’re fully understood and meaningfully 

addressed.1169

Furthermore, Michael Yaki, former Commissioner at the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights,

suggested that while passing the COVID-19 Hate Crimes Act was a step in the right direction, it 

was necessary to ensure its practical implementation. One such measure would be for federal 

agencies to work with state and local governments to launch public education campaigns to make 

progress possible.1170

Other recommendations include expanding Title II of the Civil Rights Act to include retail stores 

and other businesses where discrimination occurs. 1171 Title II currently protects against 

discrimination in public accommodations, but has been limited to restaurants, hotels, and 

exhibition halls or places of entertainment.1172 This means that establishments like grocery stores, 

markets, banks, salons, and other businesses may not be covered under Title II which is significant; 

since as shown in Chapter 1 of this report, discrimination against Asian Americans during the 

COVID-19 pandemic occurred at many different types of business establishments.1173

Additionally, as this report has detailed, language access is a significant barrier for Asian 

victims when reporting a hate incident or hate crime. Therefore, the role of a language access 

1168 Ibid., pp. 101-102. 

1169 Choi testimony, pp. 73-74.

1170 Michael Yaki, former USCCR Commissioner, Response to Anti-Asian Racism in the United States Briefing 

before the U.S. Comm’n on Civil Rights, Mar. 24, 2023, p. 157.

1171 Kulkarni Testimony, p. 102.

1172 42 U.S.C. § 2000a.

1173 See supra Table 5 (data showing where anti-Asian incidents and discrimination occurred).
194 The Federal Response to Anti-Asian Racism in the United States

coordinator at the Justice Department should be codified into federal law to ensure that all 

individuals have equal access to justice and access to federal programs and benefits regardless of 

language access.1174

This report highlights the many challenges the federal government faces when trying to prevent 

and combat hate crimes. Through the Commission’s independent research and public briefing, 

there are many recommendations and strategies that federal agencies can implement to ensure that 

all individuals’ civil rights are being protected. The Commission heard from a diverse group of 

policy and research practitioners, federal entities, and community stakeholders whose ideas and 

perspectives highlighted the importance of working collaboratively to promote equitable policies 

to address anti-Asian violence. Their recommendations centered around recurring themes, such as 

investing in expanding local network capacity and language access that would allow the 

community more access to report an attack.1175

Furthermore, other recommendations included improving data collection systems, providing 

safety training and workshops in the respective languages of the community, and expanding 

federal funding for community advocacy groups fighting hate crimes.1176 Additionally, agencies 

need to review the COVID-19 Hate Crimes Act to ensure that the law fulfills its intended purpose 

and fully represents the needs of the community.1177 These actions will help to increase education 

and raise awareness of this critical issue to combat anti-Asian hate crimes. Lastly, these 

recommendations can also encourage better community engagement and inspire a commitment to 

positive change in this crucial issue.

1174 Kulkarni Testimony, p. 102.

1175 Yoo testimony, p. 28.

1176 Yoo testimony, pp. 28, 58-59; Yang testimony, p, 40.

1177 Yaki testimony, p. 157.
Findings and Recommendations 195

Findings and Recommendations

Findings

• A major impediment to understanding the severity and magnitude of hate crimes against 

persons of Asian descent is the lack of comprehensive data. Without mandatory national 

data collection and training law enforcement on how to accurately identify and report 

hate crimes, preventing these crimes is substantially challenging.

• The transition to the NIBRS data collection has been slow for some agencies: for 2021, 

the number of participating agencies within the FBI hate crime database was 11,834, 

compared to the 15,138 participating agencies for 2020 data, and many of the agencies

that have not submitted 2021 data are the largest jurisdictions.

Recommendations

• Prosecutors and law enforcement should vigorously investigate and prosecute hate crimes 

and harassment against Asian Americans.

• First responders should be provided with training aimed at teaching a clear understanding 

of what constitutes a hate crime in their jurisdiction. 

• Federal, state, and local law enforcement agencies and victim services need to identify 

critical deficiencies in Limited English Proficient (LEP) programs for individuals who 

need language assistance.
196 The Federal Response to Anti-Asian Racism in the United States

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Statement of Commissioner Adams 197

Statement of Commissioner Adams

I voted in favor of this report because I share the Commission’s conviction that prosecutors and 

law enforcement officials should vigorously investigate and prosecute crimes against all 

Americans. This Commission was stalled for months because an insufficient number of 

Commissioners shared my view.

Our attention turns after this report to how the undeniable spike in crime over the last few years 

affected minority communities in a significant way. These two reports – this one and the 

forthcoming report on the crime increase – should, in my view be viewed as complementary. 

There are some refinements that I would like to see in our methodology, as I outline below. 

Though I voted for this report, it has significant faults. I write to document my concerns about its 

methodology, assumptions, and omissions.

Methodological Concerns

Information Quality Concerns: Federal Data Policy Has Impaired Local Crime Reporting

The report correctly identifies a major impediment to understanding the severity and magnitude 

of hate crimes against persons of Asian descent: a lack of comprehensive and reliable data.

While this deficiency has many causes, the report properly draws attention to the FBI’s transition 

to the National Incident-Based Reporting System (NIBRS) in January 2021.1 This transition has 

slowed the compilation and reporting of data by state and local agencies, due to a significant 

reduction in participating local agencies. In 2021, 11,834 such agencies participated in

the FBI’s hate crimes database. This is a 22% decrease from 2020, where 15,138 agencies 

submitted such data.

Furthermore, many of the agencies that did not submit data to NIBRS in 2021 were among the 

largest jurisdictions in the country.

Information Quality Concern: Potential Barriers to Reporting AAPI Hate Crimes

The report also notes that first responders, including law enforcement officers, are often 

insufficiently trained to identify hate crimes. Local law enforcement officials, therefore, may 

over or under-report the number of hate crimes occurring in their jurisdictions because they lack 

a clear understanding of what constitutes a hate crime.

Moreover, because many AAPI victims of such crimes may have limited English language 

proficiency, they may be less likely to initiate reports with law enforcement officials. As the 

report makes clear, the U.S. Department of Justice has only recently launched language 

1 Commission report at 15, footnote 52 (Federal Bureau of Investigation, “Crime Data Explorer,” 

https://cde.ucr.cjis.gov/LATEST/webapp/#/pages/explorer/crime/hate-crime.).Therefore, additional 

reasons exist to question the completeness of crime statistics presented to the Commission.

Statement of Commissioner Adams
198 The Federal Response to Anti-Asian Racism in the United States

assistance and related outreach programs to assist local and state law enforcement in serving 

victims with limited English proficiency.

This lack of objective data has apparently contributed to the Commission’s decision to award 

undue weight to self-reported statistics collected by non-profits that conflate “hate incidents” 

with “hate crimes.” Hate incidents are not hate crimes. Discourtesy, boorish behavior, rudeness 

and even misdirected anger may be unsettling, but they are usually not crimes.

Naturally, I also agree with the reports finding that prosecutors and law enforcement should 

vigorously investigate and prosecute violations of federal criminal laws. As I have written about 

extensively for more than a decade, that is sadly not the case. There is no subset of Americans 

who enjoy protection from racially motivated attacks while other Americans do not. Sadly, some 

continue to be vociferous opponents of equal enforcement of the law in this regard.

Deficiencies in statistics considered by the Commission

The Commission’s report relies overwhelmingly on information from the non-profit group Stop 

AAPI Hate, which the report presents as a neutral, impartial organization. It is not. This group 

enjoys support (financial and otherwise) from a number of outside organizations that I consider 

unreliable and extraordinarily biased, to the point of compromising any hope of objectivity.

Potential bias aside, the Commission’s report has adopted Stop AAPI Hate’s flawed 

methodology. That organization has generated much alarm about targeted Asian hate crimes by 

publishing “self-reports” of “hate incidents” by victims.

Hate incidents are not hate crimes.

Hate incidents are inherently subjective and often involve speech or the expression of opinion 

alone. Hate crimes are defined by the FBI as “a traditional offense like murder, arson, or 

vandalism with an added element of bias,”2 while “hate incidents” are biased acts that do not rise 

to the level of a crime, including:

Name calling, using racial, ethnic, or other slurs to identify someone, or using degrading 

language;

Insults;

Displaying hateful material on your own property;

Posting hate material that does not result in property damage;

2 Commission report at 7, footnote 6 (See FBI, “Hate Crimes,” 

https://www.fbi.gov/investigate/civil-rights/hate-crimes (last accessed June 3, 2019).
Statement of Commissioner Adams 199

Distribution of materials with hate messages in public places.3

The Commission’s report relies on “hate incident” reports from Stop AAPI Hate. It should not. 

For example, the organization reported the number of total incidents from March 2020 to 

December 2021 was 10,905, but the overwhelming majority of the incidents did not meet the 

legal definition of a hate crime and 66.9 percent were verbal statements, not actual physical 

violence.4

In other words, Stop AAPI Hate has created a false equivalency between non-violent “hate 

incidents” and “violent hate crimes,” and invoked a specter of violence regardless of the facts. 

Indeed, at least 58% of incidents reported to the non-profit took place in New York or California, 

where violent crimes against Asian Americans would surely make national news.

It is unfortunate that the Commission has accepted Stop AAPI Hate’s invitation to exploit the 

true threat of hate crimes by diluting the problem with reports of bad behavior, rudeness and 

idiots that don’t treat other people with the respect they deserve.

This increasing coarseness in our nation has many causes. A government cannot impose civility. 

Our constitutional traditions of liberty and free speech leave no room for policing rudeness and 

stupidity. More adherence to the Golden Rule, to treat others the way one wishes to be treated, 

would go a long way to reducing these so-called “hate incidents.” As shared values like the 

Golden Rule vanish from our culture, there will be many more incidents of rudeness and offense 

for Stop AAPI Hate to add to their catalog. Their current dossier contains evidence of a fractured 

culture, and very little of actual crimes.

Stop AAPI Hate and its affiliates have improperly conflated criticism of the Chinese government 

with hate crimes

In addition to allowing Stop AAPI Hate to conflate hate crimes and hate incidents, the 

Commission applied insufficient rigor in determining whether self-reports documented hateful 

speech in the first place.

Witness testimony to the Commission made much of terms that were in common use throughout 

2020 to describe the COVID-19 virus. The virus was commonly referred to with neutral 

geographic terms, such as “the Wuhan Virus.” This Commission is overly credulous in accepting 

Stop AAPI Hate’s categorization of such terms as "hate incidents."

3 Commission report at 19, footnote 96 (Danville, California, “What is the Difference Between a 

Hate Crime and a Hate Incident?” https://www.danville.ca.gov/965/What-is-the-DifferenceBetween-a-Hate-Cr.).

4 Commission report at 11, footnote 34 (Aggie J. Yellow Horse, Russell Jeung, Ronae Matriano, 

“Stop AAPI Hate: National Report, 3/19/20-12/31/21”, Mar. 22, 2022, page 5, 

https://stopaapihate.org/wp-content/uploads/2022/03/22-SAH- NationalReport-3.1.22-v9.pdf.).
200 The Federal Response to Anti-Asian Racism in the United States

As Commissioner Heriot, in footnote 20 of her Dissenting Statement, states:

There is a long history behind naming diseases for the place they were thought to be first 

detected—the Spanish Flu, the Asian Flu, Rocky Mountain Spotted Fever, Lyme 

(Connecticut) Disease, African Sleeping Sickness, West Nile Disease, Lassa (Nigeria) 

Fever, Middle East Respiratory Syndrome (MERS), Argentine Hemorrhagic Fever, 

Pontiac (Michigan) Fever, Rift Valley Fever, Marburg (Germany) Virus Disease. Ebola is 

named for a river in the Democratic Republic of the Congo. Zika is named for a forest in 

Uganda. Tularemia (or rabbit fever) is named for Tulare County, California.

Ponder the poor American Legion which will forever be associated with the 1976 outbreak at 

their convention in Philadelphia that killed twenty-nine Legionnaires. It is undisputed that 

COVID originated in China one way or another, and there is nothing controversial in speaking 

the truth, whether the Chinese government and their advocates say otherwise.

Stop AAPI Hate, for example, ignores these basic historical facts. I am alarmed that witnesses 

and commissioners alleged (and the report accepted) that official government responses to 

actions of the Peoples Republic of China are a pretext for discrimination against Chinese 

Americans.

Nonsense. In the fullness of time, we have learned that criticism of the regime and its coverup of 

the facts regarding COVID has, to the contrary, been wildly inadequate. The lack of 

transparency, endemic to authoritarian regimes like China’s, led to the world only learning facts 

about the early outbreak of COVID years later.

After one Commissioner inaccurately stated that the Texas state legislature was considering a 

ban on “Chinese Americans” owning property, Dr. Russell Jeung, a professor of Asian-American 

studies at San Francisco State University and co-founder of Stop AAPI Hate stated that “policies 

implemented at the state level, at the local level, [and] at school boards” sanction “further 

violence” against AAPI individuals and therefore encourage hate crimes directed at this 

population. (Jeung did not explain how school boards could prohibit anyone from owning 

property.)

Testimony that legislative responses to the actions of the People’s Republic of China

encourages hate crimes against Asians is one of many instances that has led me to conclude that 

Stop AAPI Hate uses the threat of hate crimes to deflect from valid criticism of the Chinese 

communists. Why?

Beyond the testimony of Stop AAPI Hate witnesses to the Commission, the group’s modus 

operandi supports my conclusion. This group appears to categorize references to COVID-19’s 

geographic origins as “hate incidents” worthy of inclusion in its database of self-reports. Then it 

uses such incidents to paint a picture of Asian Americans under the threat of violence – despite 

the fact that Stop AAPI Hate admits that nearly 70% of the “hate incidents” reported to the group 
Statement of Commissioner Adams 201

during its first few months of operation were comprised of verbal harassment – verbal 

harassment which can include merely calling COVID-19 “the Wuhan virus.”

Furthermore, such attempts to deflect scrutiny of the geographic origin of the virus obscure the 

Chinese government’s very real role in suppressing information about the virus.

This sounds more like a campaign to suppress criticism of one of the most authoritarian regimes 

on the planet, not something that should be a legitimate concern of this Commission.

Omissions in the Commission’s Report

However, most of the faults I found with the report are related to what was omitted, rather than 

what was included in the report.

The Commission gathered insufficient information to prevent attacks against Americans of Asian

descent

Throughout the hearing process, the Commission displayed a marked lack of curiosity about the 

perpetrators of hate crimes targeted at Asian Americans. Hate crimes can have many causes, and 

a major study in the American Journal of Criminal Justice that analyzed 1992-2014 NIBRS data 

found support for the “minority-specific model” of crime, which posits that hate crimes against 

different racial minority groups are likely to show significant differences.5 There is a clear need 

for analysis of NIBRS data after 2014, which would shed light on the many sociological and 

economic factors that may contribute to hate crimes in the United States.

In my opinion, the Commission showed nearly as much interest in testimony about how criticism 

of the PRC regime results in violence against Asian Americans as it did in the details of actual 

hate crimes suffered by AAPI individuals in the United States.

Understanding such details seems to me to be critical to preventing further violence. Deflecting 

criticism from the Chinese regime seems a task few would want to undertake, yet the 

Commission managed to find two witnesses to do so, both of whom made statements that I find 

questionable.

Similarly, the Commission chose to ignore expert opinions on crime prevention. For instance, 

Charles Lehman, a crime analyst from the Manhattan Institute, stated in both his written and oral 

testimony that:

[t]he best way to combat hate crime is not by targeting hate, e.g. through education or 

content moderation, but to target crime through aggressive law enforcement... [h]ate 

crime offenders are like other criminals, as opposed to being specialists in hate crime. 

5 Yan Zhang, Lening Zhang, Francis Benton. Hate Crimes against Asian Americans. American 

Journal of Criminal Justice

Vol. 47, p. 441-461 (2022), https://doi.org/10.1007/s12103-020-09602-9.
202 The Federal Response to Anti-Asian Racism in the United States

The data bear this out, one survey of convicted hate crime offenders found that 87 percent 

had a prior conviction, including 60 percent with violent conviction... [t]he Criminal 

Justice System, including the Federal Criminal Justice System, is well equipped to 

combat hate as crime.6

He went into much detail as to why this is the case, but his views and arguments on this specific 

point, which was his main point, are nowhere included the report -- and the cites attributed to 

him in the report addressed issues that were wholly unrelated to the main points in his testimony.

This raises issues internal to the operation of the Commission, namely elevating some testimony 

and disappearing other testimony.

Commission Staff Improperly Prevented Commissioners from Exploring Other Incidents of Bias 

Against Asian Americans

Similarly, internal procedures within the Commission stonewalled inquiry into other incidents of 

bias against Asian Americans.

At the Commission’s September 2023 Business Meeting, the Commission voted unanimously for 

the original concept paper for this report. The Commission had previously rejected proposals 

from Commissioner Kirsanow to develop concept papers that would explore anti-Asian bias in 

academic admissions. I and other Commissioners who share Commissioner Kirsanow’s interest 

in this subject voted for this concept paper because its proposal included key phrases that by their 

text encompassed discrimination against Asian Americans in academic admissions. These key 

phrases in the concept paper were [emphasis added]:

This follow-up project will examine federal enforcement through the Civil Rights Act of 

1964, ... and other federal statutes, Executive Orders, and regulations, as Commission 

resources may permit, addressing issues of race, color, national origin, administration of 

justice, and religion related to the rising reports of anti-Asian and Asian American 

violence and discrimination in the United States as reported since 2019, the year prior to 

the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic. [Concept Paper page 1]

To set these examinations into context, the project will examine the historical and current

stages of non-Asian America’s relationship with, and beliefs about, Asian immigrants 

and Asian Americans. [Pages 1-2]

This project will provide an overview of the historical root causes of anti-Asian racism in 

America, how anti-Asian racism is perceived by communities, and whether it is enforced 

or recognized by the justice system. It will, through interviews with organizations that are

6 Charles Lehman, Fellow at the Manhattan Institute, testimony, The Federal Response to Anti-Asian 

Racism in the United States Briefing Before the U.S. Comm’n on Civil Rights, Washington, DC, Mar. 4, 

2023, transcript, pgs. 17-21.
Statement of Commissioner Adams 203

representative of the diversity within the Asian American community, and review of

sociological and other academic studies, examine the unique circumstances of the

subgroupings of the Asian American community by places of physical and/or cultural

origin, the recently immigrated and the long-standing Asian American components of the

communities, and the individual and collective stereotypes that each has confronted 

in their past and present. [page 4]

This investigation will also focus upon the extent to which federal enforcement, or lack

thereof, of statutes, Executive Orders, regulations, policies, and programs created since 

the post-WWII era that attempt and appear either to reduce or exacerbate anti-Asian 

racism under the Commission’s jurisdiction over issues related to race, color, national 

origin, administration of justice, and religion. As staff resources may permit, the 

project shall attempt to determine instances in which government failure to act 

constituted or constitutes implicit policy which affected or affects Asian Americans. 

The extent of sources of authority and the time period covered shall be determined by the 

availability of Commission resources. [page 5]

The report will discuss the apparent outcomes, as measured in part by available statistical 

analysis and other measures, of federal enforcement, or the lack thereof, on behalf of 

Asians and Asian Americans. [page 5]

Finally, and most importantly, we will look to the representative communities to 

define what they believe, see, or define as bias against their communities. [page 5]

These phrases were instrumental in garnering support from Commissioner Gilchrist, 

Commissioner Heriot, Commissioner Kirsanow, and myself. Yet, somehow along the way, 

ideological intransience prevented the fulfillment of this stated objective. The intransigence 

drifted into farce at our hearing, presided over by Commissioner Kirsanow as de facto acting 

chair, when Staff Director Morales interrupted the proceedings to shut down Commissioner 

Magpantay’s questions to a witness by claiming some vague authority derived from 45 CFR 

701.11 – which merely states that a Chair will set an agenda for a meeting “after consulting with 

the Staff Director” – in order to prohibit further discussion of anti-Asian bias in academic 

admissions.

Director Morales stated that witness testimony is limited to the “four corners contained in the 

concept paper” and that an amendment to explicitly add anti-Asian bias in academic admissions 

to the concept paper had been defeated. Just as his authority to intervene was tenuous (at best), 

so was his characterization of the “four corners contained in the concept paper,” as well as the 

import of the amendment that was defeated.

As the anti-Asian bias concept paper was being considered in September 2022, it became 

apparent, after initially garnering support from our side of the Commission based on the 

language he had provided, that the Commissioner who was the original proponent of the anti-
204 The Federal Response to Anti-Asian Racism in the United States

Asian bias concept paper did not want the Commission report to include the issue of anti-Asian 

bias in academic admissions – despite what the text of the paper he had proposed stated.

Commissioner Kirsanow then offered an amendment to make explicit what was implicit in the 

text of the concept paper, that Anti-Asian bias in academic admissions would be addressed in the 

report. Although that amendment was defeated by a 4-4 vote, it does not alter the fact that the 

chartering document still passed with the key phrases encompassing anti-Asian bias in academic 

admissions still in it. That document would never have been approved by the Commission had it 

not included those phrases.

Staff Director Morales lacks any authority to prevent Commissioners from questioning 

witnesses. He lacks authority to interpret the scope of a concept paper passed by the 

Commission. Even in the absence of a chair, his position as Staff Director does not confer 

authority to unilaterally direct Commission business.

Director Morales’s intervention prevented the Commission from executing its charge to “look to 

the representative communities to define what they believe, see, or define as bias against their 

communities.” Witnesses from California – one of the states identified by Stop AAPI Hate as a 

hotspot for “hate incidents” – testified that “persistent discrimination against Asian American 

students in education, justified under the names of diversity, equity, and race-based affirmative 

action is a much more salient and consequential form of anti-Asian discrimination.”7

Other commission witnesses falsely stated that the majority of Asian Americans support 

affirmative action. Professor Jeung stated that “Asian Americans support affirmative action,” 

when polling, in fact, shows that 76% of all Asian adults oppose the use of race in college 

admissions decisions.8 Such ideologically motived fairy tales should have led the Commission to 

give additional weight to the testimony of the many Asian Americans who testified to this 

Commission about the pervasive anti-Asian discrimination that occurs in academic admissions.

None of the written and oral testimony, or lines of inquiry about this issue was covered or 

mentioned in the report, but it should have been. Therefore, this statement documents several 

omissions that I find germane to the stated purpose of this concept paper.

7 Wenyuan Wu, Executive Director, Californians for Equal Rights Foundation, testimony, The 

Federal Response to Anti- Asian Racism in the United States Briefing Before the U.S. Comm’n 

on Civil Rights, Washington, DC, Mar. 4, 2023, transcript, p. 75.

8 Pew Research https://www.pewresearch.org/race-ethnicity/2023/06/08/asian-americans-holdmixed-views-around- affirmative-action/
Statement of Commissioner Adams 205

Remarks from Former Assistant Attorney General for Civil Rights, Eric Dreiband

The following exchange between Commissioner Magpantay and former Assistant Attorney 

General for Civil Rights Eric Dreiband proceeded as follows at the hearing [emphasis added] –

up until the moment the Staff Director essentially shut the hearing down:

COMMISSIONER MAGPANTAY: What is an Asian?

MR. DREIBAND: What is an Asian? Asians typically refer to people whose ancestry or 

national origin is from the continent of Asia.

COMMISSIONER MAGPANTAY: The reason why is that it is a very large and diverse 

community, which some segments encounter poverty, limitations on proficiency, and I’m 

just curious in the court papers if it is recognized the nuance and diversity that we seek in 

America, like our schools should be – you know, skin color, whatever, but there is a 

diversity of experience and insights, isn’t there, within the Asian community?

MR. DREIBAND: Well, of course there is, and that’s why this whole notion of grouping

populations of people together the way many colleges, and universities, and other

institutions today are doing as, quote, Asians, I think is shameful, disgraceful, and illegal.

So, yes, there is a huge range of diversity among people whose ancestry is from Asia, 

among people who are from East Asia, or South Asia, or various part of Asia, and I think

it’s horrible that our institutions in this country today treat these individuals as if they are

part of some monolithic group and then subject them to pervasive discrimination.

And it’s even worse because we’re talking typically about 18-year-old children who are

applying to further their education at colleges and universities throughout this country,

many of whom come from very poor families, many of whom are first generation arrivals

to this country, and they are lumped together and disadvantaged by Ivy League

institutions, by all kinds of institutions in this country, and it is a total disgrace in my

opinion, and it’s illegal, and immoral, and wrong, and should stop.

COMMISSIONER MAGPANTAY: And that’s in your papers? 

MR. DREIBAND: What?

COMMISSIONER MAGPANTAY: And that’s in your papers, your litigation papers, 

yes?
206 The Federal Response to Anti-Asian Racism in the United States

MR. DREIBAND: Well, yeah, in the cases that I mentioned, yes, we made those 

allegations, yes.9

COMMISSIONER MAGPANTAY: Thank you.

[Staff Director Morales then interrupted Commissioner Magpanty to allege that the “four corners 

contained in the concept paper” were being violated, even though as pointed out above the actual 

text of the concept paper as passed encompassed the issue Commissioners and witnesses were 

discussing.]

Remarks from Diane Yap, founding member of the Friends of Lowell Foundation

Diane Yap, a prominent activist who has opposed attempts to reduce the number of Asian 

students at magnet high schools in San Francisco, testified in support of both Mr. Dreiband’s and 

Mr. Lehman’s viewpoints about anti-Asian Hate Crimes and Bias1010 as follows [emphasis 

added]:

Even at Harvard, an Asian applicant with a 25 percent chance of getting in would have a 

95 percent chance if he were only able to check the African American box instead. 

Nothing else about him would have to change.

The role of the government is not and should not be to put the thumb on the scale in order 

to produce racially proportionate outcomes. The goal should not be equal outcomes or 

equity but rather equal opportunity. The government's role is to ensure that no one faces 

discrimination on the basis of race.

On the matter of hate crimes, that means better crime prevention generally in the form of

increased police presence, surveillance of hotspots, predictive policing, and especially

imprisonment of repeat offenders.

On the issue of affirmative action, that means recognizing that such policies discriminate 

against Asians in favor of objectively less qualified applicants. If you believe that 

underrepresented groups deserve special help, then you also believe that there are 

overrepresented groups that deserve to be discriminated against. These are inextricably 

linked, and the latter is clearly unconstitutional.

9 Eric Dreiband, former Assistant Attorney General for Civil Rights, testimony, The Federal 

Response to Anti-Asian Racism in the United States Briefing Before the U.S. Comm’n on Civil 

Rights, Washington, DC, Mar. 4, 2023, transcript, pgs. 179- 181.

10 See discussion of Mr. Lehman’s testimony at page 5.
Statement of Commissioner Adams 207

If the Supreme Court bans race-based affirmative action, it is the duty of the government 

to enforce the ban as vigorously as it once enforced Brown v. Board of Education.11

Ms. Yap was only cited once in the report, a shameful omission by the original drafters. Worse, 

the lone mention was only to recite a specific incident of Anti-Asian violence that she 

mentioned, and nothing was cited related to her views regarding Anti-Asian bias, hate crimes, or 

her opinions on how to combat them. Such bias in drafting Commission reports has to end, one 

way or another.

Remarks from Wenyuan Wu, Executive Director, Californians for Equal Rights Foundation

Dr. Wenyuan Wu, a community organizer in California, shared the views of other witnesses that 

anti-Asian Hate Crime is best targeted by increasing efforts to reduce crime in general, and that 

bias against Asians in academic admissions has a larger impact on the broader AAPI community 

than hate crimes or hate incidents. She testified that:

Number one, criminal incidents targeting Asian Americans are egregious and must be 

addressed in the context of rising threats to public safety in general.

Number two, framing anti-Asian hate crimes in a narrative of systemic racism or 

systemic inequity misleads the public on methodological and moral grounds.

Number three, persistent discrimination against Asian American students in education, 

justified under the names of diversity, equity, and race-based affirmative action is a much 

more salient and consequential form of anti-Asian discrimination...

In short, when we situate crimes targeting Asian Americans in the broad context of 

increases in violent crimes and decreases in the capacity of law enforcement to 

adequately address crimes, the wave of Asian hate is part and parcel of general crime 

patterns...

Last but not least, if policymakers and observers are serious about identifying and 

tackling discrimination against Asian Americans, they must confront the elephant in the 

room: systemic and ongoing anti-Asian discrimination in education through the practice 

of race-conscious admissions...

Racial preferences for the so-called under-represented minority students at elite colleges 

come almost entirely at the expense of Asian Americans...

11 Diane Yap, founding member of the Friends of Lowell Foundation, testimony, The Federal 

Response to Anti-Asian Racism in the United States Briefing Before the U.S. Comm’n on Civil 

Rights, Washington, DC, Mar. 4, 2023, transcript, pgs. 34-35.
208 The Federal Response to Anti-Asian Racism in the United States

[T]o reduce violence targeting Asian Americans, policymakers should devise solutions to 

improve public safety and support law enforcement.

On the other hand, if public policy decisionmakers are committed to combating 

discrimination and bias against Americans of Asian descent, they should not ignore the 

prevalence of race- conscious education policies, which disproportionately harm Asian 

American students.112

Dr. Wenyuan Wu’s viewpoints, comments and statistics, either in her written or oral testimony, 

were not cited anywhere in the report.

Remarks by Lee Cheng, Co-Founder of the Asian American Legal Foundation

Lee Cheng, provided written and oral testimony that buttressed the view that anti-Asian hate 

crime is best targeted by increasing efforts to reduce crime in general, and that bias against 

Asians in academic admissions has a larger impact on the overall Asian community than hate 

crimes or hate incidents. He testified:

The traditional racism based on racial animus has been joined by an ugly cousin, racist 

discrimination and violence that is supposedly benign. Most notably in recent years, 

reportedly benign discrimination helped advance redistributionist equity efforts seems to 

have supplanted ignorance-based animus as the source of institutionalized discrimination 

against Asian Americans...

The same attitudes exclude Asian Americans de facto, if not officially, from being 

recruited under DEI programs in employment or other business contexts as well as for a 

growing number of governmental programs.

But the horrifying surge of violence that Asian Americans face in the present appears 

only to be driven partly by racism by both Whites and non-Whites... The answer lies in 

deterring and stopping crime in bad acts and bad actors and not to focus only on things 

called hate crimes.

Focusing on hate misses the forest for the trees... Logically the increase in violent crimes 

against Asian Americans is predominantly due to a surge in violent crime overall, 

particularly in large American cities...

As previously mentioned, the majority of crimes against Asian Americans and shocking 

and dismaying images of brutality that we see daily are not apparently caused by racial 

animus but are largely due to changes in criminal justice. We've heard from Dr. Wu 

12 Wenyuan Wu, Executive Director, Californians for Equal Rights Foundation, testimony, The 

Federal Response to Anti- Asian Racism in the United States Briefing Before the U.S. Comm’n 

on Civil Rights, Washington, DC, Mar. 4, 2023, transcript, pgs. 74-81.
Statement of Commissioner Adams 209

earlier that restorative justice initiatives in states like California have resulted in -- in the 

release of tens of thousands of convicted felons and the decriminalization or downgrading 

of many crimes previously considered and prosecuted as felonies...

The focus of criminal justice reform appears to be on those who commit crimes and the 

race of those who commit crimes at the expense of the rights of victims and the families 

of all communities... In the criminal justice arena, the gathering and reporting of crime 

statistics have been overhauled to focus on hate crimes, masking the increase in violent 

crimes that actually drives the increased violence against Asian Americans and 

everyone...

In my opinion, the proper role of the federal government is to uphold the dearly won 

constitutional protections for individuals to avoid discrimination based on immutable 

characteristics. Of late, the government has not only abdicated that duty but facilitated 

injustice. A high profile example of the educational context involves the decision by the 

current administration to have the Solicitor General's Office support Harvard's bogus 

claim that its admissions policies do not discriminate against Asian Americans.”13

Like Wenyuan Wu, Mr. Cheng was disappeared by the drafters of the report and thus his policy 

statements, in either his written or oral testimony, are not cited anywhere in the report.

No Dr. Wu, no mention of COVID origins, and no mention of Mr. Cheng. The report airbrushes 

away inconvenient figures out of the report.

The airbrushing gets worse.

Testimony of Devon Westhill, General Counsel of the Center for Equal Opportunity and former 

Assistant Secretary for Civil Rights at the U.S. Department of Agriculture.

Such airbrushing is not limited to AAPI witnesses. Noted civil rights expert Devon Westhill was 

also disappeared out of the report like all the other opinions and events that are uncomfortable to 

the drafters. Never mind that Westhill was the former Assistant Secretary for Civil Rights at the 

U.S. Department of Agriculture and President and General Counsel of the Center for Equal 

Opportunity. In his written and oral testimony, Westhill argued that the federal government’s 

current focus on equity “makes the federal government one of the great purveyors of 

discrimination against Asian Americans...” He stated:

My invitation to participate in this briefing [regarding the Federal Response to AntiAsian Racism in the United States] requested I address the federal response to anti-Asian 

13 Lee Cheng, Co-Founder of the Asian American Legal Foundation, testimony, The Federal 

Response to Anti-Asian Racism in the United States Briefing Before the U.S. Comm’n on Civil 

Rights, Washington, DC, Mar. 4, 2023, transcript, pgs. 91-95.
210 The Federal Response to Anti-Asian Racism in the United States

racism in the United States. Sadly, as I lay out, the federal government is one of the great 

purveyors of discrimination against Asian Americans and other accomplished ethnic 

groups in this country via its equity agenda...

My primary concern today is how the federal government regards the civil rights of Asian 

Americans and that of other Americans who, as a result of their racial or ethnic identity, 

are treated differently, contrary to the American guarantee of equal protection under the 

law...

Just last month, and we heard earlier today in this briefing, President Biden signed yet 

another EO on advancing government-wide equity. Vice President Kamala Harris 

expressed on her official Twitter account her thoughts behind the motivation for the 

directive, quote, “America is the promise of equity and justice for all. Today, President 

Biden signed an executive order that puts our nation one step closer to achieving that 

promise,” end quote. It was a telling admission that the current administration has 

perhaps less commitment to our pledge of allegiance's promise of liberty and justice for 

all.

Indeed, Vice President Harris' change in terminology comports with the Biden 

Administration equity fixation. In fact, in the most recent EO, for example, equity is 

mentioned 63 times, but liberty gets no mention at all...

The currently fashionable term “equity” is not contained in our civil rights laws and one 

might question to seek to investigate given that equity initiatives target federally 

protected classes whether equity initiatives might frustrate or impede civil rights 

protection and enforcement.

Indeed, equity is not synonymous with equality...

The federal government's equity agenda appears to consist of identifying disparities in 

outcomes and attempt[ing] to close them by preferential treatment based on race or other 

immutable characteristics such as ancestral lineage. That's immoral, it's illegal, and it's 

undeniable that the federal government has put forward massive efforts to deliver on it. 

Equity is not equality...

The insistence that we must produce equal outcomes among groups defined by skin color, 

national origin, or gender perverts the American understanding of justice based on 

individual rights as achievable only by substituting authoritarian methods that trample 

those rights, and there is no good reason to believe that people or groups of people should 

even all end up in the same place as Vice President Kamala Harris has said.
Statement of Commissioner Adams 211

This brings me to my main point. Asian Americans are a disfavored group under the 

equity regime because of their success. Equity initiatives, as discussed, seek to reach 

proportional outcomes for groups...

So, in a system where outcomes must reflect proportionality, Asian Americans can 

occupy only their proportional share, approximately seven percent. Achieving equitable 

outcomes means both providing preferences to artificially inflate the proportion of and 

lowering standards for certain groups, and also bringing down other over-represented 

races like Asian Americans to their proportion of the population.

These are the two sides of the same equity coin. Neither side can be satisfied without 

violating federal civil rights laws or the constitutional principle of equal protection under 

the law since both require divvying us up by race.14

Disappeared, all of it. Like Dr. Wu and Mr. Cheng, Mr. Westhill is never mentioned in the report 

and thus his warnings about the danger that the government’s focus on “equity” vs. “equality” in 

federal policy poses to Asian Americans is not found in the report – despite the report being 

labeled “The Federal Response to Anti-Asian Racism in the United States.” His opinion did not 

match the views of the report drafters, and were thus disappeared.

The Report Does Not Accurately Reflect the Testimony Reviewed by the Commission

The numbers don’t lie. “Stop AAPI Hate” was mentioned or cited over 100 times. Witnesses 

affiliated with the group or its views were also disproportionately cited (John Yang 22 times, Jo 

Ann Yoo 18, Manjusha Kulkarni 18, William Scott 14, Cynthia Choi 10, Orlando Martinez 9, 

Jennifer Wu 8, Brian Levin 6, and Michael Yaki 5). Stop AAPI Hate and its allies are referenced 

so often that they might as well have written this report. Considering the troubling views toward 

free speech of the organization’s representatives, I am afraid the report chose the wrong lead to 

follow.

On the other side of the ledger, Eric Dreiband was cited 9 times (mostly for his past service at 

DOJ, not for any of his views or opinions in his testimony to the Commission), Charles|

Lehman was mentioned or cited 8 times, Diane Yap 2, Wenyuan Wu 0, Lee Cheng 0, and Devon 

Westhill 0.

We get it. To any objective reader, it is obvious the report is not objective. But that’s par for the 

course around the Commission. Future Commissioners should take note. So should Congress. 

Fundamental changes are long overdue around here. This body is not functioning as an impartial 

14 Devon Westhill, General Counsel of the Center for Equal Opportunity and former Asst. Sec. 

for Civil Rights at U.S. Dept. of Agriculture, testimony, The Federal Response to Anti-Asian 

Racism in the United States Briefing Before the U.S. Comm’n on Civil Rights, Washington, DC, 

Mar. 4, 2023, transcript, pgs. 134-141.
212 The Federal Response to Anti-Asian Racism in the United States

and useful fact finder as much as it is an organ for the prevailing orthodoxy on the far left. That’s 

a shame, because civil rights can easily be a bipartisan issue if basic principles of equality and an 

adherence to objective fact finding are followed.

I would urge Congress to examine these questions, along with all the other questions this 

Commission has invited.

Final remarks

This report embodies several troubling patterns in the operations of the USCCR. As discussed, 

Staff Director Morales improperly limited the scope of Commissioner questioning. This is not 

the first time that Director Morales has asserted non-existent authority to undermine 

Commissioners’ statutory authority.

The report also shows a lack of interest in the experiences of crime victims in the United States. 

Commissioners disregard the identities of perpetrators of violent crime, and proven solutions for 

crime reduction, while treating verbal comments as equivalent to violent crime. Even more 

disturbingly, the report implicitly affirms Stop AAPI Hate’s troubling assertions that criticism of 

the actions of the Chinese government plays a role in spinning up hate crimes.

It is my hope that the Commission’s forthcoming report on crime victims may address some of 

the omissions and oversights in this report.
Statement of Chair Garza 213

Statement of Chair Garza

As the new Chair of the United States Commission on Civil Rights, I take great pride in 

addressing the issues that are critically important to making sure civil rights in this country are 

not infringed upon. As someone who has dedicated my life to advocating for justice and equality, 

I take the responsibility we have been tasked with to heart.

My family is from deep south Texas, on the border with Mexico. My grandmother married as a 

teenager, bore 13 children and worked the land – picking cotton, okra, and tomatoes. She would 

give birth at home with the help of my great-grandmother, a midwife, rest a few days and then

continue working the land and making food for the family. She encouraged me to get an 

education and to keep working towards the life I wanted. While my grandmother lacked the 

choices and opportunities she fought so hard for her children and grandchildren to have, she 

instilled in me the will to continue the fight for future generations. Her story underscores the 

importance of ensuring equal civil rights for all, transcending generational struggles and 

fostering an inclusive society.

In just my first hearing as part of the Commission, it was important that we memorialize what 

has happened to the Asian-American community in the wake of COVID-19 — specifically the 

increase of discrimination, hate crimes and hate incidents experienced by this community.

The Commission’s report on “The Federal Response to Anti-Asian Racism in the United States,” 

examines the role that the historical anti-Asian racism, along with the interconnection between 

media messaging on Asians and how the societal impact of viewing Asians as the perpetual 

foreigner, has led to the rise of anti-Asian racism during the pandemic.

This is a critically important report and one that is bolstered by this Commission’s specific 

findings and recommendations that will accompany the report for the first time since 2019. I 

commend my fellow Commissioners on finding agreement on following five (5) findings and 

recommendations:

Findings

Data collection & reporting:

• A major impediment to understanding the severity and magnitude of hate crimes against 

persons of Asian descent is the lack of comprehensive data.

• The transition to the NIBRS data collection has been slow for some agencies: for 2021, 

the number of participating agencies within the FBI hate crime database was 11,834, 

compared to the 15,138 participating agencies for 2020 data, and many of the agencies

that have not submitted 2021 data are the largest jurisdictions.

Recommendations

Training & Partnerships:

• Prosecutors and law enforcement should vigorously investigate and prosecute hate crimes 

and harassment against Asian Americans.

• First responders should be provided with training aimed at teaching a clear understanding 

of what constitutes a hate crime in their jurisdiction.

Language access:
214 The Federal Response to Anti-Asian Racism in the United States

• Federal, state, and local law enforcement agencies and victim services need to identify 

critical deficiencies in Limited English Proficient (LEP) programs for individuals who 

need language assistance.

The report indicates that language barriers are impeding the reporting of incidents and that many 

incidents that do not meet the legal criteria for hate crimes, such as racial slurs or being spat on, 

still evoke fear but go unaccounted for in official statistics. Although the COVID-19 Hate 

Crimes Act has taken steps to enhance language services and reporting hotlines, accessibility 

issues persist, creating a potential disparity between federal and local resources. Ultimately, the 

absence of adequate performance metrics poses a significant challenge in assessing the federal 

government's effectiveness in combating the surge in hate crimes against the Asian community. 

While these barriers continue to exist, the Commission has outlined holistic strategy to combat 

anti-Asian hate incidents, ranging from data collection improvements and legal enforcement to 

community support and education initiatives.

Additionally, I would be remiss to not echo the additional findings and recommendations 

supported by my colleague—Commissioner Glenn D. Magpantay, the only Asian American 

serving on the Commission—that would assist in addressing the rise of Anti-Asian racism:

Findings:

• The myth of the “perpetual foreigner” continues to play a role in understanding the rise of 

anti-Asian racism and discrimination during the pandemic.

• To contextualize the increase anti-Asian sentiment during the COVID-19 pandemic, it is 

important to understand the history of anti-Asian racism and the “Yellow Peril” laws.

• During the pandemic, there were several other names that were used in the media and by 

government officials to refer to COVID-19, including the “Chinese virus,” the “Kung 

flu,” and the “Wuhan virus,” potentially perpetuating negative views of Asian individuals 

and communities and leading to many Asian Americans feeling blamed for bringing 

COVID-19 to the U.S.

Data collection & reporting:

• A major impediment to understanding the severity and magnitude of hate crimes against 

persons of Asian descent is the lack of comprehensive data. Without mandatory national 

data collection and training law enforcement on how to accurately identify and report 

hate crimes, preventing these crimes is substantially challenging.

• Hate crime victims are less likely to report incidents due to fear of retaliation, concerns 

that justice would not be served, and distrust in the criminal justice system.

• While the transition from the FBI’s UCR to NIBRS database intended to provide a more 

complete picture of hate violence across the nation, the shift has been challenging for 

many jurisdictions, and hate crime data remains incomplete.

• The transition to the NIBRS data collection has been slow for some agencies: for 2021, 

the number of participating agencies within the FBI hate crime database was 11,834, 

compared to the 15,138 participating agencies for 2020 data, and many of the agencies

that have not submitted 2021 data are the largest jurisdictions.
Statement of Chair Garza 215

• In March 2023, the FBI released a Supplemental Hate Crimes Statistics report and 

showed that the number of anti-Asian reported incidents increased 167 percent from 279 

in 2020 to 746 in 2021.

• National data show that all race-based hate crimes rose by 30 percent in 2020; and 

specifically anti-Asian hate crimes increased over 70 percent in 2020. According to the 

Bureau of Justice Assistance (BJA), anti-Asian hate crimes rose 164 percent in 16 of the 

largest cities and counties in the first quarter of 2021 compared to the same period in 

2020. BJA wrote that the first quarter increases in 2021 followed a “historic surge” in 

anti-Asian hate crimes that started in 2020, with anti-Asian hate crimes increasing 149 

percent in 16 of the largest cities in 2020. Specifically, data show that the first spike of 

anti-Asian hate crimes “occurred in March and April of 2020 concurrently with a rise in 

COVID cases and negative stereotyping of Asians related to the pandemic.”

• Hate crime data are underreported by victims and by law enforcement and are less likely 

to be reported to police compared to other types of crimes, and some research suggests 

that Asian Americans may be even less likely to report discriminatory behavior when it 

occurs.

• Data show that in California, hate crimes have increased steadily since 2019, and antiAsian hate crimes rose from 89 (6.7%) in 2020 to 248 (14.1%) in 2021. In San Francisco, 

all hate crime events increased from 2020 to 2021 (from 54 to 114), and the proportion of 

anti-Asian events increased significantly, representing 16 percent of events in 2020 and 

more than half of events in 2021.

• In New York, reported hate crimes dipped in 2020 before spiking in 2021. Anti-Asian 

hate crimes rose from 31 (6.35%) in 2020 to 140 (18.11%) in 2021. In New York City, 

the number of anti-Asian hate crimes in the city was one (0.2%) in 2019, rose to 27 

(10.2%) in 2020, and rose again to 131 (25%) in 2021.

• In the United States, 34% of the Asian American population is limited English proficient. 

The most frequently spoken languages are Chinese, Korean, Vietnamese, Tagalog, Thai, 

Khmer, Bengali, Gujarati, Hindi, and Punjabi.

Barriers:

• Few police departments have officers fluent in Asian languages, even in metropolitan 

areas with high numbers of AAPI residents. Therefore, language barriers continue to be a 

major barrier in reporting hate incidents and hate crimes.

• A major barrier to gaining a comprehensive understanding of the magnitude of hate 

violence against Asian communities may be due to incidents not rising to the legal 

benchmark of a hate crime. Many incidents that are reported to community organizations, 

such as being spit on or called racial slurs are not accounted for in official numbers, yet 

still invoke fear in community members.

• Under the COVID-19 Hate Crimes Act, funding is provided for state and local incident 

reporting hotlines, and in May 2022, DOJ expanded their language services to be 

available in 18 of the most frequently spoken AAPI languages across the nation. 

However, at the Commission’s briefing panelists testified the local reporting hotlines, 

victim services, and law enforcement were not accessible to victims with limited English 

proficiency, possibly pointing to a discrepancy between federal and local resource 

availability.

• The lack of hate crime prosecutions may also be a contributing factor to low reporting of 

hate crimes. Prosecution of hate crimes is difficult, even in states with comprehensive 
216 The Federal Response to Anti-Asian Racism in the United States

hate crime legislation, because there is no one legal standard to which courts have 

agreed, or because the standard to prove bias is too high.

• Most nonprofit and community resources trying to provide the public with ways to 

combat anti-Asian violence include encouraging reporting hate incidents and hate crimes 

to local law enforcement as well as to organizations collecting data, learning about the 

history of Asian American discrimination, and encouraging elected officials to pass antihate legislation.

• For struggling communities, the grantmaking process is cumbersome and difficult to 

maneuver through.

• The true challenge in assessing whether the federal government is doing enough to 

combat a rise in hate crimes lies in the absence of proper performance measurements.

Recommendations:

Data & Reporting:

• FBI should require local law enforcement to submit crime data, or in lieu of that, 

Congress should make submission mandatory, or considering a range of options to 

expand implementation.

• Congress could also consider authorizing a new grant program that would provide 

funding to state and local governments to cover expenses related to transitioning to 

NIBRS, such as purchasing new software and computers, or training officers on how to 

use NIBRS.

• Federal civil rights agencies should be required to collect and report key data related to 

civil rights enforcement and the Attorney General to annually publish this data.

• DOJ should fund state and local government efforts in partnership with community 

groups to address discrimination and other hate incidents.

• Law enforcement agencies should improve data collection, requiring the tracking and 

reporting of both hate incidents and hate crimes, and ensuring reporting forms are easy to 

mark an incident or crime as a suspected hate incident or crime.

Training & Partnerships:

• The Justice Department should also provide safety training and workshops in the 

respective languages of targeted communities and expand federal funding for community 

advocacy groups fighting hate crimes.

• The Justice Department should codify the role of the language access coordinator into 

federal law to ensure that all individuals have equal access to justice and access to federal 

programs and benefits regardless of language access.

• A written policy within a law enforcement organization can serve as a bridge between 

hate crime legislation and implementation of that law by providing officers with 

information and a standard that the agency expects them to follow.

• Prosecutors and law enforcement should engage in joint training on hate crimes and 

community engagements and law enforcement agencies may even consider 

recommending that the prosecutor’s office have a designated attorney to prosecute hate 

crimes in the community.

• Prosecutors and law enforcement should vigorously investigate and prosecute hate crimes 

and harassment against Asian Americans.
Statement of Chair Garza 217

• First responders should be provided with training aimed at teaching a clear understanding 

of what constitutes a hate crime in their jurisdiction.

• The FBI suggests state and local officials utilize the FBI’s resources, publicity tools, 

forensic expertise, and experience in identifying and investigating hate-based motivations 

even if federal hate crime charges are not pursued.

• A public health and gender-based approach to prevent hate in public spaces needs to be 

creased, including the street harassment of AAPI women and other vulnerable 

communities.

• The strengthening and expansion of local networks should be invested in so victims have 

ready access to community-based places where they can report attacks, receive support 

services, and take safety training and workshops in their own languages.

Language access:

• Regarding language access, federal agencies need to review their compliance with Title 

VI in Executive Order 13166 and take proactive steps to address any potential violations 

to ensure that they provide language access services to individuals who need them.

• As recipients of federal finding, local law enforcement and victim services should also 

comply with Title VI in Executive Order 13166 provide language access such as 

interpreters and bilingual officers who speak Asian languages

• Federal, state, and local law enforcement agencies and victim services need to identify 

critical deficiencies in Limited English Proficient (LEP) programs for individuals who 

need language assistance.

• Expand reporting hotlines or in-person contact for those limited English proficiency.

• Develop a language access policy statement prohibiting discrimination based on national 

origin that grants equal access to all individuals, including those with limited English 

proficiency and promotes effective communication through interpreter services, 

document translation, and staff training.

Civil Rights Protections:

• Title II of the Civil Rights Act should be expanded to include retail stores and other 

businesses where discrimination occurs to protect employees and customers from biasbased discrimination and harassment.

• Businesses frequented by the public should be required to train employees on their 

responsibilities to customers, so that they know and understand their responsibility to 

maintain a space free from bias-based harassment and discrimination, even if perpetrated 

by other customers.

I applaud the work the Commission has taken to address Anti-Asian hate, and I look forward to 

working with my colleagues in the future. My hope is that together we can continue the legacy of 

bipartisan progress that has been made possible by the resilience of many generations of 

Americans before us.
218 The Federal Response to Anti-Asian Racism in the United States

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Statement of Commissioner Gilchrist 219

Statement of Commissioner Gilchrist

When Covid-19 came to America, it left all too many Americans reeling! Businesses were forced 

to close; the unemployment rate reached a high of 14.7 percent1and more than 1.1 million 

people died because of Covid-19.2 The initial thrust of the pandemic left many of us exposed and 

vulnerable. In fact, my family and I was dealing with my mother-in-law’s death and within a 

two-week period we lost our home due to a fire. I mention this to not only remind myself about 

my personal challenges, but also, how Covid-19 challenged our entire country. As Americans we 

were trying to find our footing. We were told masks were not necessary, then mask must be 

worn, we were told to stay six feet apart, then vaccination was highly encouraged, sometimes 

feeling like it was more of a mandate. And in fact, there were professions where it was a 

mandate.3

Dr. King wrote, where do we go from here, chaos or community? The uneasiness of the 

pandemic, the George Floyd protest movement, economic calamity for many and the rise in 

violence against the Asian community stressed our cohesion as a community and a Nation. The 

pandemic exacerbated existing disparities within our country; health, education, finances, and 

shared opportunities.4 The term “essential” workers became the norm, yet many of those workers 

were more likely to be low-income and a member of a minority group. But they were crucial in 

helping to guide us through the pandemic. I’m eternally grateful to the healthcare professionals, 

the delivery service professionals and others that showed up for their fellow Americans and got 

things done, despite not having the convenience and opportunity to work from home.5

Usually when Americans are faced with big challenges, we have found a way to come together 

and see our way through the other side, however, the Covid-19 pandemic presented different 

kinds of challenges. Those that refused to subject themselves to exposure from vaccination were 

often chided, ridiculed, or told that they were being irresponsible.6 And there were accounts from 

those that felt as though because of their appearance that their fellow Americans “otherized” 

them.7 One of the most horrific incidences that happened during the pandemic was the Atlanta 

Spa Shooting. Many saw the Atlanta shooting as a sign of just how far off track we have gotten 

1

Long, Heather, & Van Dam, Andrew. (2020, May 8). U.S unemployment rate soars to 14.7 percent, the worst since the Depression era. 

Washington Post. Retrieved from: https://ww.washingtonpost.com/business/2020/05/08/april-2020-jobs-report/

2 World Health Organization. (2020, January 3). Retrieved from: https://covid19.who.int/region/amro/county/us

3

Pereia, Ivan. (2021 August 5). More businesses are mandating Covid-19 vaccines. Is that legal? ABCNews. Retrieved from: 

https://nbcnews.com/business/business-news/here-are-companies-mandating-vaccines-all-or-some-employees-n1275808

4 Wilson, Valerie. (2020, June 22) Testimony. Video. Inequities exposed: How Covid-19 widened racial inequities in education, health, and the 

workforce. Economic Policy Institute. Retrieved from https://epi.org/publication/covid-19-inequities-wilson-testimony/

5

Levitz, Jennifer; Bauerlein, Valeri; Lazo, Alejandro. (2021, February 1). Covid Wears On, Essential Workers Carry On: ‘Everybody Forgets 

That You’re Still on the Front Line.’ Wall Street Journal. Retrieved from: https://www.wsj.com/article/pandemic-wears-on-essential-workerseverybody-forgets-that-youre-still-on-the-front-line-11612197832

6 Delizza, Timothy. (2021, July 1). What the Media Gets Wrong About Red-State Vaccine Hesitancy. Undork. Retrieved from:

https://undark.org/2021/07/what-the-media-gets-wrong-about-red-state-vaccine-hesitancy/

7

Li Yao, & Nicholson Harvey. (2021, January 16). When “model minorities” become “yellow peril”—Othering and the racialization of Asian 

Americans in the COVID-19 pandemic. Sociology Compass. Retrieved from: https://compass.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/soc4.12849
220 The Federal Response to Anti-Asian Racism in the United States

in assessing blame for the pandemic on Asian Americans.8 Law enforcement dismissed race as a 

factor early on, while the mainstream media seemed all too quick to make it all about race. 

9Whenever there are incidents like the Spa Shooting in Atlanta involving different races, 

assumptions are made too quickly. Instead, we should allow some time for deeper analysis and 

thorough investigation into the potential causes of the incidents. According to reports the 

assailant indicated that race was not his motivation, even though there were some unverified 

reports that the 21-year-old assailant mention that he was “going to kill all the Asians.”10 The 

intersection of race, sex, mental illness and possibly, just plain evil makes an analysis of events 

like these more complex. Did the assailant have a contextual history of Asian discriminatory 

practice that guided his actions? Was it current or past stereotypes on how Asian women have 

been sexualized a contributing factor? As a society we have decided to elevate crimes against a 

person due to race, sex, religion, and natural origin as “hate crimes” to send a message that these 

types of crimes are an egregious affront to the ideals of a civilized society. Since Covid-19 

originated from China, many believe that it created an atmosphere of “suspicion” towards Asians 

or for some Asian-looking persons.11 I am not sure anyone will definitively know why he killed 

those at the massage parlor in Atlanta. It is hard to make rational sense out of senseless violence, 

especially acts of violence that rob individuals of their lives. I have intentionally not given the 

murderer recognition here by calling out his name, because he does not need more recognition 

than what he has already been given. It is more important to recognize and acknowledge the 

victims here. Let’s say their names: Xiaojie Tan 49, Daoyou Feng, 44; Delaina Ashley Yuan, 33; 

Paul Andre Michels, 54; Soon Chung Park, 74; Hyun Jung Grant, 51; Suncha Kim, 69.12

As a son of the South and particularly my beloved South Carolina, I’d be remised if I didn’t 

mention how the deaths in Atlanta triggered emotions I felt when the Charleston Church 

Massacre shooting at historic Mother Emmanual AME Church took place in June of 2015.13

Unlike the event in Atlanta, the event in Charleston was an unmistakable racist act. The assailant 

specifically drove to this historic Black church, prayed with the congregants and once heads 

were bowed and eyes closed, he massacred nine beautiful souls.14 Evidence and witnesses at trial 

produced a manifesto, which included the motive to start a race war, the murderer’s own 

8 Fausset, Richard; Vigdor, Neil; Nieto del Rio, Giulia. (2021, March 26). 8 Dead in Atlanta Spa Shootings, With Fears of Anti-Asian Bias. New 

York Times. Retrieved from: https://www.nytimes.com/live/2021/03/17/us/shooting-atlanta-acworth

9 Walsh, Joe. (2021, March 18). FBI Director Says Atlanta Shooting ‘Does Not Appear’ Racially Motivated. Forbes. Retrieved from

https://www.forbes.com/sites/joewalsh/2021/03/18/fbi-director-says-atlanta-shooting-does-not-appear-racially-motivated/

10Kim, Regina. (2021, March 31). Atlanta Spa Shootings: What Korean-Language Media Told Us That the Mainstream Media Didn’t. Rolling 

Stone. Retrieved from https://www.rollingstone.com/culture/culture-news/atlanta-shootings-what-korean-language-media-told-us-that-themainstream-media-didnt-1149698/ 

11 Barbaro, Michael. (2020, April 10). ‘I became a Person of Suspension.’ [Podcast]. New York Times. Retrieved from: 

https://www.nytimes.com/2020/04/10/podcasts/the-daily/racism-chinese-coronavirus-asian-americans.html

12 Stevens, Alexis (2022, March 15). The victims killed in the March 16, 2021, spa shootings. Atlanta Journal Constitution. Retrieved from: 

https://www.ajc.com/news/atlanta-news/what-we-know-about-the-spa-shootings-victims/OVPCGHAFZVGNRCUY3UYM2ZQVI/

13Kreutz, Liz; Liddy, Tom; Keneally, Meghan & Shapiro, Emily. (2015, June 18). Charleston Shooting Leaves 9 Dead at AME Church, Gunman 

in Custody. ABC News. Retrieved from: https://abcnews.go.com/US/charleston-shooting-leaves-dead-ame-church-gunmanremains/story?id=31845305

14Osunsami, Steve; McFann Kristen, Shapiro, Emily, & Fowler, Tarra. (2016, December 14). Charleston Church Shooting Survivor Says She 

Prayed as Dylann Roof Gunned Down Parishioners. ABC New. Retrieved from: https://abcnews.go.com/US/charleston-church-shootingsurvivor-prayed-dylan-roof-gunned/story?id=44185820
Statement of Commissioner Gilchrist 221

statements and writings were used.15 This was personal to me, because I knew the pastor of the 

church, Reverend Clemente Pinckney, and I also attended the eulogy that President Obama 

delivered at the College of Charleston Coliseum.16 That moment will forever be seared in my 

memory, my spirit will be forever changed, and I believe it is our duty to speak up and stand up 

when blatantly racist acts are committed against our fellow Americans. Conversely, we must also 

stand tall and push back on quick narratives of racism and blame when the evidence doesn’t 

comport with our ideology. This is no easy task because those who do push back are often 

vilified and dismissed with vulgarity and sometimes violence.17 There are times when we should 

allow our intellect to be elevated over the emotions of the moment, but then there are times when 

intellect without emotions leaves one spiritually inept-which causes an imbalance in our 

assessments. Both the shooting in Atlanta and Charleston left communities shattered, yet not 

broken. We still struggle to comprehend how such horrific events could occur, how lives so full 

of promises and potential can be extinguished in an instant. It is my hope that the souls of 

victims are resting in peace and that their loved ones still find comfort in the love and warmth of 

the community. In the spirit of remembrance, rest in peace: Reverend, Clemente Pickney, 41; 

Cynthia Hurd, 54; Tywanza Saunders, 26; Sharonda Singleton, 45; Reverend DePayne 

Middleton-Doctor, 49; Reverend Daniel Simmons, 74; Susan Jackson, 87; Ethel Lance, 70; Myra 

Thompson, 59.18

The predominate narrative is that the greatest threat to minority communities are white people, 

particularly young white males. While the two examples do involve white male perpetrators 

attacking minority populations, it’s more likely that “intra” racial violence is more the norm.19

President’s Trump appointee to the FBI, Christopher Wray stated before a congressional hearing 

that white supremacy presents a “persistent” and “pervasive” threat to the United States.20 This 

pronouncement often seems counter to some additional facts. Individuals are more likely to 

victimize those of their own race, however, there is evidence that Blacks offend Asians at a 

higher rate than Asians offend Blacks.21 Additionally, testimony from Diane Yap, Founding 

Member, Friends of Lowell Foundation would suggest that a large percentage of the perpetrators 

were not white nationalist, but African Americans.22 Based on her testimony, African Americans 

15The New York Times. (2016, December 9). The Dylann Roof Trial: The Evidence. New York Times. Retrieved from: 

16Pilkington, Ed. (2015, June 26). Obama gives searing speech on race in eulogy for Charleston pastor. The Guardian. Retrieved from: 

https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2015/jun/26/obama-charleston-eulogy-pinckney-amazing-grace

17 Carney, T (2022, April 29). To liberals ‘Free Speech’ Means the Right to Indoctrinate. To Conservatives, It Means the Right to Dissent from 

Elites. American Enterprise Institute. Retrieved from: https://www.aei.org/op-eds/to-liberals-free-speech-means-the-right-to-indoctrinate-toconservatives-it-means-the-right-to-dissent-from-the-elites/

18 Dennis, R (2020 September 14). Family Members Honor Emmanuel Victims with Tribute: ‘They will forever be in our hearts.’ Charleston 

Post and Courier. Retrieved from: https://www.postandcourier.com/news/family-members-honor-emanuel-victims-with-tribute-they-will-foreverbe-in-our-hearts/article_40c0e562-b0dd-11ea-b9d3-03e72d9c6841.html

19 Caldera, C (2020 September 29). Fact Check: Rates of white-on-white and Black on Black Crime are similar. USA Today. Retrieved from: 

https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/factcheck/2020/09/29/fact-check-meme-shows-incorrect-homicide-stats-race/5739522002/

20 APnews (2021, March 2). FBI Chiefs warns violent ‘domestic terrorism’ growing in US. APNews. https://apnews.com/article/fbi-chris-wraytestify-capitol-riot-9a5539af34b15338bb5c4923907eeb67

21 Yap testimony, Transcript. p. 32 Lines 5-9 

22 Yap testimony, Transcript. p. 32 Lines 6-15
222 The Federal Response to Anti-Asian Racism in the United States

made up 27.5% of the attackers that occurred on Asian Americans. 23 I do not believe these 

attacks were the result of following a politician’s rhetoric regarding anti-Asian sentiments. It is 

quite possible that the tension between the Asian Community and Blacks have a deeper history.24

The history of Asian Americans and African Americans in the United States is marked by 

significant differences and similarities. While both groups have faced discrimination and 

struggled for equal rights, their experiences have been shaped by distinct historical contexts and 

circumstances.25 Asians’ immigration to the United States began in the mid-19th century, 

primarily driven by economic opportunities such as the California Gold Rush and the 

construction of railroads.26 Chinese immigrants faced hostility and discrimination, leading to the 

Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882, which severely restricted Chinese immigration.27 African 

Americans, on the other hand, were brought to the United States as slaves during the 17th and 

18th centuries. Their arrival was forced and marked by extreme forced labor and conditions, as 

they were considered property and denied basic human rights.28 The Asian American civil rights 

movement gained momentum in the 1960s and 1970s, with activists advocating for equal rights, 

an end to discriminatory immigration policies, and better representation. The movement was 

diverse, with different Asian ethnic groups fighting for their specific rights.29 The African 

American civil rights movement emerged in the mid-20th century, led by prominent figures like 

Martin Luther King Jr. and Rosa Parks. The movement aimed to end racial segregation, secure 

voting rights, and address pervasive racism. It resulted in landmark legislation, such as the Civil 

Rights Act of 1964 and the Voting Rights Act of 1965.30 Over time, Asian Americans have 

achieved significant socioeconomic success, with higher educational attainment and median 

household incomes compared to the national average.31 However, this success varies among 

different Asian ethnic groups, with some facing economic challenges and disparities.32

African Americans, as a group, have historically faced socioeconomic disadvantages due to 

23 Yap testimony, Transcript.p. 32 Line 2

24Lim, Dion, Forston, Jobina. (2020, July 10). Coming Together: Understanding the history of tension between the Black and Asian 

Communities. Retrieved from: https://abc7news.com/african-american-asian-history-black-lives-matter/6309505/

25 https://www.vox.com/22321234/black-asian-american-tensions-solidarity-history

26

“Asian Americans Then and Now: Linking Past to Present” ( n.d.). Asia Society. Retrieved from: https://asiasociety.org/education /asianamericans-then-and-now

27 Chinese Exclusion Act. National Archives: Retrieved from: https://www.archives.gov/milestone-documents/chinese-exclusionact#:~:text=This%20act%20provided%20an%20absolute,good%20order%20of%20certain%20localities.

28

“An overview of the African-American Experience.” (n.d.). retrieved from: https://www.crf-usa.org/black-history-month/an-overview-ofthe-african-american-experience

29 Maeda, Daryl. (2016, June 09). “The Asian American Movement” Oxford University Press. Retrieved from: 

https://oxfordre.com/americanhistory/page/word/word-fromoxford?t:state:client=D8s9JAakuilS0XLVCmbYjsSnySA=:H4sIAAAAAAAAAFXOvUoDQRQF4Bt/UAk2Nr5A2p2fDSEulqIQsogQtB9m725

GdmfGO0PiNraWvogvZG1tZ2XlrIWQ4sI98HE4719wuD0AgFEgWDpqmPJKr5FF5TFE6mfM2IhkVcsC0sZoDOyqNWjjHVIwIabvxmBbraIj1

eCi8+1kif3H9/nb0efP6x7slzDWrvPOJrqoIpyVj2qjeKtsw1eRjG0uSziph5Jb1eETvMCohGOf2v7zs/cRxoSVIdTxntoIpy44/mBwe23TzgiWJ0xG

K7tOsxz1fACbBHAAXAomRTGdCJHXShPWjvAvFPMLIYtimhdyPmNCyHRC7rhsx2SY5fIXVmZHhDoBAAA=

30 https://www.civilrightsteaching.org/documents-based-lesson/civil-voting-rightsact#:~:text=The%20Civil%20Rights%20Act%20did,other%20barriers%20to%20Black%20voting.

31 Joo, Nathan; Reeves, Richard; Rodrique, Edward. (2016, April 20). Asians-American success and the pitfalls of generalization. Brookings. 

Retrieved: https://www.brookings.edu/articles/asian-american-success-and-the-pitfalls-of-generalization/

32 Banerjee, Asha.(2022, June 7). Understanding economic disparities within the AAPI Community. Economic Policy Institute. Retrieved from: 

https://www.epi.org/blog/understanding-economic-disparities-within-the-aapicommunity/#:~:text=Many%20Asian%20Americans%20and%20Pacific,year%2Dround%20workers%20in%202019
Statement of Commissioner Gilchrist 223

systemic racism and discrimination.33 They have experienced higher poverty rates, lower 

educational attainment, and limited access to economic opportunities. However, it is important to 

note that there is significant diversity within the African American community, with variations in 

socioeconomic status.34 Asian Americans encompass a wide range of ethnicities, including 

Chinese, Japanese, Korean, Filipino, Indian, and many others. They have diverse cultural 

traditions, languages, and religious practices, contributing to a rich and varied Asian American 

identity.35 African Americans have a shared cultural heritage rooted in their African ancestry, but 

their cultural identity is also influenced by the diverse experiences of slavery, segregation, and 

migration within the United States. African American culture has had a significant impact on 

American music, literature, art, and cuisine.36 Both Asian Americans and African Americans 

have faced discrimination and fought for equal rights, their histories differ due to factors such as 

immigration patterns, the nature of arrival, and the specific challenges they have encountered. 

Understanding these differences and similarities is crucial for recognizing and addressing the 

unique struggles and achievements of each group. 

In April 1992, during the Rodney King riots, South Central Los Angels went up in flames.37 Four 

police officers were acquitted of the charges for excessive use of force in beating motorist 

Rodney King. King suffered a broken bone, a skull fracture and permanent brain damage.38 The 

jury verdict was announced from the Simi Valley court room at approximately 3pm and South 

Central was ablaze about 6pm.39 The LAPD was woefully unprepared for the malaise that ensued 

afterward; residents set fire to businesses, looted, pulled motorist from cars, and beat them. 

Americans watched in horror as the scenes from Florence and Normandie (street intersections) 

reminded us just how fragile we are. The damage was tremendous; more than 2,000 people were 

injured, nearly 6,000 people were arrested, more than 1,000 buildings were damaged or 

destroyed, approximately 2,000 Korean businesses were damaged or destroyed. In total, nearly 1 

billion worth of property damage occurred.40 During the five-day unrest there were more than 50 

riot related deaths.41 One of the contributing factors that enraged the Black community was an 

incident earlier that month in which a 15-year-old black girl, Latasha Harlin, who was accused of 

33 Beyer, Don. (2020). The Economic State of Black America in 2020.” Joint Economic Committee. Retrieved from: chromeextension://efaidnbmnnnibpcajpcglclefindmkaj/https://www.jec.senate.gov/public/_cache/files/ccf4dbe2-810a-44f8-b3e7-

14f7e5143ba6/economic-state-of-black-america-2020.pdf

34 Tamir, Christine. (2021, March 25). “The Growing Diversity of Black America.” Pew Research Center. Retrieved: chromeextension://efaidnbmnnnibpcajpcglclefindmkaj/https://www.jec.senate.gov/public/_cache/files/ccf4dbe2-810a-44f8-b3e7-

14f7e5143ba6/economic-state-of-black-america-2020.pdf

35 Ruiz, Neil; Noe-Bustamante; Shah, Sono. (2023, May 8). “Diverse Cultures and Shared Experiences Shape Asian American Identities. Pew 

Research Center. Retrieved: https://www.pewresearch.org/race-ethnicity/2023/05/08/diverse-cultures-and-shared-experiences-shape-asianamerican-identities/

36 White, Constance. (2018, February 6). “How African Americans Have Influenced Style and Culture.” Time. Retrieved:

https://time.com/5134486/how-to-slay-black-fashion-influence/

37 Krbechek, Anjuli; Bates, Karen. (2017, April 26). “When LA Erupted in Anger: A Look Back At The Rodney King Riots.” NPR. Retrieved 

from: https://www.npr.org/2017/04/26/524744989/when-la-erupted-in-anger-a-look-back-at-the-rodney-king-riots

38 Ibid., p. 5

39 Ibid

40 Ibid.,

41 Ibid., p. 12
224 The Federal Response to Anti-Asian Racism in the United States

trying to steal orange juice, was killed by a Korean merchant.42 For the crime the merchant 

received probation and a $500 fine.43 In his testimony before the Commission, John Yang, 

President and Execute Director, Asian Americans Advancing Justice(AAJC) stated: 

“Let me be clear about this. Is there anti-Blackness in the Asian American community? Yes, 

there is. Is there anti-Asian-ness in the Black community? Yes, there is. And this is where, again, 

education is important. Right? Facts are important because there are those that are trying to use 

these divisions to create wedges within all our communities in a manner that is going to prevent 

progress."44

It’s very important in these discussions regarding race and violence that we are careful not to be 

too broad in our analysis and open to the possibilities of counter-narratives that we have not 

thought of before. It’s never my intent nor purpose to create a wedge between the Asian 

Community and the Black community. In the United States there has been “tension” between 

minority groups during times of economic and social unrest in our country.45 Acknowledging 

these tensions doesn’t create the wedge, it can serve as an opportunity to investigate and explore 

how we can do “community” better. 

As Russell Jeung, Professor of Asian American Studies stated in his testimony:

“So, I think Ms. Yap is correct that those of us living in low-income, maybe high-crime areas are 

victims of crime at high rates, but everybody in the community are victims of crime in those 

communities. So, it's not necessarily Black on Asian crimes. The Black and African American 

community, they're also victims of crime in those neighborhoods.”46

While it’s clear that since Covid-19 there has been an uptick in violence against Asians,47

however, it has been the Black community that has taken the brunt of crime increases, particular 

law-abiding working-class Blacks.48 And I thought that Mr. Levin, professor California State 

University-San Bernardino, Director, Center for the Study of Hate & Extremism (CSHE) further 

illustrated the nuance related to crime:

“...And I'm going to quote the dean, Jack McDevitt, who's the first one to come up with the 

typology back in 1989 with the American Study of Criminology. I added the mentally ill offender, 

but he looks at the thrill offender; the defensive reactive offender, who's reacting to a threat or a 

42 Ibid., p.7

43 Ibid.

44 Yang testimony, Transcript. p. 

45 Yamazato, Akiko. (2003). Interminority Relations in Early 1990’s in California: Conflicts among African-Americans, Latinos, AsianAmericans. William & Mary Scholar Works. Retrieved from: https://scholarworks.wm.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=5512&context=etd

46 Jeung testimony, Transcript. p.57. Lines 3-11 

47 Norwood, Candice. 2021, April 1). “What advocates and lawmakers are doing to address growing anti-Asians hate crimes.” PBS NewsHour. 

Retrieved. https://www.pbs.org/newshour/politics/what-advocates-and-lawmakers-are-doing-to-address-growing-anti-asian-hate-crimes

48 Canaparo, GianCarlo. (2022, April 12). “Who Suffers the Most From Crime Wave? The Heritage Foundation. Retrieved. 

https://www.heritage.org/crime-and-justice/commentary/who-suffers-the-most-crime-wave
Statement of Commissioner Gilchrist 225

change in their neighborhood; and the mission offender, like the neo-Nazi skinheads. There are 

different types of offenders, and they require, and America requires a different response.”49 

How did our government respond when it was recognized that violence against Asian Americans 

were increasing? Eric Drieband, former Assistant Attorney General, Civil Rights Division, 

Department of Justice; Partner, Jones Day shared the following with the Commission:

“On April 9, 2020, I announced publicly that the Department would not tolerate civil rights 

violations during the pandemic, and I explained that the Justice Department's pandemic-related 

work includes enforcing disability rights laws, protecting religious liberty, and prosecuting hate 

crimes. I also explained that because the coronavirus originated in China, some people have 

targeted Asian Americans and Asians simply because of their ethnicity and that this conduct has 

no place in America, and I added the Justice Department will prosecute hate crimes and 

violations of anti-discrimination laws against Asian Americans, Asians, and others to the fullest 

extent of the law.”50

Mr. Drieband went on to say that the directive he received from then, Attorney General, William 

Barr, to protect the American people Constitutional rights during Covid was paramount. 

“Attorney General Barr stated, quote, “the Constitution is not suspended in times of crisis. We 

must therefore be vigilant to ensure its protections are preserved at the same time that the public 

is protected.”51

Also, the United States House of Representatives passed the Covid-19 Hate Crimes Act on May 

18, 2021, and signed by President Joe Biden on May 20, 2021.52 The bill would have the Justice 

Department appoint a point person to expedite the review of hate crimes related to COVID-19. It 

would also direct resources toward making the reporting of hate crimes more accessible. Also, 

the White House Covid-19 Equity Task Force allocated nearly $50 million to fund community 

services for Asian or Pacific Islander survivors of sexual and domestic violence.53 Attorney 

General, Merrick Garland stated at the White House signing ceremony that “the Justice 

Department will play a central role in implementing this legislation and it’s an important step 

toward protecting everyone in our country from acts of hate and intolerance. We will use the new 

49 Levin Testimony, Transcript. p.54. Lines 2-10.

50 Drieband testimony, Transcript. p.129 Lines 8-21

51 Ibid. p.130, Lines 3-7

52 Sprunt, Barbara. (2021, May 20). “Here’s What the New Hate Crimes Law Aims to Do As Attacks On Asian Americans Rise. NPR. Retrieved 

from: https://www.whitehouse.gov/briefing-room/speeches-remarks/2021/05/20/remarks-by-president-biden-at-signing-of-the-covid-19-hatecrimes-act/

53 WhiteHouse. (2021, November 10). Biden Administration Announces New Investments to Support COVID-19 Response and Recovery 

Efforts in the Hardest-Hit and High-Risk Communities and Populations as COVID-19 Health Equity Task Force Submits Final Report [Fact 

Sheet]. Retrieved from: https://www.whitehouse.gov/briefing-room/statements-releases/2021/11/10/fact-sheet-biden-administration-announcesnew-investments-to-support-covid-19-response-and-recovery-efforts-in-the-hardest-hit-and-high-risk-communities-and-populations-as-covid-19-

health-equity-task/
226 The Federal Response to Anti-Asian Racism in the United States

law to enhance the aggressive measures we are taking to combat crime motivated by bigotry and 

discrimination.”54

Sometimes it seems rare that our Congress can get together and pass legislation. The media 

ecosystem will have the American people to believe that our elected leaders are like gladiators 

and cannot get anything done. But when it was time to send a message about hate and our values 

as a country a strong bi-partisan group of legislators did just that. The Covid 19 Hate Crime 

legislation passed the US House by a vote of 364-62.55

One of the nation’s leading organizations for Asian Americans, Stop AAPI Hate welcomed the 

federal response but also warned that the “act centers on criminal law enforcement agencies in its 

solutions, it will not address the overwhelming majority of incidents reported to our site which 

are not hate crimes, but serious hate incidents.”56

In reviewing the report and transcript its evident that most “attacks” against Asian Americans has 

been racial incidents more than actual crimes. I don’t want to minimize incidents because an 

accumulation of incidents can feel like “death by a thousand cuts.” Incidents such as “shunning” 

“avoidance” ‘jokes” and “racial slurs” have accounted for most of the reported hate incidents. As 

Mr. Jeung reiterated at the briefing: 

“I would like to really distinguish between hate incidents, which make up the great majority of 

our cases, and hate crimes, which make up a small fraction. We really need to address what the 

majority of Asian Americans are experiencing, what we're experiencing trauma from are just 

regular microaggressions of verbal harassment. But they're not micro in their impact. Right?”57

One of the most basic tenets and function of our government is to protect us from harm and 

dangers. Our freedoms are predicated on the fact that we can move about our environments 

without harm or intimidation. This is the base function of our government! Within our society we 

should not tolerate the fact that some Americans, due to fear, are quasi prisoners within their own 

homes and within their communities. Mr. Lehman suggested in his testimony that: 

“The wrong policy is to focus on reducing bias through education or social media content 

moderation. Such approaches are not only ineffective on their own terms, a large research 

literature casts doubt on educational interventions efficacy, but inefficient because they poorly 

target the small subset of the biased population that will actually criminally offend.”58

54 Garland, M. (2022, September 15). Attorney General Merrick B. Garland Delivers Remarks on Justice Department Efforts to Combat 

Unlawful Acts of Hate. [Speech] Retrieved from https://www.justice.gov/opa/speech/attorney-general-merrick-b-garland-delivers-remarksjustice-department-efforts-combat

55 Macagone, Michael. (2021, May 18). House sends anti-Asian Hate Crimes bill to Biden. Roll Call. Retrieved from 

https://rollcall.com/2021/05/18/house-sends-anti-asian-hate-crimes-bill-to-biden/

56 Stop AAIP. (2021, May 18). Statement on House Passage of the COVID-19 Hate Crimes Act [Press Release]. Retrieved from 

https://stopaapihate.org/2021/05/18/statement-on-house-passage-of-the-covid-19-hate-crimes-act/

57 Jeung testimony, Transcripts pg. 50 Lines 14-21

58 Lehman testimony, Transcripts pg. 20 lines 22-24. pg 21 lines 1-4
Statement of Commissioner Gilchrist 227

For the most part I concur with this assessment. I would recommend to the President and the 

Congress that we do the following: 

• Continue to strengthen the collaboration between our federal, state and local law 

enforcement officials.

• Fully utilize existing resources to assist communities in navigating cumbersome 

bureaucratic processes that makes it hard for community groups to access government 

grants.

• Make language accessibility the norm for the diversity of the population.

• Carefully balance the rights of the accused with the care of the victims. There is a reason 

our constitution mentions the rights of the accused, yet we must start respecting the harm 

to victims.

• The government should evaluate every five years whether federal hate crime laws are 

substantively beneficial in reducing hate crimes. 

Conclusion:

Crime continues to be a significant issue in our society, whether it’s because of immutable 

characteristics or not, a crime is a crime. Martin Luther King said that one day we will judge one 

another not by the color of our skin, but by the content of our character-this report is partially 

indicative that we are not there yet. Unfortunately, or fortunately, there are limits to what 

governments can do. It is my sincere hope that we do not have to have the heavy hand of 

government to tell us how to treat one another and how to do community. It is important for law 

enforcement agencies (federal, state, local) policy makers and communities to work together to 

address and combat not only hate crimes, but crime in general.

This report would not have been possible without former Commissioner Michael Yaki’s proposal 

to investigate the issue of crimes against the Asian Community. Additionally, I also want to 

thank my fellow Commissioners, they put in the time and talent to make us all a better 

Commission. And I want to thank the staff, led by Staff Director, Mauro Morales. The staff does 

a herculean job in preparing these reports. The logistics of writing, researching, re-writing, 

calling witnesses, interviewing witnesses, confirming witnesses, securing travel arrangements, 

follow-up with witnesses, editing, coordinating with Commissioners, Special assistants, IT 

professionals, other staff members, the press and on and on. It is indeed an honor to serve with 

my fellow Commissioners as we continue to push to make our country the absolute best!
228 The Federal Response to Anti-Asian Racism in the United States

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Statement of Commissioner Heriot 229

Statement of Commissioner Heriot

I learned an unfortunate lesson with this project: In politically mixed company, only certain 

kinds of anti-Asian race discrimination are considered appropriate for discussion. Bringing up 

others can result in a sharp rebuke. 

In this Statement, I will therefore begin by discussing the issue that we are allowed to discuss—

anti-Asian hate crimes (and so-called bias incidents). The problem is that talking about them is 

fashionable these days—perhaps a bit too fashionable. Such talk has become a way to score 

political points. By contrast, talking about effective solutions is decidedly unfashionable. Doing 

so exposes conflicts within the progressive coalition and therefore is discouraged. 

If we’re serious about preventing anti-Asian hate crimes, that needs to change.

Toward the end of this Statement, I will also briefly comment on the topic that was pushed 

aside—college and university admissions policies that penalize Asian Americans for being 

Asian. Several of our Asian American public commentators made it clear that this was the issue 

that mattered most to them. But such talk also exposes conflicts within the progressive coalition 

with some favoring race-preferential admissions and others victimized by them. I regret, but am 

not surprised, that the Commission failed to give the issue due attention. What surprised me was 

that the Commission’s staff director actually interrupted our briefing to prevent our expert 

witnesses from bringing it up. That’s taking coalition politics to extremes.

Perhaps now that the Supreme Court has decided Students for Fair Admissions v. President and 

Fellows of Harvard College (2023) the Commission will give the issue of anti-Asian 

discrimination in college and university admissions the attention it deserves. But I am not 

expecting it. 

Anti-Asian Hate Crimes

Enforcing the Criminal Law Generally Will Go a Long Way Toward Preventing Anti-Asian Hate 

Crimes.

It is understandable that hate crimes would be a part of this report. The Commission’s job is to 

study discrimination. And while the problem of crime is much broader than hate crimes—only a 

tiny percentage of the crime committed against Asian Americans are hate crimes1—they are the 

only crimes that involve intentional race discrimination. They are thus an obvious issue of 

interest to the Commission. 

1

In her written testimony, Diane Yap stated that while Asian Americans were targeted in about 305 hate crimes in 

2021, they were the victims of 102,650 violent crimes. Yap at 1.
230 The Federal Response to Anti-Asian Racism in the United States

But it’s important not to get carried away thinking of hate crimes as an issue separate and apart 

from crime in general. The solutions are similar.2

In a 2021 opinion essay in the New York Post entitled Asians Want Action Against Violence—Not 

More Rhetoric on Racism, Wai Wah Chin, founding president of the Chinese American Citizens 

Alliance of Greater New York, vented her frustration:

We Asians in New York City are fed up with woke politicians and their media going on and on 

about hate crimes. They are all talk about hate, but no action on crime.

And we want action on all crimes, not just “hate” crimes. Without catching, charging, and 

putting criminals away, our subways, streets, stores, and homes will never be safe. When you are 

being pushed into the subway tracks or face a knife in a robbery, whether the expletive used by 

the attacker qualifies as a hate crime is a remote concern to you.3

She has it right. If we want to bring violent hate crimes under control, we need to bring violent 

crime under control. For that, we need effective law enforcement. Special attention should be 

given to crimes committed by repeat offenders and by mentally ill individuals with a history of 

violence, because these are the crimes we have the best chance to prevent before they happen. 

Since these two overlapping offender populations also commit a disproportionate number of hate 

crimes, getting them off the streets will be an effective way to prevent hate crimes too. (In the 

case of the mentally ill, there is evidence that they account for a larger percentage of hate crimes 

than they do of non-hate crimes.)4

To be sure, the solutions will not be simple. Fashioning a fair and effective criminal justice 

system is a difficult job, especially when dealing with the mentally ill.5 But political rallies 

2 Often, it’s hard to draw a line between hate crimes and non-hate crimes. When a violent crime is committed for no 

apparent reason—a random stranger is savagely beaten—we may suspect that race, ethnicity, religion, sex, sexual 

orientation or another protected classification played a role, but if it can’t be proven beyond a reasonable doubt, the 

conviction will be for a non-hate crime. We may never know what actually motivated the crime. On the other hand, 

if a racial, ethnic, religious, sex, or sexual orientation slur is involved, it may well be charged as a hate crime, and 

the offender may be convicted on that charge. And yet sometimes it will be true that the slur had nothing to do with 

the offender’s motivation. The offender was simply using the most convenient epithet that came to mind. If the 

victim had been a different race, ethnicity, religion, sex, or sexual orientation, a different insult—perhaps one that 

had nothing to do with protected classifications—would have been used. For the remainder of this Statement, for 

brevity’s sake, I will shorten the list to race and ethnicity.

 

3 Wai Wah Chin, Asians Want Action Against Violence—Not More Rhetoric on Racism, N.Y. Post, April 10, 2021.

4 Charles Fain Lehman, What Motivates Hate Crime? Why Hate Criminals Are Still Criminals, Manhattan Institute, 

May 2023, https://media4.manhattan-institute.org/wp-content/uploads/Why-Hate-Criminals-Are-StillCriminals.pdf#page=14 (In 2021, half of the hate-crime offenders were mentally ill).

5 The Biden Administration has instead gotten off on the wrong foot by suggesting in a draft policy that federal law 

enforcement officers “should not use statistics about arrest rates in particular communities when making decisions 

about where and how to focus their activities.” Put differently, but not unfairly, the policy indicates that officer and 

agents should not focus efforts on where the crime is. Rather, they should put as much energy into patrolling the 
Statement of Commissioner Heriot 231

where politicians and activists urge attendees to “stop the hate” don’t get us closer to achieving 

that goal. The focus needs to be on stopping the crime, not on making sure everyone knows we 

oppose hatred.

Consider, for example, some of the more egregious crimes that have victimized Asian Americans 

in the last few years:

*Christina Yuna Lee was a 35-year-old Korean American with a talent for the visual arts. 

Assamad Nash followed her into her apartment in New York’s Chinatown, where he stabbed her 

more than forty times with her own kitchen knife. Police were alerted by neighbors who heard 

her screams, but they arrived too late to save her young life. Her killer was a chronically 

homeless and mentally disturbed man with an extensive criminal record. According to the New 

York Daily News, that record included charges for robbery, carjacking, and burglary.6 At the 

time of the murder, he was out on supervised release on three open criminal cases, including one 

in which he was accused of punching a random stranger on the subway.7

*Yao Pan Ma, a resident of the East Harlem neighborhood in New York, was a 61-year-old dim 

sum chef who had lost his job on account of the COVID-19 pandemic. Reduced to collecting 

cans on the street for a living, he was jumped from behind in a brutal and unprovoked attack. His 

assailant, Jarrod Powell, literally stomped him to death. Powell had a long arrest record that 

included kidnap and multiple assaults, including one on a fellow inmate at Rikers Island.8

safest, most privileged, crime-free neighborhoods in in America as they do in the most crime-infested 

neighborhoods. That’s great if you happen to live, work or own a business in a privileged neighborhood. But it’s 

not so great if you’re in a high-crime neighborhood instead. James Lynch, EXCLUSIVE: DOJ Proposal Would Ban 

FBI Agents From Using Community Crime Statistics In Law Enforcement, Docs Show, May 9, 2023.

6 Emma Seiwell, Rocco Parascandola, Chris Sommerfeldt and Leonard Greene, Homeless Suspect Accused of 

Following Christina Yuna Lee and Stabbing Her Inside Her NYC Apartment Charged with Murder, N.Y. Daily 

News, February 14, 2022. See Lisa Fernandez, Why the Stabbing Death of Christina Yuna Lee Reaches Far Beyond 

New York City, Fox 2 San Francisco ktvu.com, February 16, 2022. See also Dean Moses, “It’s Like a Zombie 

Land”: The Sorry State of Sara Roosevelt Park a Year After Christina Yuna Lee’s Murder, amNY.com, February 

15, 2023 (“One year since Christina Yuna Lee was brutally stabbed to death inside her Chinatown apartment, locals 

say the area of Sara Roosevelt Park—steps away from her former home—remains rife with drug use and the 

mentally ill”).

7 Luke Funk, Who is Assamad Nash, the NY Man Accused of Killing Christina Yuna Lee?, Fox 2 San Francisco 

ktvu.com, February 17, 2022.

8 Adam Schrader, Man Arrested for Stomping on the Head of Chinese Immigrant, 61, Who Was Collecting Cans in NYC 

is Convicted Sex Attacker with Lengthy Criminal Record, Daily Mail, April 27, 2021. Yao Pan Ma remained in a coma 

for months before his death. Alyssa Guzman, Asian Man, 61, Who Was Repeatedly Kicked in the Head in NYC Hate 

Crime that Left Him in a Coma Dies Eight Months After the Savage Attack: Thug Charged with Attempted Murder 

Has Been Arrested 15 Times, Daily Mail, January 9, 2022.
232 The Federal Response to Anti-Asian Racism in the United States

*GuiYing Ma, a 61-year-old grandmother, was sweeping the sidewalk when Elisaul Perez, for no 

apparent reason, picked up a large rock and bludgeoned her with it.9 She later died from her 

injuries.10 Perez had eight prior arrests.

11

*Michelle Go, a 40-year-old mergers and acquisitions specialist at Deloitte, often volunteered 

her time to, among other things, help the homeless. She died on the scene after being pushed into 

the path of an oncoming subway train by Martial Simon. Simon, a chronically homeless man, 

had been twice convicted of attempted robbery. At the time of the incident, there was a warrant 

out for him for a parole violation.12 

It’s not just the homicide cases that follow this pattern. Consider these cases too:

*Tommy Lau, a Chinese American bus driver, was on his lunch break when he noticed an older 

Asian couple being harassed by a homeless man. When he tried to intervene, the homeless man, 

Donovan Lawson, spat on him, punched him in the face and called him by an anti-Asian slur. 

This was Lawson’s 33rd arrest and the fourth time police had been called upon to help when he 

was in the grip of a mental breakdown.

13

*Vilma Kari, a 65-year-old immigrant from the Philippines, was walking to church when she 

was suddenly kicked in the stomach by Brandon Elliott. When she collapsed on the sidewalk, he 

kicked her in the head, shouted an obscenity and added, “You don’t belong here.” Kari suffered a 

broken pelvis but survived. Elliott, who lived in a nearby shelter, was on parole from prison 

after being convicted of killing his own mother. 14

9 Sabrina Souza & Eric Levenson, New York City Man Who Fatally Struck Chinese Woman with a Rock Sentenced 

to 20 Years in Prison, CNN.com, January 10, 2023.

10 Amir Vera & Liam Reilly, Asian Woman, Attacked Last Year in New York by Man with Rock Has Died, Family 

Says, CNN.com, March 1, 2022. 

11 Carl Samson, Repeat Offender Sentenced to 20 Years in Prison for Killing Guiying Ma in NYC Rock Attack, 

Yahoo.com, January 11, 2023. Perez pleaded guilty to manslaughter. In a statement read by the family attorney, the 

victim’s husband said, “He should be taken away so he can never hurt anyone else again. That is what justice means 

to me.”

12 Rana Novini, DA: Man in Woman’s Deadly Times Square Subway Shove Used Both Hands to Kill Her, 

NBCNewYork.com, Jan. 19, 2022.

13 Nicole Hong, Ashley Southall & Ali Watkins, He Was Charged in an Anti-Asian Attack. It Was His 33rd

Arrest, N.Y. Times, April 6, 2021. The article went on to say: “[Lawson] is not unique. Many of the 

people charged recently with anti-Asian attacks in New York City have also had a history of mental health 

episodes, multiple arrests and homelessness, complicating the city’s search for an effective response.”

14 Nicole Hong, Juliana Kim, Ali Watkins & Ashley Southall, Brutal Attack on Filipino Woman Sparks Outrage: 

“Everybody Is on Edge,” N.Y. Times, March 30, 2021; Joe Marino, Amanda Woods & Lia Eustachewich, Man 

Busted for Midtown Attack on Asian Woman Was on Parole for Killing His Mom, N.Y. Post, March 31, 2021. 
Statement of Commissioner Heriot 233

*Carl Chan, the president of the Oakland Chinatown Chamber of Commerce, was walking down 

the street, minding his own business, when James Lee Ramsey shouted a racial slur and struck 

him on the back of the head. Chan was left sprawled on the pavement, scraped and bleeding. 

Ramsey was on parole from state prison, chronically homeless and schizophrenic. Less than an 

hour after the attack, he was arrested by the Oakland police, who reported he said he had been 

seeing “crazy things” like “half-dog and half-humans and half-cat and half humans.”15

These cases are not outliers. Both long criminal records and a history of mental illness coupled 

with violence are common among offenders. According to the Manhattan Institute’s Charles Fain 

Lehman, 52.2% of those arrested for a hate crime in New York State between 2019 and 2021, 

had a prior conviction, 31.9% had a prior felony conviction, and 36.6% had a pending case 

against them.16 Judging from the newspaper reports, those arrested for the more serious hate 

crimes were especially likely to have such a record.17 

Similarly, on May 3, 2022, the head of the New York City Police Department’s Hate Crime Task 

Force, Deputy Inspector Andrew Arias, told the New York City Council that out of 100 suspects 

arrested in 2022 for hate crimes, 47 had “prior documentation of an EDP incident.” By “EDP 

incident” he was using the NYPD’s acronym for an “emotionally disturbed person”. Officers 

with the NYPD are directed by their procedural guide to document whether an individual 

“appears to be mentally ill or temporarily deranged.”18

15 Eyal Press, The Deadly Collision of Racism and Mental Illness, N.Y. Times, October 4, 2022.

16 See Written Statement of Charles Fain Lehman, fig. 3 at 5.

17 See, e.g., Wai Wah Chin, Asians Want Action Against Violence—Not More Rhetoric on Racism, N.Y. Post, April 

10, 2021(citing several serious cases involving perpetrators with prior arrests and convictions); Pervaiz Shallwani, 

Man Charged With Murder as Gay Hate Crime, Wall St. J., May 19, 2013, 

https://www.wsj.com/articles/SB10001424127887323648304578493541799661834 (Hate crime offender had an 

extensive criminal record which included extended stays in prison).

18 Arun Venugopal, Nearly Half of Those Arrested in Hate Crime Attacks Had Mental Health Issues: NYPD, 

Gothamist, May 4, 2022.
234 The Federal Response to Anti-Asian Racism in the United States

Not all these crimes are being prosecuted as hate crimes, though in all cases racial motivations 

were suspected by at least some.19 In the end, it hardly matters. Four innocent lives have been 

lost. Three innocent people have been injured. 20 

All the funding for bias education programs and “stop the hate” public service announcements in 

the world won’t solve this problem.21 The sort of person who commits these crimes is not likely 

to be attending bias education programs or listening to public service announcements.22

19 Jarrod Powell was prosecuted for and pleaded guilty to a hate crime. Associated Press, NYC Man Pleads Guilty in 

Brutal Hate Crime Stomping Death of Chinese Immigrant, nbcNewYork.com, January 12, 2023; Suspect Arrested in 

Vicious, Unprovoked, Assault on Asian Man in Manhattan, abc7NY.com, April 29, 2021. Because Assamad Nash’s 

and Elisaul Perez’s motivations were difficult to prove, they were not. But their crimes nevertheless understandably 

raised fear in the hearts of many Asian Americans. Elisaul Perez pleaded guilty to first degree manslaughter. David 

Propper, Brooklyn Man Gets 20 Years in Prison for Deadly Attack on Asian Woman, N.Y. Post, January 10, 2023. 

Assamad Nash was initially charged with murder but was found unfit for trial. Suspect in Gruesome Chinatown 

Stabbing Death of Christina Lee Deemed Unfit for Trial, NBC New York, June 12, 2023. Martial Simon was turned 

over to the New York Department of Mental Health and Hygiene after being found incompetent to stand trial. 

Tamar Lapin & David Meyer, Man Accused of Fatally Shoving Michelle Go, Found Unfit to Stand Trial, Court 

Official Says, N.Y. Post, March 22, 2022. 

Brandon Elliott has been charged with a hate crime. Man Charged in Brutal Attack on Asian Woman Out on Parole 

for Killing his Mom, abc7NY, April 1, 2021. But while James Lee Ramsey was initially charged with a hate crime, 

the hate charge was later dropped as part of a plea bargain, and he pleaded guilty to a lesser offense. Amber Lee, DA 

Drops Hate-Crime Charges vs. Man who Attacked Oakland Chinatown Leader, Fox KTVU, September 17, 2021. 

Donovan Lawson has been charged with assault-hate crime, aggravated harassment, menacing and harassment. Jaime 

DeJesus, Man Charged in Hate Crime Assault, Brooklyn Reporter, March 26, 2021.

20 My colleague Commissioner Magpantay states that hate crimes should not be a partisan issue, and he is exactly 

right. But I am disappointed that the report demonstrates a much deeper interest in attempting to link Donald Trump 

(who is mentioned 33 times) to anti-Asian hate crimes than it does in ensuring that perpetrators are taken off the 

streets. That makes it seem more partisan than I would like. (For my view on Trump’s references to COVID-19 as 

the “Wuhan Virus,” etc., please see my footnote 22). 

21 Professor Russell Jeung, a professor of Asian-American Studies at San Francisco State University, launched Stop 

AAPI Hate, a project of Chinese for Affirmative Action, in 2020. In his written testimony before the Commission, 

he advocated efforts “to mediate intergroup conflicts through restorative justice approaches” and the promotion of 

“anti-harassment awareness and safety campaigns against racism.” He also called for “preventing health 

stigmatization, denouncing xenophobic political rhetoric, and proactively countering hate speech on social media.” 

Russell Jeong Statement at 16. Similarly, Jo-Ann Yoo of the Asian American Federation asked that the federal 

government assist communities to “[d]evelop anti-bias programming to educate within and across communities to 

dispel misconceptions, address the root cause of hate crimes, and build relationships that create safety at the local 

level.” Jo-Ann Yoo Statement at 4. I have serious doubts that these measures would have had a significant effect on 

actual hate crimes. 

22 It seems unlikely that they were affected by Donald Trump either. I have no desire to be an apologist for the 

former president, who has been known to say things that nearly everyone (including me) wishes he hadn’t. But 

calling COVID-19 the “China Flu” or the “Wuhan Flu” doesn’t strike me as over the line. There is a long history 

behind naming diseases for the place they were thought to be first detected—the Spanish Flu, the Asian Flu, Rocky 

Mountain Spotted Fever, Lyme (Connecticut) Disease, African Sleeping Sickness, West Nile Disease, Lassa 

(Nigeria) Fever, Middle East Respiratory Syndrome (MERS), Argentine Hemorrhagic Fever, Pontiac (Michigan) 

Fever, Rift Valley Fever, Marburg (Germany) Virus Disease. Ebola is named for a river in the Democratic Republic 
Statement of Commissioner Heriot 235

It is also unlikely the problem will be solved by hate crimes hotlines or by gathering better hate 

crimes statistics. It may be true that hate crimes, especially low-level hate crimes, are underreported, just as crime in general is under-reported. Interestingly, despite what the staff-written 

part of this report states, the evidence is that hate crimes are somewhat more likely to be reported 

than non-hate crimes of similar magnitude.23 Alas, the heart of the problem lies elsewhere. More 

of the Congo. Zika is named for a forest in Uganda. Tularemia (or rabbit fever) is named for Tulare County, 

California. 

It seems to me that, if anything, a disease that is named for a specific group of people is worse, and the fact that the 

media do not shrink from using such terms is evidence of their political motivation in their panic over Trump’s use 

of “China Flu.” A good example is Legionnaires’ Disease, which is named for members of the American Legion, a 

veterans’ organization, who suffered an outbreak of the disease at a convention at the Bellevue Hotel in Philadelphia 

in 1976. I recall my father, a member of the American Legion, good naturedly objecting to the name. But I don’t 

think it would have occurred to him that was somehow malicious to use it. I note that ABC News, the New York 

Times, USA Today, and a host of other mainstream media outlets, have recently used the term. See Nathan Diller, 

FDA Sends Warning to American Cruise Lines after Guests Contract Legionnaires’ Disease, USA Today, February 

21, 2023; Knvul Sheikh, What Is Legionnaires’ Disease and How Can I Protect Myself?, N.Y. Times, September 

21, 2022; Paul Sisson, SDSU to Reopen Buildings Closed During Legionnaires’ Disease Investigation, San Diego 

Union Tribune, April 19, 2023; Meredith Delison, 1 Dead, 11 Sickened in Legionnaires’ Disease Outbreak in 

California County, ABCnews.go.com, August 4, 2022.

Even if Trump’s use of the terms “China Flu” and “Wuhan Flu” were somehow wrongful, it is unlikely that 

individuals like Donovan Lawson, Assamad Nash, James Lee Ramsey, and Martial Simon were influenced by it. 

They may not have even known about Trump’s description of the disease. Homeless people seldom spend their time 

following Trump or his Twitter feed. It used to be standard procedure for psychiatrists in the United States to 

determine if patients are alert and oriented by asking their name, the date, and the identity of the president of the 

United States. If they couldn’t answer those questions, they had serious problems. Of course, Nash, Ramsey, and 

Simon really had serious problems and might well have been unable to identify Trump as the president. It seems far 

more likely that if their motivations had anything to do with COVID-19, it had more to do with the fact that 

COVID-19 did indeed originate in China than with Trump’s behavior.

Commissioner Jones and the staff-generated portion of the report both suggest “a correlation” between Trump’s 

tweet and anti-Asian crime. I strongly suspect they are right that there is a correlation. How could there not be? 

But correlation is not causation. Both were responding to the same stimulus: the outset of the COVID-19 

pandemic. See Sean Darling-Hammond, Eli Michaels, Amani Allen, David Chae, Marilyn Thomas, Thu Nguyen, 

Mahasin Mujahid, and Rucker Johnson, After ‘The China Virus’ Went Viral: Racially Charged Coronavirus 

Coverage and Trends in Bias Against Asian Americans, 47 Health Education and Behavior, Sept. 2020,

https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.1177/1090198120957949.

 

23 Somehow the Commission’s report has gotten the idea that hate crimes are less likely to be reported than other 

crimes. The report states: “It is well-established that hate crimes are less likely to be reported to the police in 

comparison to other types of crimes.” Rep. at 71. I didn’t see that demonstrated in the data. The report cites a 2005 

Department of Justice report that does indeed show that only 44.1% of violent hate crime victimizations are 

reported, while 49.3% of violent non-hate crime victimizations are reported from July 2000 through December 

2003. (Caroline Harlow, “Hate Crime Reported by Victims and Police,” National Criminal Victimization Survey 

and Uniform Crime Reporting, Bureau of Justice Statistics at 4, Table 4, November 2005, 

https://bjs.ojp.gov/content/pub/pdf/hcrvp.pdf). But there is a lack of equivalence between the hate crime 

victimizations and the non-hate crime victimizations to which they are being compared. I had to do some of my 

own calculations using data in the 2005 report, but it turns out the violent non-hate crime victimizations in the 

comparison are, on average, somewhat more serious than the violent hate crime victimizations, so one would have to 

expect higher reporting rates. For example, the proportion of non-hate crime victimizations that were robberies (a 

felony) was much higher than the proportion of hate crime victimizations (10.9% vs. 5.9%). On the other hand, the 
236 The Federal Response to Anti-Asian Racism in the United States

needs to be done to ensure that those who are committing the crimes are taken off the streets. 

Until that happens, crime is likely to remain a problem.24

A policy of “de-incarceration” has often been urged in recent times. Second thoughts about this 

may well be in order. As Wai Wah Chin alludes to in her New York Post article, it is rather 

awkward to fret over anti-Asian hate crimes and at the same time advocate for radically reducing 

proportion of non-hate crime victimizations that were simple assaults (a misdemeanor) was lower. In particular, the 

least serious simple assaults—those involving verbal threat only—were only 26.2% of the non-hate crime 

victimizations, while they were 33.5% of the hate crime victimizations. (Id. at 3, Table 3.) In order to make the 

comparison to the figures in Table 4, I calculated these percentages using only the violent victimizations in Table 3. 

Because the reporting rates are not broken down by seriousness of offense, one cannot conclude from this whether 

hate crime reporting was higher or lower than non-hate crime reporting. But it is entirely possible that this would 

fully account for the lower reporting rate for hate crimes that the 2005 article found.

More important, the 2005 report appears to be seriously outdated. The more recent report from the Department of 

Justice--Hate Crime Victimization, 2005–2019—found that 57% of violent hate crime victimizations were reported 

to the police in the period from 2015-2019. (Grace Kena and Alexandra Thompson, Hate Crime Victimization, 

2005–2019 at 4, Table 2, September 2021, 

https://bjs.ojp.gov/sites/g/files/xyckuh236/files/media/document/hcv0519_1.pdf). 

No directly comparable figure for violent non-hate crime victimizations is included in that report. But it is possible 

to go outside of Hate Crime Victimization, 2005–2019, and find nearly comparable figures for violent non-hate 

crime victimizations. Criminal Victimization, 2018 states that the non-hate crime reporting rate for 2017 was 44.9% 

and for 2018 was 42.6%. Put differently, contrary to what the staff generated portion of this report states, the 

reporting rate for violent hate crimes was actually higher than the rate for violent non-hate crimes. (See Rachel E. 

Morgan & Barbara A. Oudekerk, Criminal Victimization, 2018 at 8, Table 5, September 2019. See also Alexandra 

Thompson & Susannah N. Tapp, Criminal Victimization, 2021 at 5, Table 4, September 2022 (reporting that in 

2020, the rate that violent non-hate victimizations were reported to police was 40.2% and that the rate for 2021 was 

45.6%)). That isn’t surprising given how many resources have been devoted to increasing hate crime reporting 

rates. Why should anyone be surprised that such efforts have been successful? 

24 Ms. Chin pointed out how Critical Race Theory (CRT) training could even increase the likelihood of an antiAsian hate crime:

When a black man told a Chinese father in Central Park on March 27 that “you guys always have 

the advantage,” then sucker-punched him, he acted out the two fundamental tenets of CRT. The 

first tenet is that you must judge people, not as individuals, but by their race only—i.e., to be 

racist—so the unlucky Chinese father became “you guys,” part of a collective racial judgment. 

The second tenet is that the only relationship between black and whites—and Chinese by 

extension—is that of unjust oppression. Oppression justifies retaliation, making it “socially just” 

to sucker-punch.

Wai Wah Chin, Asians Want Action Against Violence—Not More Rhetoric on Racism, N.Y. Post, April 10, 2021. 
Statement of Commissioner Heriot 237

incarceration rates,25 eliminating cash bail,26 and defunding the police.27 It’s naïve at best. And at 

some point, it starts to look insincere.

It’s also taken for granted that the problem of the homeless mentally ill is intractable—that miles 

and miles of makeshift tents in our nation’s largest cities are something we must learn to live 

with. I have been told—perhaps conveniently—that there is little to worry about, because they 

have very little tendency toward violence. But, as many urban dwellers have experienced, a not 

insubstantial number—including Donovan Lawson, Assamad Nash, and James Lee Ramsey—

obviously do. 

The most important reason we have governments is to protect us from aggression, both foreign 

and domestic. For the past few years, our criminal justice system has not earned high marks in 

this most fundamental of governmental tasks. That needs to change.

25 See, e.g., Michelle Alexander, The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness 

(2010)(advocating radical de-incarceration and viewing incarceration rates in the United States to be anti-African 

American). Compare Wendy Sawyer & Peter Wagner, Mass Incarceration: The Whole Pie 2023, Press Release: 

Prison Policy Institute, March 14, 2023 (stating that prison populations were reduced 15% during 2020 and jail 

populations were reduced 25%, but lamented that rates have begun to climb again) with Tom Cotton, Our 

Underincarceration Problem, National Review, August 11, 2021 (“Ill-conceived anti-prison policies rooted in 

platitudes, lies, and misleading statistics have unleashed thousands of criminals onto the streets”).

26 For a discussion of recent changes in the law of various states in connection with cash bail, see U.S. Commission 

on Civil Rights, The Civil Rights Implications of Cash Bail (January 20, 2022).

27 In 2023, some have argued that reductions in police budgets was never advocated and never happened—that it is 

all a myth. But that’s nonsense. For example, in Seattle, about $45 million was whacked out of the police 

department budget for 2021. In 2022, another $7 million was taken away. See Seattle Open Budget, 

https://openbudget.seattle.gov/#!/year/2023/operating/0/service/Public+Safety/0/department. The number of sworn 

police officers was 1,420 in 2018 and decreased steadily after that and was down to 1,077 in 2022. See FBI Crime 

Data Explorer, Law Enforcement Employees Breakout, https://cde.ucr.cjis.gov/LATEST/webapp/#/pages/le/pe. 

Minneapolis is similar. Its 2021 police budget was slashed by almost $28 million. Compare City of Minneapolis, 

2020 Budget, https://www.minneapolismn.gov/media/-www-content-assets/documents/2020-adopted-budget.pdf

with City of Minneapolis, 2021 Adopted Budget, https://lims.minneapolismn.gov/Download/FileV2/23271/2021-

Adopted-Budget.pdf. In 2019, it had 861 sworn officers. By 2020, this had declined to 833, and by 2021 it fell off a 

cliff with only 648. Rather than improving in 2022, it got worse with only 592. See FBI Crime Data Explorer, Law 

Enforcement Employees Breakout, https://cde.ucr.cjis.gov/LATEST/webapp/#/pages/le/pe. 

Chicago had almost $80 million cut from its police budget from 2020 to 2021. Compare City of Chicago Annual 

Appropriation Ordinance for the Year 2020, https://chicityclerk.s3.us-west-2.amazonaws.com/s3fspublic/document_uploads/budget/2020/2020_Annual_Appropriation_Ordinance_1.pdf with City of Chicago Annual 

Appropriation Ordinance for the Year 2021, https://chicityclerk.s3.us-west-2.amazonaws.com/s3fspublic/document_uploads/budget/2021/2021_Annual%20Appropriation_1.pdf. 

See Chelsia Rose Marcius, N.Y.P.D. Officers Leave in Droves for Better Pay in Smaller Towns, N.Y. Times, 

December 9, 2022 (“Police departments across the country are grappling with increasing resignations and 

retirements. And while hiring levels rose last year after a sharp decrease in 2020, they have not made up for the 

losses, according to a March report from the Police Executive Research Forum, a law enforcement policy group.”).
238 The Federal Response to Anti-Asian Racism in the United States

Some of the witnesses at the briefing as well as many of those who submitted public comments 

discussed the need for law enforcement.28 For example, the Asian American Coalition for 

Education, an alliance of over 300 Asian-American organization, wrote to us:

Notably, the majority of violent attacks on Asian Americans were reported in states that either 

defunded the police, or released many violent criminals irresponsibly during COVID-19 

pandemic, or failed to address their rampant homeless and mental health issues .... 

AACE’s comment noted that law and order are “essential to protect Asian Americans and all 

Americans.” It urged us to demand that “relevant state and local governments reverse their 

failing policies of defunding and releasing violent criminals irresponsibly” and “effectively 

address their homeless and mental health issues.” 

Similarly, a coalition of eleven Asian American and civil rights organizations wrote a 

public comment that urged the Commission to focus on “threats to public safety in general.” 

They stated that it is a mistake to focus attention “on relatively minor incidents that do not 

constitute crimes at all,” while “ignor[ing] violent crime the motivations [for which] don’t 

happen to be classified by the police authorities as ‘hate crime.’”29

The reference, of course, is to law enforcement agencies like the Sacramento Police 

Department, which urges citizens to report on their neighbors when they use racial or ethnic slurs 

or otherwise behave in a way that suggests bias.30 It is hard to imagine a good reason for such a 

28 Charles Fain Lehman stated in his written submission to the Commission, that “hate crime offenders are not 

specialists—they tend to resemble non-hate crime offenders in their history of criminal behavior, an indicator that 

they commit other, non-hate crimes as well.” For example, in New York State between 2019 and 2021, 52.2% of 

those arrested for a hate crime had a prior conviction, 31.9% had a prior felony conviction, and 36.6% had a pending 

case against them. The numbers for those arrested for other crimes were similar—51.4% had a prior conviction, 

33.1% had a prior felony conviction, and 33.0% had a case pending against them. Mr. Lehman concluded from this 

that “the best way to combat hate crime is not by targeting “hate,” e.g. through bias reduction programming or 

content moderation, but the target “crime” through aggressive law enforcement.” Statement of Charles Fain 

Lehman at 1.

29 Public Comment submitted by Californians for Equal Rights Foundation, et al., April 24, 2023. Comments from 

individual members of the public also sounded this theme. YangMing Cao of Fresno, California wrote about the 

witnesses who addressed the Commission about our March 24 briefing. In his view, many of them disregarded the 

Asian American community’s actual interests in order to “sell their ideological rhetoric of ‘Stop Asian hate,’ 

pretending that ‘white supremacy’ or ‘systemic racism’ is the biggest threat to the Asian American community.” He 

further stated:

Such fear mongering and race politicking can’t be further away from the truth: Asian Americans, 

just like other Americans, deserve equal treatment, not special treatment. Make American cities 

safer, crack down on crimes and criminal, and grant our children equal education rights. Everything 

else is either window dressing or counter-productive.

30 “Anonymous Crime Tip, Gang, Drug or Suspicious Tip Lines/Hotlines”, City of Sacramento, 

https://www.cityofsacramento.org/Police/Contact/Crime-Tips. The hotline for hot crimes doubles as a hot line for 

bias incidents. 
Statement of Commissioner Heriot 239

policy, especially in this era in which everything has been labeled “racist.” Police should stick to 

their core mission—to stop murder, mayhem, armed robbery, and other conduct that actually 

violates the criminal law. Given that this report is about anti-Asian discrimination, it is worth 

pointing out that some Asian Americans—recent immigrants from China—will likely be 

sensitive to a practice that sounds a lot like China’s social credit policy.31 For some, avoiding 

that policy may have been the reason they left China. 

Asian American voting patterns also reflect Asian American concern over the failure of 

our criminal justice system to keep violent crime under control. 32 As Michael Hartney and Renu 

Mukherjee wrote in connection with the successful effort to recall San Francisco’s progressive 

district attorney Chesa Boudin: 33

On June 7, San Franciscans voted overwhelmingly to recall their city’s progressive district 

attorney, Chesa Boudin, from office—an outcome foreshadowed by pre-election polling showing 

31 According to Katie Canlaes and Aaron Mok, China’s social credit policy assigns rankings to both individuals and 

organizations. The ranking is based upon “good” or “bad” behavior as determined by the National Development and 

Reform Commission, the People’s Bank of China, and the Chinese court system. “Incentive mechanisms encourage 

keeping trust” and “punishments” discourage “breaking trust.” Infractions include “bad driving, smoking in nonsmoking zones, buying too many video games, and posting fake news online, specifically about terrorist attacks or 

airport security.” Punishments include travel bans, bans from better hotels, and reduced internet speeds. Katie 

Canales and Aaron Mok, China’s ‘Social Credit’ System Ranks Citizens and Punishes Them with Throttled Internet 

Speeds and Flight Bans if the Communist Party Deems Them Untrustworthy, Business Insider, November 28, 2022. 

32 The New York Times has written on more than one occasion about Asian American voters in the New York area 

who are voting for candidates they believe will be tougher on crime. Jason Kao, Where New York’s Asian 

Neighborhoods Shifted to the Right, N.Y. Times, March 5, 2023; Luis Ferré-Sadurní & Ellen Yan, Crime Concerns 

Drove Asian Americans Away from New York Democrats, N.Y. Times, January 10, 2023. See also Hannah Hartig, 

Andrew Daniller, Scott Keeter & Ted Van Green, Republican Gains in 2022 Midterms Driven Mostly by Turnout 

Advantage, Pew Research Center, July 12, 2023, https://www.pewresearch.org/politics/2023/07/12/voting-patternsin-the-2022-elections/ (noting that the Republican share of the Asian American vote has been increasing with 26% 

in 2018, 30% in 2020, and 32% in 2022).

33 In a hotly contested election in 2019, Boudin emerged as the winner after campaigning for “radical change to how 

we envision justice.” According to NBC News, he pushed for “sweeping reform over incarceration” and “said he 

wants to tackle racial bias in the criminal justice system, overhaul the bail system, protect immigrants from 

deportation and pursue accountability in police misconduct cases.” Associated Press, Chesa Boudin, Whose Parents 

Were Imprisoned, Win San Francisco D.A.’s Race: The Son of Anti-War Radicals Sent to Prison for Murder When 

He Was a Toddler, Said He Wants to Reform the Criminal Justice System, NBC News, November 10, 2019. His 

parents, Kathy Boudin and David Gilbert, were members of the far-left Weather Underground and participated in 

the infamous Brinks armored car robbery that left two police officers and a security guard dead. His mother spent 

22 years in prison as a result and his father remains there. He was reared by fellow Weather Underground members 

Bill Ayers and Bernadine Dohrn, who themselves spent years as fugitives. Id. 

As to anti-Asian crime in particular, Boudin was criticized for one of his statements concerning the vicious murder 

of an 84-year-old Thai American grandfather named Vicha Ratanapakdee. Mr. Ratanapakdee was taking his 

morning walk when 19-year-old Antoine Watson, for no apparent reason, sprinted across the street and brutally 

pushed him down. As he fell, his head hit the pavement, causing his death. Boudin described Watson as having 

“some sort of temper tantrum,” which outraged Ratanapakdee’s family and evidently many other San Franciscans. 

Dion Lim, Family Outraged Over SF DA’s Description of 84-Year-Old Asian Man’s Suspected Killer, ABC7 News, 

March 2, 2021. 
240 The Federal Response to Anti-Asian Racism in the United States

that a majority of residents were so tired of Boudin’s soft-on-crime policies that they were 

willing to fire him after just two years on the job. ... [O]bservers would do well to understand 

the vital role that San Francisco’s Asian voters played in the Boudin recall.34

I do not pretend to be an expert in matters of enforcement of the criminal law. But it 

seems to me that if policymakers are concerned about violent hate crimes, they would do well to 

focus on violent crime in general.35 The steep increases in crime that the nation witnessed over 

34 Michael Hartney & Renu Mukherjee, The Asian Recall, City Journal (June 17, 2022). They further wrote:

Our evaluation of two key data points largely validates the anecdotal evidence showing that AsianAmericans played a key role in ousting Boudin. We compared support for the recall across the 

city’s 11 supervisor districts relative to the share of registered voters in each district who requested 

a Chinese language ballot. In the three districts with the smallest share of Chinese ballots (2 percent 

or less), just 50 percent of voters supported the recall (5 percentage points less than the citywide 

average). In contrast, in the three supervisor districts with the highest share of Chinese language 

registrants (10 percent or more), 65 percent of voters voted to recall Boudin.

We also examined another measure of citizen support for the recall: campaign donations. Using 

publicly available campaign-finance data, we examined the share of donor to the pro- and antiBoudin campaign committees who had Asian surnames. What we found largely confirmed the 

thesis that the pro-recall movement drew heavily on Asian support. Notably, one in five individual 

contributors to the Boudin recall effort had an Asian surname. By contrast, a much smaller share of 

pro-Boudin contributors (closer to one in ten) had an Asian surname. ...

While Asian residents of one of the nation’s most progressive cities are unlikely to become reliable 

Republicans, these dynamics suggest that many of these voters have begun to feel meaningful 

political cross-pressures. Democrats have embraced positions on education and crime that are 

unpopular with many Asian voters, including recent immigrants. With Asian-Americans 

representing the fastest-growing racial or ethnic group in the United States, events like the Boudin 

recall suggest that a potentially major national development may be underway.

See Claire Wang, How San Francisco’s D.A. Recall Election Shows a Rift in the Asian American Community, 

nbcnews.com, June 10, 2022 (“Asian Americans, galvanized by rising crime rates and violent attacks against elders, 

appeared to be a driving force in Tuesday’s recall election that ousted San Francisco’s reformist District Attorney 

Chesa Boudin”). 

35 Commissioner Nourse, to credit, is more focused on the need for prosecution. In particular, she is focused on hate 

crimes prosecutions, especially federal hate crimes prosecutions. She takes issue with the requirements set forth in 

Section 4707(b) of the Matthew Shepard and James Byrd Jr. Hate Crimes Act. 18 U.S.C. § 249(b). Under that law, 

a prosecution cannot take place unless the Attorney General has certified in writing that: 

(b) Certification Requirement.—

``(1) IN GENERAL.— No prosecution of any offense described in this subsection may be undertaken by the 

United States, except under the certification in writing of the Attorney General, or a designee, that—

``(A) the State does not have jurisdiction;

``(B) the State has requested that the Federal Government assume jurisdiction;

``(C) the verdict or sentence obtained pursuant to State charges left demonstratively unvindicated the Federal 

interest in eradicating bias-motivated violence; or

``(D) a prosecution by the United States is in the public interest and necessary to secure substantial justice.
Statement of Commissioner Heriot 241

Those requirements were put in place to deal with special aspects of federal hate crime prosecutions. In essence, 

they allow state law enforcement authorities to conduct the prosecution unless good reason exists for federal 

prosecutors to act instead.

For one thing, those requirements were intended to cut down on the likelihood of duplicative effort in prosecution. 

Because prosecuting major hate crimes tends to be viewed as a feather in the cap of a state or federal prosecutor, 

Congress feared that the federal statute would cause a rush to prosecute as ambitious prosecutors vied for the 

publicity the prosecution would surely bring. They wanted to avoid the jockeying for position and waste.

There is also another reason for the Section 4707(b) requirements. To understand that reason, some background on 

federal criminal jurisdiction would be useful: Our Constitution protects us against double jeopardy. An individual 

cannot be tried twice for the same crime. If the individual is acquitted, that’s the end of it. 

But there’s a catch. Under the “dual sovereignty rule,” the federal government cannot be ousted from jurisdiction 

just because a state has undertaken a prosecution first. And vice versa. Each must be accorded an opportunity to 

exercise its authority to protect the public from crime. See United States v. Lanza, 260 U.S. 377 (1922).

That is a genuine cause for worry. The potential for abuse is obvious. On the other hand, the dual sovereignty rule 

makes some logical sense. The federal government cannot allow states to thwart federal policy. There have been 

actual cases of efforts by state authorities to interfere with federal authority during Prohibition by conducting 

intentionally botched prosecutions of bootleggers. Nor should a botched federal prosecution be permitted to prevent 

states from exercising their authority to protect the public. 

The whole thing worked tolerably well back when federal criminal jurisdiction was very limited (as it was intended 

to be by the Constitution). It is worth noting here that the Constitution does not grant the federal government a 

general police power. That’s for the states. Consequently, when Congress passes a criminal statute, it must relate it 

to one of the federal government’s enumerated powers. Typically, these statutes have dealt with such things as 

crimes committed on federal property, crimes that victimize federal actors in the performance of their duties, crimes 

conducted through the use of the U.S. Mail, and crimes that implicate interstate or foreign commerce. Back when 

federal jurisdiction over crime was very narrow, the dual sovereignty rule rarely caused problems.

But in recent decades, the federal criminal code has expanded in ways that for the first time, allow prosecutors to get 

two bites at the apple on a routine basis. That’s intolerable. The federal hate crimes act is a major factor in this. 

For example, it covers violent crimes that occur “because of” someone’s disability. But victims of crimes are 

frequently targeted because of some real or perceived weakness. And there are those who take the position that all 

rapes are hate crimes because rapists almost always target victims of a particular sex. See Hearing Before the 

Committee on the Judiciary of the United States Senate on the Matthew Shepard Hate Crimes Prevention Act of 

2009 (S. Hrg. 111-464), June 25, 2009.

The requirements of Section 4707(b) were also intended to cut down on the double jeopardy issue by making sure 

that a re-prosecution would not occur except when determined to be truly necessary and in the public interest. This 

was the product of compromise. Out of concern for double prosecutions, I would have favored more stringent 

limitations on re-prosecutions. Others were less bothered by the prospect of prosecutors getting two bites at the 

apple this way and would have preferred fewer constraints on federal prosecutions.

Commissioner Nourse also calls upon Congress to re-promulgate the Matthew Shepard and James Byrd Jr. Hate 

Crimes Prevention Act in an effort to re-assert Congress’s view that it has constitutional authority to pass such a 

statute in its current configuration. I, too, would prefer to see the statute re-promulgated, but not in the way 

Commissioner Nourse suggests. For reasons I have commented on at greater length elsewhere, I don’t think there is 

anything Congress can do to make Section 4707(a)(1) of the Act (18 U.S.C. § 249(a)(1)) constitutional (though 

other parts of the Act appear to be constitutional). That section depends on the Thirteenth Amendment for its 

authority, but the Thirteenth Amendment only gives Congress the broad power to see to it that slavery and 

involuntary servitude are prohibited and never return. Unless the statute was intended by Congress in good faith as 

a means of preventing the return of slavery or involuntary servitude, it’s without constitutional authority. See 
242 The Federal Response to Anti-Asian Racism in the United States

the last few years seem to have leveled off in the last year or so—in part because post-pandemic 

incarceration rates have started to climb again. But that slight decrease in the crime rate is hardly 

cause for celebration. The rate leveled off in a bad place—still higher than it was prior to the rise. 

We can do better. And we must.

Of the Making of Hate Crime Statistics There Is No End.36

What Do Aggregate Hate Crime Statistics Tell Us? The answer to that question is probably “not 

as much as we like to think.”

It is generally agreed that, beginning around the time of the COVID-19 lockdown, the country 

had a spike in anti-Asian hate crimes. The most notorious example may be the case of José 

Gomez III of Midland, Texas, who, on the very day the lockdown began, tried to kill a Burmese 

American family that was shopping at Sam’s Club. Gomez, who acted in full view of other 

shoppers, thought the family was Chinese and somehow blamed them for the pandemic.37 

Exactly how large the spike was and how long it lasted is hard to say. Extensive media coverage 

tends to corrupt the numbers. It can increase the reporting rate rather than the crime rate itself. It 

can also encourage victims and law enforcement officers to interpret incidents as hate crimes that 

they might otherwise have viewed as ordinary crimes or even not crimes at all. On the other 

hand, the increases in crime can be real, and the publicity itself can sometimes cause the increase 

by inspiring copycat crimes. The bottom line is that arriving at accurate numbers is impossible.38

United States v. Hougen, No. 21-10369 (9th Cir. August 1, 2023)(Ikuta, J. dissenting); United States v. Cannon, 750 

F.3d 492, 509 (5th Cir. 2014)(Elrod, J., specially concurring to her own majority opinion); Gail Heriot & Alison 

Somin, Sleeping Giant?: Section Two of the Thirteenth Amendment, Hate Crimes Legislation, 13 Engage (Feb. 12, 

2013); Brief Amicus Curiae for Gail Heriot & Peter N. Kirsanow in United States v. Metcalf, No. 16-4006 (8th Cir. 

filed December 22, 2016)(available on SSRN). No one will believe that Congress was genuinely concerned that 

without the statute there would be a risk that slavery or involuntary servitude as that term was understood in 1865 

would return. Such a claim would be obviously insincere. See McCulloch v. Maryland, 17 U.S. 316 (1819)(“Let 

the end be legitimate” ... i.e. let Congress’s purpose in promulgating the statute be a legitimate one under Article I’s 

enumerated powers and courts will be deferential as to means). On the other hand, Congress could easily repromulgate the statute to put all of the prohibitions into Section 4707(a)(2) (18 U.S.C. § 249(a)(2)), which is 

premised on Congress’s power under the Commerce Clause. See Art. I, sec. 8, cl. 3. That would require 

prosecutors to prove an interstate commerce nexus with each prosecution, but that is a small price to pay for 

compliance with the Constitution

36 Ecclesiastes 12:2.

37 Julian Mark, Man Sentenced to 25 Years for Violent Anti-Asian Assault at Sam’s Club, Wash. Post, August 8, 

2022. The fact that he acted in full view of other shoppers suggests mental illness was a factor here.

38

 The truth is that accurate statistics on any kind of crime are hard to come by, particularly, though not only, during 

the rocky transition from UCR to NIBRS. I tend to trust only the statistics for homicide (and then only when applesto-apples comparisons are made). Sure, there is slippage with the handful of cases that are incorrectly classified as 
Statement of Commissioner Heriot 243

accidents or suicides when they are really homicides (and vice versa). And there are the rare cases of an individual 

who disappears and whose body is never found. But when the UCR data show that 16,374 homicides occurred in 

the United States in 2018 and 16,425 in 2019, those figures are as close to on target as any national crime statistic 

you’re likely to run across. See 2019 Crime in the United States, tbl. 1 https://ucr.fbi.gov/crime-in-theu.s/2019/crime-in-the-u.s.-2019/tables/table-1

By contrast, everything else is likely to be less accurate—especially for low-level crimes like simple assault. It's not 

that the federal government doesn’t try. It collects statistics both from law enforcement agencies and from the 

public. Both methods have their drawbacks. Putting them together is useful. Among other things, when the 

numbers don’t match up (and they never do), it reminds us of how difficult it is to get an accurate picture of 

something as complicated as crime. 

Data from law enforcement agencies is less than optimal in part because those agencies can’t report crimes that 

weren’t reported to them. Judging from the chatter on my neighborhood email list, lots of crimes, especially lowlevel ones, go unreported. This is in part because victims perceive that nothing will be done about them. They don’t 

want to waste their time. Note that from neighborhood to neighborhood or from demographic group to demographic 

group, crimes go unreported at different rates. For example, immigrant communities may trust the government less 

than more established communities, at least in part because in the place they came from the police may have been 

entirely unworthy of trust. 

In addition, even when crimes are reported, it is sometimes in the interest of local law enforcement to downgrade 

reports of crime to non-crimes in order to improve the locality’s reputation for safety and to reduce their workload. 

In the 1980s, WBBM-TV in Chicago received numerous awards for an extensive exposé that it entitled “Killing 

Crime,” which documented how Chicago police downgraded many credible reports of crime to non-crimes. See 

WBBM: Killing Crime: A Police Cop-Out, Vimeo.com, https://vimeo.com/73164896. See also Ben Poston, Joel 

Rubin & Anthony Pesce, LAPD Underreported Serious Assault, Skewing Crime Stats for 8 Years, L.A. Times, 

October 15, 2015; Leslie Griffin, Chicago’s Police Accused of Dismissing Unsolved Crimes to Better Their Record, 

UPI.com, May 7, 1983. As a resident of Chicago at the time, I found it shocking. These days, I don’t get shocked 

nearly so easily.

Then there is the problem of getting the data from the local law enforcement agency to the federal government. 

Here, too, it turns out that there is many a slip from the cup to the lip. For years, the Uniform Crime Reporting 

(UCR) Program compiled official data on crime in the U.S. More recently, however, a more complex database has 

been implemented—at least partially. As I understand it, the National Incident-Based Reporting System (NIBRS) 

differs from original UCR in part because it eliminates the “hierarchy rule” which recognizes the most serious 

offense committed during an incident. NIBRS, agencies are required to submit detailed information, not just about 

the most egregious offense in an incident, but about each and every offense committed in a single incident, as if each 

offense is a separate and distinct crime. Put differently, it is more work. It’s also expensive to convert from a UCR 

system to a NIBRS system. (Cost Issues of Implementing the National Incident-Based Reporting System in Local 

Law Enforcement Agencies, NIBRS Project Staff Report 2, May 1997, https://www.search.org/files/pdf/costs.pdf) 

As a result, many fewer local law enforcement agencies participate. For 2022, the largest city to report data was San 

Diego. That means New York, Chicago, and Los Angeles did not report. I feel very uncomfortable with national 

numbers like that. For gauging basic crime trends, looking at the issue city by city may yield more useful 

information.

The federal government also looks to the public for its crime data in the form of the National Crime Victimization 

Survey. But victim-reported information has its problems too. Ordinary Americans may make mistakes about what 

constitutes a crime and what doesn’t. For example, they may believe that actions that are protected by the First 

Amendment are criminal when they are not or that actions that create civil liability are also punishable as crimes 

when they are not. Ordinary Americans may also err when asked if they have been victimized in the last year and 

report a crime that actually took place 14 months ago. One reason to believe that victims make mistakes is that they 

often respond to the survey by saying they did report a hate crime to the police. Yet the police data reported via 

UCR and NIBRS do not reflect the same number of such crimes. Although several explanations for the 
244 The Federal Response to Anti-Asian Racism in the United States

But even if we had rock-solid numbers—whether we’re talking about anti-Asian hate crimes or 

hate crimes in general—there would still problems with understanding what those numbers 

mean. It’s easy to be misled. One problem is that when Americans think of hate crimes, they 

often think of a gang of skinheads attempting to kill or seriously injure a randomly selected 

member of a racial, ethnic, or sexual orientation minority—for no reason other than to feed their 

seething hatred. Many remember the horrific murder of James Byrd, Jr., who was chained to a 

pick-up truck and dragged to his death by a gang of thugs.39

If that’s your image of the “typical” hate crime, the number of hate crimes that are said to occur 

each year will be terrifying. President Biden’s very peculiar claim that “[w]hite supremacy ... is 

the single most dangerous terrorist threat in our homeland” will seem like understatement.40 But 

only a tiny number of hate crimes even come close to fitting that stereotype. Those that do shock 

the nation. If they didn’t, there’d be something wrong with us. It’s disorienting to think that there 

are bloodthirsty individuals out there with an all-consuming hatred directed at entire racial or 

ethnic groups.

But in a nation of over 330,000,000, there will always be a number of human scorpions. 

Mercifully, they are rare. To me at least, it is fitting that the men responsible for James Byrd, 

Jr.’s grisly murder—John William King and Lawrence Brewer—were executed pursuant to the 

laws of the state of Texas. 

Was their crime worse because Byrd was targeted for being African American? Would they have 

been less culpable if they had selected the victim of their monstrous crime completely randomly? 

While a reasonable argument can be made that the answer is yes, I will leave that question to 

inconsistencies exist, I believe the most obvious is that the police made the decision either that the reported incident 

was not a hate crime or that there was insufficient evidence that it was. See Rep. at 69-71.

39 James Byrd, Jr.’s Killer Executed for Notorious 1998 Hate Crime, BBC, April 25, 2019.

40 Giselle Ruhiyyih Ewing, Biden Calls White Supremacy “Most Dangerous Terrorist Threat” in Speech at Howard, 

Politico, May 13, 2023. The statement was made in Biden’s commencement address to Howard University’s 

graduating class. He added, “And I’m not just saying this because I’m at a Black HBCU. I say this wherever I go.” 

See also Rob Crilly & Geoff Earle, Conservatives Slam Biden for Saying White Supremacy is the “Most Dangerous 

Terrorist Threat” to the Nation During Howard Commencement Address, Daily Mail, May 14, 2023.

The New Oxford American Dictionary defines “terrorism” as “the unlawful use of violence and intimidation, 

especially against civilians, in the pursuit of political aims.” Under that definition, the September 11 attacks were 

terrorism because they were intended to discourage the United States from intervening in Middle Eastern affairs. 

Similarly, the bombing of the Alfred P. Murrah federal building in Oklahoma City by anti-government extremists 

was terrorism, because it was an intended to retaliate for the Waco siege in 1993 and the Ruby Ridge incident in 

1992 and to discourage the federal government from acting in a similar way in the future. Also, many of the 

participants in the 2020 riots were engaged in terrorism, since their aim was to encourage de-incarceration, a 

reduction in funding to the police, and other public policy changes. Other participants—like those who simply saw 

the riots as an opportunity to steal from retail stores—were not terrorists. The same principle applies to all violent 

crime: If it was part of a strategy to influence political decisionmakers, it was terrorism. If it was committed for its 

own sake, it was not. President Biden did not elaborate on how he arrived at his conclusion.
Statement of Commissioner Heriot 245

others to ponder. In any event, it’s important not to confuse the typical hate crime, which are 

certainly bad enough, with the astonishing evil of King and Brewer and similar killers. They 

have less in common than one might think. Consider: 

Who commits violent hate crimes? Very few are committed by “white supremacists” in the sense 

of card-carrying members of the Ku Klux Klan.41 Indeed, the hate crimes reported to the federal 

government are disproportionately committed by African Americans relative to their numbers in 

the population at large 42 (though there are plenty white offenders too as well as offenders of 

other races). 

As I noted in the previous section, many hate crime offenders are mentally ill. In the context of 

the anti-Asian hate crimes that were triggered by COVID-19 that’s easy to understand. What sort 

of a person over the age of 12 would irrational enough to blame the pandemic on Asian 

Americans generally (or even Chinese Americans generally)? A mentally ill person, that’s who. 

Also contrary to the stereotype, about a third of hate crimes are committed by family members, 

intimates, neighbors, or at least acquaintances of the victim.43 That should tell us something 

41 Of course, the term “white supremacist” gets tossed around very lightly these days with some so thoroughly 

imbued with critical race theory as to view nearly everyone as a white supremacist, including non-whites. See John 

Blake, White Supremacy, With a Tan, CNN.com, September 4, 2021 (taking the position that individuals who would 

be viewed by most as non-white are frequently white supremacists).

42 See Charles Fain Lehman, What Motivates Hate Crime? Why Hate Criminals Are Still Criminals tbl. 1, 

Manhattan Institute, May 2003, https://media4.manhattan-institute.org/wp-content/uploads/Why-Hate-CriminalsAre-Still-Criminals.pdf. 

Between 2005 and 2019, the perpetrators in 45.3% of the hate crime incidents were non-Hispanic whites, while in 

33.3% of the hate crime incidents, the perpetrators were non-Hispanic blacks. The percentage of hate crime 

incidents in which Hispanics or “Other” were the perpetrators was 15.4% and 4.3% respectively. In addition, in 

1.6% of the incidents, the perpetrators were listed as belonging to more than one group. Grace Kena and Alexandra 

Thompson, Hate Crime Victimization, 2005–2019 at 11, Table 6, September 2021, 

https://bjs.ojp.gov/sites/g/files/xyckuh236/files/media/document/hcv0519_1.pdf. Taking the 2010 census as the best 

source for comparison, the only group that appears to be over-represented as perpetrators is African Americans. See 

also Rep. at. 82-83, Table 9; pp 90-91, Table 13; pp. 92, Table 16; pp. 101-102, Table 22; pp. 111, Table 26 

(perpetrator race statistics not adjusted for population share.)

Diane Yap submitted written testimony (in addition to her oral testimony) that indicated that anti-Asian hate crimes 

are disproportionately committed by African Americans and that the disproportionality is not explained by 

proximity. Yap at 1-4. Ms. Yap lamented what she considered an overemphasis on hate crimes and hate incidents 

(or as she put it “nonviolent behaviors like tweets and shunning”) and an underemphasis on actual violent crime. 

43 Grace Kena and Alexandra Thompson, Hate Crime Victimization, 2005–2019 at 11, Table 6, September 2021, 

https://bjs.ojp.gov/sites/g/files/xyckuh236/files/media/document/hcv0519_1.pdf. According to the data from 2015 to 

2019, 30.7% of violent hate crime are committed by individuals who are “at least casually known” to the victim. 

For 56.2%, the offender was a stranger. For 13.1%, the relationship was listed as “unknown” (or at least unrecorded 

by police investigating the crime). Interestingly, just a few years earlier, in 2012, a majority (53%) of violent hate 

crime offenders were intimates, family members or acquaintances and only 40% were strangers with 7% 

“unknown.” See Bureau of Justice Statistics, Office of Justice Programs, U.S. Department of Justice, Hate Crime 
246 The Federal Response to Anti-Asian Racism in the United States

about the context of these crimes: Often the offenders are not simply looking to target a random 

member of a particular racial or ethnic group. Rather, they are engaged in a dispute with a 

particular person over something that is itself unrelated to race, ethnicity, etc. The dispute 

escalates, epithets fly, and a crime is committed. Perhaps without the added element of race or 

ethnicity, it wouldn’t have escalated. Or perhaps it would have. In any event, the encounter may 

not have started out as a crime. It may even have started as one neighbor arguing that the other 

neighbor’s dog barks too much or a customer insisting that the store clerk gave him incorrect 

change.44

How serious does the underlying crime tend to be? More than two thirds (69.4%) of violent hate 

crimes are simple assaults—a misdemeanor.45 Note that a simple assault need not involve actual 

Victimization, 2004-2012 tbl. 7 at 7 (February 2014), 

https://bjs.ojp.gov/content/pub/pdf/hcv0412st.pdf. This leads me to wonder if a change in methodology occurred.

44 In the civil rights course that I teach, I sometimes ask students to consider a hypothetical about an argument over a 

parking space. In it, one of the parties steps up close to the other and hurls a racial epithet at her. There is no other 

evidence he has any particular view of her racial group. Since she is a stranger to him, the only things he knows 

about her are her race, sex, rough age, the car she drives, and the clothes she was wearing that day. Should it be 

charged as a hate crime? He’s initially angry because he believes he was entitled to a parking space that she took, 

not because she is, say, Asian American. If she had not been Asian American, perhaps he would have been just as 

aggressive and come up with another insult to hurl at her—perhaps a sexual epithet or perhaps he would have called 

her fat, ugly, or stupid. On the other hand, perhaps if she had not been Asian American, he wouldn’t have attempted 

to put her in fear for her safety by shouting at her inches from her face. Perhaps he really doesn’t like Asian 

Americans. The victim herself is not in a good position to judge. The offender himself may not know what he 

would have done if he had not been dealing with an Asian American. We could leave it to the jury, but how are they 

supposed to decide? Under the circumstances, there is little hope of ever getting “accurate” statistics on hate crimes.

Last year, I was surprised to find myself a (very limited) witness to an altercation rather like my 

hypothetical. As I walked down a busy sidewalk, I saw what appeared to be a frightened transgender woman 

wielding a cord like a whip and telling what appeared to be an angry, young cisgender man to stay away. I came too 

late to observe what the fight was about or who was right and who was wrong. I stopped and made a mental note of 

what each of the parties looked like. When the young man backed away and got into his car, I took down as much 

of his license plate number as I could in case it was needed. 

The transgender woman thanked me for stopping at a time when others were just walking by. She told me 

the young man had become irate when she told him that he was parking his car illegally, that he had gotten out of his 

car, come toward her and called her a “fake woman.” She feared he would strike her and viewed his actions as a 

hate crime. I gave her the license plate number and my phone number. The police did indeed interview me about 

the incident as a potential hate crime. I have no idea whether the matter was pursued further. But I suspect it is not 

terribly different from some of the borderline cases that make their way into the statistics. If the police determine 

that the young man came at the transgender woman in a physically threatening manner and would not have done so 

if she had been a cisgender man, then the charge would be plausible under many hate crimes statutes. On the other 

hand, if he treated her no differently than he would have treated anybody else under those same circumstances, it

may arguably have been a simple assault (misdemeanor), but it was not a hate crime. 

45 Grace Kena & Alexandra Thompson, Hate Crime Victimization, 2005–2019 at 4, Table 2, September 2021, 

https://bjs.ojp.gov/sites/g/files/xyckuh236/files/media/document/hcv0519_1.pdf. The National Crime Victimization 

Survey is a national survey conducted twice a year by the U.S. Census Bureau. Data on non-fatal crime 

victimizations are collected from a representative sample of approximately 150,000 households. For the years 2015, 

2016, 2017, 2018, and 2019, the survey found that an average of 240,770 hate crimes (as perceived by the victim 
Statement of Commissioner Heriot 247

violence. It is enough that violence was explicitly or implicitly threatened. An offender who 

walks up to the victim, fists raised, and saying “I am going to beat the daylights out of you” is 

almost certainly guilty of a simple assault. That would be true even if he never lands a blow. It is 

sufficient that he intended to put the victim in apprehension of such a blow. Lesser factual 

showings can also amount to a simple assault: Suppose an offender, in the midst of a shouting 

match with the victim, comes within inches from the victim’s face in a menacing manner (even 

without specifically saying that he intends to strike the victim). That may well be enough to 

establish a simple assault. Add a racial or ethnic epithet, and it often enough to sustain a hate 

crime charge.

What role need hatred play in hate crimes? None whatsoever. Contrary to the popular 

understanding of hate crimes, there is no requirement that the offender be motivated by hatred of 

individuals because of their race, ethnicity, etc. As the Department of Justice’s web site states:

The term “hate” can be misleading. When used in a hate crime law, the word “hate” does not 

mean rage, anger, or general dislike. In this context, “hate” means bias against people or groups 

with specific characteristics that are defined by the law.46

Suppose a thug targets an Asian Americans for an attack, not because he hates Asian Americans, 

but because he believes, correctly or incorrectly, that Asian Americans are less likely to be 

armed than other potential victims. The lack of race hatred doesn’t matter a bit. What matters is 

that the victim was targeted because of his race.47

survey respondents) each year. Of those, on average, 215,094 were violent hate crimes (again, as perceived by the 

victim survey respondents). Of those violent hate crimes, on average, 149,202 were simple assault, 43,342 were 

aggravated assault, 16,000 were robberies, and 6552 were rapes or other sexual assaults. The rest of hate crimes 

(non-violent) were property crimes that included trespass, theft, and burglary. Id.

46 U.S. Department of Justice, Learn About Hate Crimes, https://www.justice.gov/hatecrimes/learn-about-hatecrimes. If anything, the Department of Justice website may have understated the point. The particular hate crime 

law that I am most familiar with is the federal statute passed in 2009—the Matthew Shepard and James Byrd Jr. 

Hate Crimes Prevention Act. The word “hate” appears in the title and in the section caption of the statute, but it 

doesn’t appear at all in the definition of the crime. 18 U.S.C. § 249. It therefore isn’t that the word “hate” means 

something different from its usual meaning. It’s that it isn’t used at all in the part of the statute that counts. Rather 

the statute creates a special crime for certain violent acts that occur “because of” someone’s race, color, religion, 

national origin, sexual orientation, disability, etc. Other hate crimes statutes are often similar. Under the federal 

statute, it would seem that an employer who becomes irate and strikes his assistant for working too slowly may have 

violated the statute if the assistant is disabled and would have worked more quickly without that disability. 

47 Similarly, the home invader who listens to the Rapper YG’s song Meet the Flockers has also acted “because of” 

someone’s Chinese national origin. The song instructs the listener on how to commit a burglary or home invasion. 

The lyrics to that song are as follows: 

First, you find a house and scope it out

Find a Chinese neighborhood

‘Cause they don’t believe in bank accounts
248 The Federal Response to Anti-Asian Racism in the United States

The upshot of this is that there is a broad range of crimes that can be labeled “hate crimes.” Most 

of them would be misdemeanors but for the racial or ethnic element: Two neighbors get into a 

dispute over parking.48 One routinely parks in a way that makes it difficult for the other to exit 

his driveway. In a burst of anger, one hurls a racial epithet at the other and threatens to punch the 

other in the nose, but in fact does not intend to do so. Others are deadly. 

My worry is that when Americans hear statistics reflecting the total number of hate 

crimes were reported to the FBI in a given year, they may not have a sense that the typical such 

crime would be a misdemeanor but for the racial or ethnic element. They may not know that 

frequently the parties were arguing about something other than race or ethnicity and that the 

evidence of a racial or ethnic motivation may consist solely of an epithet. And they may not 

realize that if the offender hadn’t used an epithet that relates to a protected classification, he 

might have used a vulgar insult that doesn’t happen to reflect protected categories like a*****e 

or he may have simply called the victim ugly, stupid, fat, etc. 

Consequently, sometimes hate crimes statistics, without more context, can cause Americans to 

believe that the level of racial and ethnic animosity in the country is greater than it is. That in 

turn can fuel further racial and ethnic resentment and social fragmentation. Instead of working to 

build a stronger, common identity as Americans, this can work to fuel divisive identity politics. 

Add to the mix, so-called bias incidents and the aggregate numbers may seem even more 

alarming, while average seriousness of the event declines rather sharply. For example, the 

numbers as collected by Stop AAPI Hate include 10,905 reported cases of “avoidance or 

shunning” (16.1% of the Respondents).49 It is perfectly understandable why Asian Americans in 

particular would feel sensitive about shunning during the pandemic. But it is worth pointing out 

that very few Americans were spared the experience of being avoided or shunned during that 

period. My own most memorable experience came an hour or two before the lockdown took 

effect. Many people had gone to the small grocery store in my San Diego neighborhood to stock 

up while they still could. As I was entering the store through the entrance lane, an obviously 

distraught woman was exiting through that lane rather than through the exit lane. She shouted at 

the top of her lungs (and at great length) that I should stay far away from her. I was stunned. To 

my knowledge, there was not yet a single case of COVID-19 in San Diego County. Of course, 

she was only the first of many to keep their distance from me over the last three years—some 

The victims in that case are again being chosen on the basis of their Chinese national origin. Again, it may be a hate 

crime as that offense is defined in many states, since it targets the Chinese. It is not surprising that many Americans, 

especially those of Chinese descent and including some of our public commentators, find this song offensive. See 

Chris Fuchs, Rapper YG's Song “Meet the Flockers” Sparks Protests, Accusations of Targeting Asian Americans,

NBCNews.com, October 14, 2016. 

48 See supra at n. 44 for my personal experience as a witness to a parking incident. 

49 Aggie Yellow Horse, Russell Jeung, and Ronae Matriano, Stop AAPI Hate National Report, 03/19/2020 –

12/31/2021, Mar. 1, 2022, https://stopaapihate.org/national-report-through-december-31-2021/.
Statement of Commissioner Heriot 249

rationally so given the information available to them, others not so rationally. I strongly suspect 

that Asian Americans (especially schoolchildren who have to be around other schoolchildren) 

have had far more than their fair share of this shabby treatment—though the numbers have likely 

declined precipitously, just as the number of reported anti-Asian hate crimes appears to be 

declining.50

Still, all in all, Federal, state, and local governments would do well to put their resources into 

preventing Asian Americans (and all Americans) from being victimized by serious crime. It’s not 

disproportionality that makes serious crime important to Asian Americans (and all Americans). 

The data suggest that Asian Americans are actually somewhat less likely to be victimized by 

violent crime than other racial groups.51 What matters most is the crime itself and the harm it 

inflicts, all of which is substantial and unacceptable for all races and ethnicities.

50 One of the experts the Commission consulted believed that the uptick in anti-Asian hate crimes has subsided 

along with COVID-19 itself. See Statement of Dr. Barry Latzer, Emeritus Professor of Criminal Justice, John Jay 

College of Criminal Justice, CUNY at 4 (“As the pandemic fades away preliminary data indicate that anti-Asian bias 

is diminishing as well. Along these lines, it is noteworthy that both New York City and Los Angeles experienced 

significant declines in Asian bias crimes in 2022”); see also Nora Mishanec, S.F. Touts Drop in Hate Crimes 

Against Asians, S.F. Chron., January 14, 2023. Another of our experts pointed to gaps in the data and noted that 

even with the 2022 decline, the numbers were still unacceptable. See Statement of Dr. Brian Levin, Director of the 

Center for the Study of Hate and Extremism, California State University at San Bernadino (stating that violent crime 

spikes have demonstrated “a disturbing resiliency”). Both experts can be correct. My points are these: (1) the best 

way to fight hate crimes is to fight crime in general, not to fund more bias education, to hold more “anti-hate” 

events, or to urge Americans to report non-criminal “bias incidents” to the police; (2) fighting crime in general 

requires that we be serious about the dealing with repeat offenders and with the mentally ill with a history of 

violence; (3) aggregate hate crime statistics may cause some Americans to overestimate the extent to which racial 

and ethnic animosity fuels violence; and (4) overestimating the extent to which racial and ethnic animosity fuels 

violence may itself fuel social fragmentation.

51 In 2019 and 2020, Asians were the victims of violent crimes 90,560 and 80,100 times, respectively, compared to 

Non-Hispanic whites - 1,836,520 and 1,593,170, Non-Hispanic blacks - 367,030 and 361,940, and Hispanics -

610,690 and 417,570. Rachel Morgan and Alexandra Thompson, Criminal Victimization, 2020 – Supplemental 

Statistical Tables at 4, Table 2, U.S. Department of Justice, February 2022, 

https://bjs.ojp.gov/content/pub/pdf/cv20sst.pdf. According to the Census Bureau’s current estimates, 6.6% of the 

population was Asian/Native Hawaiian/Other Pacific Islander, 58.9% was Non-Hispanic white, 13.6% was black or 

African American, and 19.1% was Hispanic. See Quick Facts, https://www.census.gov/quickfacts/US. That works 

out to Asian Americans being less likely to be victimized (if we can assume roughly similar rates of crime 

reporting).
250 The Federal Response to Anti-Asian Racism in the United States

Race-Preferential Admissions Disadvantage Asian Americans in Particular.

Meanwhile, discrimination against Asian Americans is hardly confined to hate crimes. Racebased admissions policies under which selective high schools, colleges, and universities hold 

Asian Americans to higher academic standards than other students, are very prevalent.52

The problem—if you can call it that—is that many Asian American subgroups, especially 

Chinese Americans, Korean Americans, and South Asians, on average, perform well in school.53

This is at least in part due to the fact that, on average, they spend more time studying.54

Consequently, if selective schools applied their academic standards fairly, without regard to race, 

they would have to offer Asian Americans seats that they would evidently prefer to give to 

African American, Hispanic, and white students.55 They would have “too many Asians” in the 

words of some. Instead, these schools hold Asian American students to a higher standard than 

52 See Lance Izumi & Rowena Itchon, Race Preferences and Discrimination Against Asian Americans in Higher 

Education in A Dubious Expediency: How Race Preferences Damages Higher Education (Gail Heriot & Maimon 

Schwarzschild, eds. 2021). 

53 See National Center for Education Statistics, America’s High School Graduates, U.S. Department of Education, 

https://nces.ed.gov/nationsreportcard/pdf/studies/2011462.pdf, Figure 30 (From 1990-2009, Asian/Pacific Islander 

students had higher GPAs than Whites, Blacks, and Hispanics, with the difference between Blacks and Asians being 

the largest.); Jane Nam, Average ACT Score, Best Colleges, December 22, 2022, 

https://www.bestcolleges.com/research/average-act-score/#average-act-scores-by-race-ethnicity (From 2018 – 2022, 

Asians were the only racial group to increase in average ACT scores and in 2022 they had the highest average ACT 

composite score).

54 Valerie A. Ramey, Is There a “Tiger Mother” Effect? Time Use Across Ethnic Groups, University of California, 

San Diego, February 2011, https://econweb.ucsd.edu/~vramey/research/Tiger_Mothers.pdf (Asian high school 

students spend between seven and nine and a half hours more per week studying than do white, black, or Hispanic 

students, and Asian college students spend 5-7 more hours doing homework than do white, black, or Hispanic 

students.); Michael Hansen and Diana Quintero, Analyzing ‘the homework gap’ among high school students, 

Brookings, August 10, 2017, https://www.brookings.edu/articles/analyzing-the-homework-gap-among-high-schoolstudents/#:~:text=Among%20all%20high%20school%20students,hours%20of%20homework%20per%20day, 

Figure 1 (Asian students spend nearly two hours per day on homework compared to Whites, Blacks, and Hispanics 

who spend nearly one hour, about 35 minutes, and nearly one hour, respectively).

55 Robert VerBruggen, Does Affirmative Action Lead to “Mismatch”? A Review of the Evidence, Manhattan 

Institute, July 2022, https://media4.manhattan-institute.org/sites/default/files/VerBruggen_Does-Affirmative-ActionLead-to-Mismatch.pdf, at 2 (“If these schools ignored race and admitted students solely on academic credentials, 

black and Hispanic students would be substantially underrepresented there, given racial gaps in those credentials”). 
Statement of Commissioner Heriot 251

their African American, Hispanic, and even white counterparts.56 To gain admission, they must 

perform better than their non-Asian peers.57

I myself don’t get the concept of “too many Asians.” It seems to me that a university that fairly 

applies its admissions criteria, without regard to race, will have just the right number of Asians, 

whether that’s many or few. Similarly, a National Basketball Association doesn’t have “too 

many African Americans” and Major League Baseball doesn’t have “too many Hispanics.” If 

they are developing and applying their standards without regard to race, they have just the right 

number. The doesn’t mean schools should consider only academic credentials in deciding whom 

to admit. But whatever they choose to consider—musical talent, artistic talent, athletic prowess, 

participation in extra-curricular activities, clean criminal record, or whatever—they should 

develop and apply those criteria without regard to race.

It is worth noting that discrimination against Asians in admissions is an example of history is 

repeating itself. In the 1920s, it was “too many Jews” rather than “too many Asians.” As one 

Harvard alumnus, writing in 1925 to Harvard president A. Lawrence Lowell, put it: 

Naturally, after twenty-five years, one expects to find many changes but to find that one’s 

University had become so Hebrewized was a fea[r]ful shock. There were Jews to the right of me, 

Jews to the left of me, in fact they were so obviously everywhere that instead of leaving the Yard 

with pleasant memories of the past I left with a feeling of utter disgust ....58

Jewish Americans were only about 4% of the American population in the 1920s. But by that 

time, Columbia University’s entering class may have been as much as 40% Jewish, and the 

56 Robert VerBruggen, Does Affirmative Action Lead to “Mismatch”? A Review of the Evidence, Manhattan 

Institute, July 2022, https://media4.manhattan-institute.org/sites/default/files/VerBruggen_Does-Affirmative-ActionLead-to-Mismatch.pdf, at 2 (At public institutions Asians were disfavored by 3.4 ACT points and at private colleges 

Asians received a 140 SAT point penalty).

57 A good example is Harvard University’s admissions rate. For those applicants in the top 10% in terms of 

academic credentials, the odds of being admitted are 56.1% for African Americans, 31.3% for Hispanics, and 15.3% 

for whites, but only 12.6% for Asian Americans. See Petition for Writ of Certiorari in Students for Fair Admissions, 

Inc., v. President & Fellows of Harvard College, No. 20-1199 at 11 (filed February 25, 2021). Harvard claims that it 

is not discriminating against Asian Americans and that while Asian Americans, on average, do very well on 

measures of academic talent, they do less well, again on average, than other groups on other talents and 

qualifications that Harvard looks for in its students. That is not an absurd claim on its face. It is certainly possible 

for one racial or ethnic group to do better, on average, than another on some measure; indeed, that is the case with 

Asian Americans and academic measures. But the facts suggest that Harvard is being less than candid. The specific 

claim is that Asian Americans do not interview well, that their personalities are less engaging. But it turns out that 

Asian Americans fare poorly in interviews only when they are interviewed by Harvard staff; when they are 

interviewed by Harvard alumni, who presumably haven’t been let in on Harvard’s diversity practices, Asian 

American applicants do just fine. Anemona Hartocollis, Harvard Rated Asian-American Applicants Lower on 

Personality Traits, Suit Says, N.Y. Times, June 15, 2018. The only way to avoid smelling a rat is to hold one’s 

nose. 

58 Jerome Karabel, The Chosen: The Hidden History of Admission and Exclusion at Harvard, Yale and Princeton 

105 (2005) (quoting Dec. 17, 1925 letter).
252 The Federal Response to Anti-Asian Racism in the United States

University of Pennsylvania’s was similar. Within a few years, Harvard’s entering class was 

27.6% Jewish, and Yale’s enrollment was 13.3%.59 Especially given that many of these students 

were the children of recent immigrants, their academic accomplishments were impressive.

But some Harvard officials—notably President A. Lawrence Lowell—didn’t like it. Lowell, who 

in his spare time was the vice president of the Immigration Restriction League, an organization 

steeped in that era’s scientific racism, was determined to do something about what he called “the 

Hebrew problem” at Harvard. Among other things, he argued it affected both student recruitment 

and alumni fundraising: 

The summer hotel that is ruined by admitting Jews meets its fate, not because the Jews it admits 

are of bad character, but because they drive away the Gentiles, and then after the Gentiles have 

left, they leave also. This happened to a friend of mine with a school in New York, who thought, 

on principle, that he ought to admit Jews, but who discovered in a few years that he had no 

school at all.60

Lowell originally wanted to deal with the issue by publicly adopting a ceiling on Jewish 

enrollment. But when the faculty—to its credit—initially balked, he put forth a more subtle plan. 

“To prevent a dangerous increase in the proportion of Jews,” he insisted that future admissions 

should be based on a “personal estimate of character on the part of the Admission authorities.”61

Harvard adopted such a policy in 1926, but as one might predict, the “personal estimate 

of character” was not what it seemed, just as “holistic admissions” are not what elite colleges and 

universities claim they are today. Shortly after the 1926 policy was adopted, Yale’s Dean 

Clarence Mendell paid a visit to Harvard’s admissions director. He reported that Harvard was 

“now going to limit the Freshman Class to 1,000. They are also going to reduce their 25% 

59 Id. at 86-88, 105, 114. 

60 Id. at 88 (quoting May 19, 1922 Lowell letter to William Hocking). 

61 Marcia Graham Synnott, The Half-Opened Door: Discrimination and Admissions at Harvard, Yale, and Princeton, 

1900-1970 at 108 (1979). Lowell insisted that “the Faculty should understand perfectly well what they are doing” 

and that their vote for a character test “should not be supposed by anyone to be passed as a measurement of 

character really applicable to Jews and Gentiles alike.” Karabel at 89. In Regents of the University of California v. 

Bakke, 438 U.S. 265 (1978)(opinion of Powell, J.), Justice Powell wrote favorably of Harvard’s longstanding efforts 

for geographical diversity. He was apparently unaware that the policy was part of the effort to limit the numbers of 

Jewish students, who tended to be concentrated in Northeastern urban centers. See Alan M. Dershowitz & Laura 

Hanft, Affirmative Action and the Harvard College Diversity-Discretion Model: Paradigm or Pretext?, 1 Cardozo 

L. Rev. 379, 386, 395 (1979).
Statement of Commissioner Heriot 253

Hebrew total to 15% or less by simply rejecting without detailed explanation. They are giving no 

details to any candidate any longer.”62

The Jewish Quota Era at the Ivy League eventually became a source of shame. But the end of the 

Jewish Quota Era was followed within a couple of decades by the rise of affirmative action 

preferences. By the 1980s it was clear that the more things changed, the more they stayed the 

same. Instead of discrimination against high-performing Jewish students, it was discrimination 

against high-performing Asian students. Jewish students were being treated as generically white 

and hence were discriminated against vis-à-vis African Americans, Latinos and American 

Indians, but not within the category of white. But Asian American students were the new Jews. 

Their numbers were depressed even vis-à-vis whites. 

Of course, you’d hardly know that from this report, which has the broad title “The Federal 

Response to Anti-Asian Racism in the United States,” that race-preferential admissions policies 

were an issue among many Asian Americans.

Here’s the background: The project that led to this report was proposed by now-former 

Commissioner Michael Yaki, who is a former member of the San Francisco Board of 

Supervisors. The concept paper, which he submitted to the Commission in mid-2022, was 

entitled The New Exclusion Act: The Re-Emerging Rise of, and Federal Response to, Anti-Asian 

Racism in America. It stated that, among other things, we would hear from “[c]ommunity 

leaders” who could “inform the Commission from a variety of perspectives about their 

experiences with bias/racism, and their recommendations regarding federal, state, and local 

enforcement or lack thereof related to Asian American civil rights.” The concept paper was 

adopted by majority vote in part on the basis of that description and now governs the scope of the 

project. 

The more conservative members of the Commission wanted to assign the Commission staff to 

explore specifically the admissions issue in the report (a proposal that did not pass, since none of 

the progressive commissioners were willing to vote for it). But we were comforted by the fact 

that the concept paper at least made it clear that the report would be on anti-Asian bias/racism in 

62 See id. at 109. The situation was not quite the same for African Americans. Harvard, for example, takes pride in its 

reputation for relative openness to African Americans, and all things considered, it did indeed have a better record 

than most institutions of the period. It was a record that was tarnished by Lowell, who segregated living and dining 

facilities over the objections of many alumni. On the other hand, at Princeton, perhaps the least friendly of the Ivies 

to racial minorities, not a single black attended in the 20th century until 1945, and at least one was actively discouraged 

from enrolling. Still, even at Princeton, African Americans occasionally attended in the 18th and 19th centuries. See 

Synnott at 47-53, 80-84; Karabel at 228, 232-36. Ivy Leaguers did not believe that African American students would 

come to dominate business and industry. Even at Harvard, their numbers were small, perhaps as few as 165 total 

between 1871 and 1941. Id. Alumni felt no reason to worry, consciously or unconsciously, that African Americans 

would crowd their offspring out of elite status. African Americans students were curiosities. Any “old guard” is likely 

at its worst when its members perceive that a group of newcomers may come to take a take a significant share of the 

benefits that its elite institutions can confer. The group that seemed to present that challenge at the time was Jewish 

Americans, not African Americans. 
254 The Federal Response to Anti-Asian Racism in the United States

general and that witnesses would thus be able to talk about the issue as part of the failure of the 

government to enforce their civil rights. 

Many of the witnesses at our briefing did indeed want to discuss or at least mention racepreferential admissions. And no wonder. As horrifying as the murders of Christina Yuna Lee, 

Yao Pan Ma, GuiYing Ma and Michelle Go were, they are the rare, one-in-a-million case. On the 

other hand, millions of Asian Americans have been or will in the future be affected by racepreferential admissions policies. Ignoring the issue is like ignoring the proverbial elephant in the 

room.

These witnesses nevertheless were discouraged from discussing the issue.63 Indeed, when the 

following colloquy took place between Commissioner Magpantay and former Assistant Attorney 

General Eric Dreiband, it was interrupted by Staff Director Mauro Morales to prevent discussion 

of race-preferential admissions.

COMMISSIONER MAGPANTAY: What is an Asian?

MR. DREIBAND: What is an Asian? “Asians” typically refer to people whose ancestry or 

national origin is from the continent of Asia.

COMMISSIONER MAGPANTAY: The reason why is that it is a very large and diverse 

community, which some segments encounter poverty, limitations on proficiency,64 and I’m just 

curious in the court papers if it is recognized the nuance and diversity that we seek to seek in 

America, like our schools should be -- you know, skin color, whatever, but there is diversity of 

experience and insights, isn’t there, among the Asian community?

MR. DREIBAND: Of course, there is, and that’s why this whole notion of grouping populations 

of people together the way many colleges and universities and other institutions today are doing 

as, quote, Asians, I think is shameful, disgraceful, and illegal. 

So, yes, there is a huge range of diversity among people whose ancestry is from Asia, among 

people who are from East Asia, or South Asia, or various parts of Asia, and I think it’s horrible 

that our institutions in this country today treat these individuals as if they are some monolithic 

group and then subject them to pervasive discrimination. 

63 Commissioner Victoria Nourse repeatedly told the witnesses “The Supreme Court is going to rule” in a manner 

that strongly suggested that she thought the topic should be avoided. Former Commissioner Michael Yaki, who was 

given the opportunity to speak, also sounded that theme. Transcript at 165, 173-74. This was the first time I can 

recall anyone making such an argument. There is nothing unusual about a civil rights issue coming before a court, 

including the Supreme Court. That has never been a reason for the Commission to avoid an issue in the past. 

64 This is what the transcript says, but listening to the recording, it sounds more like with “some segments coming 

from poverty, limited English proficiency” to me.
Statement of Commissioner Heriot 255

And it’s even worse because we’re talking typically about 18-year-old children who are applying 

to further their education at colleges and universities throughout this country, many of whom 

come very poor families many of whom are first generation arrivals to this country, and they are 

lumped together and disadvantaged by Ivy League institutions, by all kinds of institutions in this 

country, and it is a total disgrace in my opinion, and it’s 

Illegal, and immoral, and wrong, and it should stop.

COMMISSIONER MAGPANTAY: And that’s in your papers.

MR. DREIBAND: What?

COMMISSIONER MAGPANTAY: And that’s in your papers, your litigation papers, yes?

MR. DREIBAND: Well that yes, in the cases I mentioned, yes, we made those allegations yes.

STAFF DIRECTOR MORALES: I’m going to assert my authority under 45 CFR 701.11 and I 

want to remind all Commissioners that they voted for the concept paper on hate crimes against 

Asian Americans on September 16, Transcript page 40. Research timeline voted on October 21, 

transcript page 32. 

An amendment to add admissions of Asian Americans’ status to colleges and universities failed 

by a vote on September 16. Our conversation and the point of the testimony today is limited to 

the four corners contained in the concept paper, so I’m going submit the concept paper and the 

timeline for the record, so thank you.

COMMISSIONER MAGPANTAY: I apologize for my question if it was not appropriate ... not 

germane to the topic.65

I think we all know why Staff Director Morales, an Obama appointee, was seeking to limit 

Commissioners from asking, and witnesses from answering, questions about the racial double 

standard that works against Asian American in college and university admissions. And he 

succeeded. I have served on the Commission for more than fifteen years, and I do not believe 

that anything remotely like that has ever occurred before. It was unprecedented.

Staff Director Morales read from a statement that was obviously prepared prior to the briefing in 

anticipation of the possibility that a discussion of discrimination against Asians in college and 

university admissions would occur. Weirdly, he claimed to be asserting his “authority under 45 

C.F.R. § 701.11” to intervene in this manner. But there is nothing in that provision about the 

limiting the questions a commissioner can ask at a briefing or limiting answers that a witness 

65 Federal Response to Anti-Asian Racism in the United States, Mar. 24, 2023, transcript pp. 179-182, 

https://www.usccr.gov/files/2023-05/aa-hc-usccr-transcript_3.24.23-edited.pdf (hereinafter cited as Anti-Asian 

Briefing).
256 The Federal Response to Anti-Asian Racism in the United States

may give in response.66 Moreover, the provision lays out the duties of the chairperson, not the 

duties of the staff director. At the time of the briefing, the Commission had no chairperson, but 

the Commission’s most senior member, Commissioner Peter N. Kirsanow was acting in that 

capacity. In the definition section of the regulations to which the staff director referred, the term 

“chairperson” was defined to someone acting in that capacity.67 If anyone possessed the authority 

to limit questioning it was Commissioner Kirsanow. He did not choose to do so.68 It is important 

to note that the job of staff director is to direct the staff, not to direct the Commission. If 

Congress has intended the staff director to direct the Commission (which is defined in the statute 

as the eight commissioners, not as eight commissioners plus a staff director), it would have 

called him the commission director. 

Since the briefing, the Supreme Court has indeed decided that discrimination against Asian 

Americans in admissions is unconstitutional (as to state colleges and universities) and illegal 

under Title VI of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, 42 U.S.C. § 2000d (as to public or private 

universities that receive federal funds). I applaud that decision.

66 § 701.111 Commission meetings—duties of the Chairperson.

(a) At a meeting of the Commission in each calendar year, the Commission shall, by vote of the majority, 

adopt a schedule of Commission meetings for the following calendar year.

(b) In addition to the regularly scheduled meetings, it is the responsibility of the Chairperson to call the 

Commission to meet in a special open meeting at such time and place as he or she shall deem appropriate; 

provided however, that upon the motion of a member, and a favorable vote by a majority of Commission 

members, a special meeting of the Commission may be held in the absence of a call by the Chairperson.

(c) The Chairperson, after consulting with the Staff Director, shall establish the agenda for each meeting. The 

agenda at the meeting of the Commission may be modified by the addition or deletion of specific items 

upon the motion of a Commissioner and a favorable vote by a majority of the members.

(d) In the event that after consulting with the members of the Commission and consideration of the views of 

the members the Chairperson determines that there are insufficient substantive items on a proposed meeting 

agenda to warrant holding a scheduled meeting, the Chairperson may cancel such meeting.

67 45 C.F.R. § 702.1(c).

68 Commissioner Kirsanow told me that he was stunned by Staff Director’s intervention, but that given that the CSpan cameras were rolling, his instinct was to let it go. The following month, when the Staff Director Morales again 

attempted to limit what a commissioner could say, Commissioner Kirsanow explained to him that this was 

inappropriate. April Business Meeting Transcript at 64, https://www.usccr.gov/files/2023-04/0421-usccr-businessmeetingtranscript.pdf. 
Statement of Commissioner Jones 257

Statement of Commissioner Jones

The Federal Response to Anti-Asian Racism in the United States, whose general parameters 

were agreed upon prior to my appointment to this Commission, is a timely and much-needed 

report that addresses the surge in violence against the Asian American community that the 

COVID-19 pandemic exacerbated. This latest iteration of Anti-Asian sentiment and racism in 

America is well-documented in the report, however, Anti-Asian racism in the United States 

began centuries earlier. 

The Page Act of 1875 was the first in a series of legislative acts that significantly restricted 

immigration from Asian countries to the United States. Bans or limitations on Asian immigrants 

would extend, in one way or another, through the Immigration and Nationality Act of 1965.1318

Anti-Asian racism often involved myths and stereotypes related to disease, from the notion of 

“Yellow Peril” to the unconstitutional quarantine of San Francisco’s Chinese residents in 

1900.1319 Not only were these stereotypes damaging on their own, but they were perpetuated and 

reinforced by harmful rhetoric in newspapers and other media.

 

Unfortunately, right-wing rhetoric describing the COVID-19 pandemic has been reminiscent of 

the same stereotyping Asian Americans have experienced since the 19th century. In a briefing to 

the Commission, one panelist testified that “the political rhetoric and social media today really 

did exacerbate the issue. When politicians used the term ‘Chinese Virus,’ it did two things––it 

racialized the virus, so it made it Chinese, and it stigmatized the people, so Chinese people were 

the ones carrying the disease.”1320 The racialization of disease––which prompted the World 

Health Organization to outline best practices for the naming of diseases years before COVID191321

––was evident in the rhetoric used by then-President Donald Trump and members of his 

administration, who collectively referred to the coronavirus as “the Chinese Virus,” “the Wuhan 

Virus,” and the “Kung Flu.”1322

Unsurprisingly, research indicates a correlation between the rise in Anti-Asian violence during 

the COVID-19 pandemic and language utilized by politicians and the media during the initial 

outbreak of the virus.1323 Indeed, presidential statements have been correlated with both increases 

and decreases in hate crimes over the years, so the damaging effects of harmful rhetoric by 

Donald Trump and other right-wing politicians, which perpetuated centuries-old stereotypes, was 

to be expected.1324 The sheer scope of Anti-Asian hate crimes reported during the pandemic is 

1318 U.S. COMM. ON CIV. RIGHT, The Federal Response to Anti-Asian Racism in the United States, 31-38. (2023) 

[hereinafter Report]. Please note page citations to the Report may be slightly off due to the final formatting of the 

Report. 

1319 Report, 38-40. See also Robert G. Lee, Orientals: Asian Americans in Popular Culture, Temple University Press, 

Philadelphia. (1999); John Kuo Wei Tchen and Dylan Yeats, Yellow Peril: 19th-Century Scapegoating, AAWW.org, 

Mar. 5, 2014, https://aaww.org/yellow-peril-scapegoating/.

1320 Jeung Testimony, Anti-Asian Racism Briefing Transcript, p. 13.

1321 WHO Issues Best Practices for Naming Infectious Diseases, May 8, 2019, https://www.who.int/news/item/08-

05-2015-who-issues-best-practices-for-naming-new-human-infectious-diseases.

1322 Report, 12, 51. See also Deb Riechmann and Terry Tang, “Trump dubs COVID-19 ‘Chinese virus’ despite hate 

crime risks,” AP News, Mar 18, 2020, https://apnews.com/article/donald-trump-ap-top-news-asia-crime-virusoutbreak-a7c233f0b3bcdb72c06cca6271ba6713.

1323 Report, 11. 

1324 Report, 52. 
258 The Federal Response to Anti-Asian Racism in the United States

shocking: for example, in just 14 days during March 2020, more than 100 hate crimes were 

collected by the Stop AAPI Hate website.1325

I am especially proud of this report and its findings because Anti-Asian racism is an issue that 

has particularly affected residents in my home state of New York. New York has one of the 

largest Asian American populations of all 50 states––second only to California––and was one of 

the three states discussed in detail in Chapter Two of the report. Asian Americans living in New 

York, like those across the country, experienced a surge in hate incidents from 2019 to 2021. As 

Jennifer Wu, founding partner of a law firm in New York City, testified, “We have witnessed 

firsthand in New York City the surge in Anti-Asian violence.”1326 In New York City alone, the 

number of Anti-Asian hate crimes rose by 361 percent from 2020 to 2021.1327 New York has not 

just experienced an increase in hate incidents, but a large volume of hate incidents: of the 10,905 

reported hate incidents from March 19, 2020 to December 31, 2021, 15.7% of the respondents 

were from New York, the second largest percentage of any state.1328 While the volume of hate 

incidents experienced by Asian American New Yorkers is terrifying, each individual hate 

incident is horrifying in its own right, and combatting these hate incidents requires renewed 

effort by federal, state, and local governments.

As a Congressman representing New York’s 17th Congressional District, which consisted of 

diverse and dynamic Asian American communities, I called on our country to stand against hate 

and our federal government to more aggressively enforce hate crime laws that can protect the 

most vulnerable Americans. I also proudly helped pass the COVID-19 Hate Crimes Act and the 

Emmitt Till Antilynching Act of 2022 into law. The COVID-19 Hate Crimes Act of 2022 

responded to the rise in Anti-Asian hate crimes by, among other measures, expediting the review 

of hate crimes and reports of hate crimes by the Department of Justice, requiring the issuance of 

guidance on data collection, authorizing grants for states and local governments to implement the 

National Incident-Based Reporting System (NIBRS), and allowing courts to require education 

and community service as conditions of supervised release.1329 Meanwhile, the Emmitt Till 

Antilynching Act of 2022 is the first piece of legislation to outlaw lynching after more than 200 

failed attempts to pass such legislation spanning 100 years.1330

Not all efforts to protect the American people from discrimination and hate were as successful as 

the COVID-19 Hate Crimes Act and the Emmitt Till Antilynching Act of 2022. Republicanappointed FBI Director Chris Wray has accurately described white supremacist violence to be 

1325 Ibid.

1326 Jennifer Wu, Founding Partner, Groombridge, Wu, Baughman & Stone LLP, Written Statement for The Federal 

Response to Anti-Asian Racism in the United States Briefing before the U.S. Comm’n on Civil Rights, Mar. 24, 

2023, at 8.

1327 Kimmy Yam, “NYPD reports 361 percent increase in anti-Asian hate crimes since last year,” NBC News, Dec. 

10, 2021, https://www.nbcnews.com/news/asian-america/nypd-reports-361-percent-increase-anti-asian-hate-crimeslast-year-rcna8427. 

1328 Report, 63.

1329 COVID-19 Hate Crimes Act of 2022, S.937, 117th Cong. (2022).

1330 Emmett Till Antilynching Act of 2022, H.R. 55, S.3710, 117th Cong. (2022); See also “Senate Passes Emmett 

Till Antilyching Act of 2022, Senidng Bill to Biden for His Signature,” CNN, Mar. 7, 2022, 

https://www.cnn.com/2022/03/07/politics/senate-passes-antilynching-law/index.html. 
Statement of Commissioner Jones 259

the greatest domestic terror threat to the United States.1331 As a member of the House Judiciary 

Committee, I helped pass the Domestic Terrorism Prevention Act through the committee and 

then through the House, but Republicans filibustered this legislation in the Senate thereafter.1332

The Domestic Terrorism Prevention Act would have expanded the availability of information on 

domestic terrorism and its relation to hate crimes, established intra-agency reports and a task 

force focused on domestic terrorism and white supremacy, and directed the FBI to assign a 

special agent or hate crimes liaison to each field office for the purpose of investigating hate 

crimes with a nexus to domestic terrorism.1333

I also sponsored the Juror Non-Discrimination Act of 2021, which would prohibit excluding 

individuals from jury service on the basis of their sexual orientation or gender identity.1334 My 

legislation became part of the Equality Act, which would finally enshrine protections for the 

LGBTQ+ community in federal anti-discrimination law. As the nation’s first openly gay, Black 

member of Congress, this legislation remains personal to me, and it is a shame that after passing 

the House in the 117th Congress Republicans in the Senate filibustered this bill thereafter.

One of this report’s strengths is that it highlights how severely underreported hate crimes are, a 

problem for those seeking justice and a comprehensive understanding of Anti-Asian racism 

across the United States. In order to effectively combat hate crimes, it is critical that we, as a 

nation, understand the nature and extent of hate crimes, and this requires accurate data on and 

full reporting of incidents. The report observes that it is “well established that hate crimes are 

less likely to be reported to the police in comparison to other types of crimes.”1335 The 

Commission has documented in past reports numerous reasons why victims may choose not to 

report a hate crime, including a lack of understanding of laws designed to protect them, a lack of 

language access, and isolation from information and resources that could inform them of their 

rights and how to report such crimes.1336 Furthermore, a distrust of police, concerns over 

deportation and retaliation, and confusion over whether or not an incident qualified as a hate 

crime all contribute to underreporting.1337 Regardless of the specific reasons, the facts speak for 

themselves: despite over 25% of Asian Americans experiencing a hate incident at some point in 

their life, only 30% of Asian Americans feel comfortable reporting incidents to the police.1338

The distinction between hate crimes and other hate incidents creates further challenges for 

reporting and tracking incidents of Anti-Asian racism across the nation. While the NYPD uses 

the same definition for hate crimes and bias incidents, in many other municipalities and states, a 

1331 "THE RISE OF DOMESTIC TERRORISM IN AMERICA." Congress.gov, Library of Congress, 14 August 

2023, https://www.congress.gov/event/117th-congress/house-event/LC67828/text.

1332 Domestic Terrorism Prevention Act of 2022, H.R. 350, 117th Cong. (2022).

1333 Ibid.

1334 Juror Non-Discrimination Act of 2021, H.R. 1140, 117th Cong. (2021).

1335 See e.g., Caroline Harlow, “Hate Crime Reported by Victims and Police,” National Criminal Victimization 

Survey and Uniform Crime Reporting, Bureau of Justice Statistics, Nov. 2005, 

https://bjs.ojp.gov/content/pub/pdf/hcrvp.pdf; Brendan Lantz and Joonggon Kim, “Hate Crimes Hurt More, but So 

Do Co-Offenders: Separating the Influence of Co-Offending and Bias on Hate-Motivated Physical Injury,” Criminal 

Justice and Behavior, Nov. 2018.

1336 U.S. Commission on Civil Rights, In the Name of Hate: Examining the Federal Government’s Role in 

Responding to Hate Crimes, Nov. 2019; Report, 127.

1337 Ibid.

1338 Report, 71
260 The Federal Response to Anti-Asian Racism in the United States

hate incident is a non-criminal offense and as such is not tracked or reported. Moreover, proving 

that a criminal offense meets the legal benchmark for a hate crime is incredibly difficult, further 

contributing to the challenges with tracking the actual extent of hate crimes across the 

country.1339 As one legal commentator explained, “Prosecutors often find it impossible to 

demonstrate by proof beyond a reasonable doubt that the accused acted out of racist motives” 

due to the fact that “motive exists within an individual’s own knowledge.”1340 Even if hate 

crimes and other incidents were not underreported, collecting and tracking data on hate crimes 

comes with its own unique challenges. Many agencies do not report hate crimes to the FBI 

through its NIBRS database and are not incentivized to update the technology needed to report 

the incidents, which makes tracking hate crimes year-to-year challenging.1341 As explained in the 

report, “as long as reporting is voluntary, the picture at the federal level will remain murky.”1342

For instance, in 2020 nearly 25% of large cities did not report a single hate crime, which research 

suggested was “a statistical near-impossibility.”1343 Reporting, investigating, and accurately 

tracking hate crimes and other incidents is a necessary first step to comprehensively addressing 

anti-Asian racism in the United States. 

Regardless, the distinction between a hate crime and another form of hate incident is minimal––

if at all relevant––from the perspective of the victims: as the Executive Director of Asian 

Americans Advancing Justice notes, “Regardless of whether these are designated as hate crimes, 

the effect is the same, and the Asian American community right now is under fear, under pain, 

and angry.”1344 The harm done by hate crimes and other incidents extends far beyond the 

violence of any one event. Hate crimes and other incidents alike are responsible for an increase 

in anxiety, depressive symptoms, and sleep problems among victims.1345 Moreover, the mental 

health impacts of race-based discrimination are compounded for Asian Americans, who are less 

likely than other racial groups to seek mental health treatment.1346 The harm of Anti-Asian 

racism even extends beyond the victims of said racism: studies show that communities with 

higher levels of racial prejudice also have an increased risk of mortality independent of other 

sociodemographic characteristics.1347

Combating Anti-Asian racism in the United States requires a coordinated response by federal, 

state, and local governments. Mandatory national data collection and training would increase the 

accuracy of current data collection efforts and thus our understanding of hate crimes across the 

nation. The FBI should require local law enforcement to submit crime data to the NIBRS; 

1339 Report, 70.

1340 James Morsh, (1991), “Problem of Motive in Hate Crimes: The Argument Against Presumptions of Racial 

Motivation,” Journal of Criminal Law and Criminology, 82, 3: 

https://scholarlycommons.law.northwestern.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=6710&context=jclc.

1341 Report, 14, 65-67. 

1342 Report, 181.

1343 Report, 128.

1344 Catherine Thorbecke, “Why anti-Asian hate incidents often go unreported and how to help,” ABC News, Mar. 

18, 2021, https://abcnews.go.com/US/anti-asian-hate-incidents-unreported/story?id=76509072.

1345 Abrams, Zara. “The Mental Health Impact of Anti-Asian Racism.” American Psychological Association, Vol. 

52, No. 5, Jul. 1, 2021, https://www.apa.org/monitor/2021/07/impact-anti-asian-racism.

1346 Ibid.

1347 Lee, Yeonjin et al. “Effects of Racial Prejudice on the Health of Communities: A Multilevel Survival Analysis.” 

AM J Public Health, Nov. 2015, doi: 10.2105/AJPH.2015.302776, 

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4605182/.
Statement of Commissioner Jones 261

alternatively, Congress could make submission mandatory. While mandatory data collection 

would help prevent the underreporting of hate crimes from law enforcement officers, meeting the 

legal benchmark for a hate crime as opposed to a hate incident would still prevent many harmful 

events of race-based discrimination and violence from being reported, collected, and tracked. For 

this reason, many community organizations working to stop Anti-Asian racism suggest 

simultaneously reporting the incidents to nonprofits that track said incidents. All of the reported 

data on hate crimes should be published by the Attorney General and federal civil rights 

agencies, providing as much transparency as possible regarding the state of Anti-Asian racism 

across the nation. With a more complete picture of the sheer scope of Anti-Asian hate crimes and 

incidents, perhaps elected officials would pass much-needed hate crimes legislation and other 

civil rights protections to better protect the American people from discrimination.
262 The Federal Response to Anti-Asian Racism in the United States

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Statement of Commissioner Magpantay 263

Statement of Commissioner Magpantay

As the only Asian American and first Filipino American serving on the United States 

Commission on Civil Rights, I am proud of the Commission’s report on “The Federal Response 

to Anti-Asian Racism in the United States.”

Background

The last time the Commission presented a report focused on Asian Americans was 30 years ago 

in “Civil Rights Issues Facing Asian Americans in the 1990s.”1348 Since then, Asian Americans 

have become the nation’s fastest growing racial minority group1349 and the largest segment of 

immigrants coming to the United States. By the year 2040, one in ten Americans will be of Asian 

ancestry. 

Former Commissioner Michael Yaki first proposed that the Commission study the complexities 

of anti-Asian racism, its roots in varied communities, and offer recommendations on how best to 

address them.1350 The Commissioners then opened the door to more detailed inquiry when we 

issued the following statements addressing growing concerns about anti-Asian xenophobia 

during the COVID-19 pandemic: “The U.S. Commission on Civil Rights Expresses Concern 

Over Growing Anti-Asian Racism and Xenophobia Amid the COVID-19 Outbreak” on March 

20, 20201351 and “U.S. Commission on Civil Rights Unanimously Issues Recommendations to 

Secure Nondiscrimination in the COVID-19 Pandemic Context, and Specifically to Address 

Anti-Asian Racism and Xenophobia” on May 8, 2020.1352 This report gives those initial 

statements and set of recommendations the contextual and historical depth and breadth they 

deserve. 

Critical findings and recommendations can be discerned from the statements, public testimony, 

and the Commission’s fact-finding and investigation. 

Findings

● The myth of the “perpetual foreigner” continues to play a role in understanding the rise of 

anti-Asian racism and discrimination during the pandemic.

● To contextualize the increase in anti-Asian sentiment during the COVID-19 pandemic, it 

is important to understand the history of anti-Asian racism and the “Yellow Peril” laws.

1348 US Commission on Civil Rights (hereinafter “USCCR”), Civil Rights Issues Facing Asian Americans in the 

1990s (Feb. 1992) https://www.ojp.gov/pdffiles1/Digitization/135906NCJRS.pdf. 

1349 Abby Budiman and Neil Ruiz, “Asian Americans are the fastest-growing racial or ethnic group in the U.S.,”

Pew Research Center (Apr. 9, 2021) https://pewrsr.ch/3tbjILO. 

1350 Commissioner Michael Yaki, The New Exclusion Act: The Re-Emerging Rise of, and Federal Response to, 

Anti-Asian Racism in America,” USCCR (Sept. 12, 2022).

1351 USCCR,” The U.S. Commission on Civil Rights Expresses Concern Over Growing Anti-Asian Racism and 

Xenophobia Amid the COVID-19 Outbreak” (Mar. 20, 2020) https://www.usccr.gov/press/2020/03-20-Racism-andCoronavirus-Stmt.pdf. 

1352 USCCR, “U.S. Commission on Civil Rights Unanimously Issues Recommendations to Secure 

Nondiscrimination in the COVID-19 Pandemic Context, and Specifically to Address Anti-Asian Racism and 

Xenophobia” (May 8, 2020) https://www.usccr.gov/press/2020/05-08-Anti-Asian-Discrimination.pdf. 
264 The Federal Response to Anti-Asian Racism in the United States

● Throughout the pandemic there were several xenophobic names used by government 

officials and media outlets to refer to COVID-19, including the “Chinese virus,” the 

“Kung flu,” and the “Wuhan virus,” potentially perpetuating negative views of Asian 

individuals and communities and leading to many Asian Americans feeling blamed for 

COVID-19 in the U.S.

● The multilingual Stop AAPI Hate documented 11,000 anti-Asian incidents and found that 

hate crimes were not “crimes” per se (i.e., resulting in death or serious bodily injury), but 

rather hateful verbal harassment, gestures, and vandalism. 

● Only one in five AAPIs who experienced illegal discrimination say they reported it. A 

majority of those who reported said the reporting process was difficult. A majority of 

those who did not report said they did not think reporting would make a difference, and 

other barriers included a lack of information and resources (e.g., did not know where to 

go or what to do) and a fear of retaliation (e.g., did not want unwanted attention for 

themselves or their family). These reasons point to the need for government law 

enforcement and civil rights enforcement agencies to make the case for reporting: why it 

matters, how to do it, and how victims and complainants will be protected. 

Data Collection & Reporting:

● Lack of comprehensive data is a major impediment to understanding the severity and 

magnitude of hate crimes against persons of Asian descent in the U.S. Without 

mandatory national data collection and training for law enforcement on how to accurately 

identify and report hate crimes, preventing these crimes is substantially challenging.

● Hate crime victims are less likely to report incidents due to fear of retaliation, concerns 

that justice would not be served, and distrust in the criminal justice system.

● While the FBI’s hate crimes database software transition was intended to provide a more 

complete picture of hate violence across the nation, the shift has been challenging for 

many jurisdictions and hate crime data remains incomplete.

● The transition for data collection software has been slow for some agencies. In 2020 there 

were 15,138 participating agencies within the FBI hate crimes database. But with 

software transition, in 2021 the number of participating agencies dropped to 11,834.

Many of the agencies that did not submit data in 2021 represent the database's largest 

jurisdictions.

● In March 2023, the FBI released a “Supplemental Hate Crimes Statistics” report and 

showed that the number of anti-Asian reported incidents increased 167% from 279 in 

2020 to 746 in 2021.

● National data shows that all race-based hate crimes rose by 30% in 2020, and specifically 

anti-Asian hate crimes increased over 70% in 2020. According to the Bureau of Justice 

Assistance (BJA), anti-Asian hate crimes rose 164% in 16 of the largest cities and 

counties in the first quarter of 2021, compared to the same period in 2020. BJA wrote that 
Statement of Commissioner Magpantay 265

the first quarter increases in 2021 followed a “historic surge” in anti-Asian hate crimes 

that started in 2020, with anti-Asian hate crimes increasing 149% in 16 of the largest 

cities in 2020. Specifically, data shows that the first spike of anti-Asian hate crimes 

“occurred in March and April of 2020 concurrently with a rise in COVID cases and 

negative stereotyping of Asians related to the pandemic.”

● Hate crime data is underreported by victims, third party intermediaries (government 

agencies and community organizations), and by law enforcement. Hate crimes are less 

likely to be reported to police compared to other types of crimes. Some research suggests 

that relative to other racial groups, Asian Americans may be less likely to report 

discriminatory behavior when it occurs.

● Data show that in California, hate crimes have increased steadily since 2019, and antiAsian hate crimes rose from 89 in 2020 to 248 in 2021. As a percentage of overall hate 

crimes, this was an increase from 6.7% to 14.1%. 

● In San Francisco, all hate crime events increased from 2020 to 2021 (from 54 to 114). Of 

those, the proportion of anti-Asian events increased significantly, representing 16% of 

events in 2020 and more than half of events in 2021.

● In New York State, reported hate crimes dipped in 2020 before spiking in 2021. AntiAsian hate crimes rose from 31 in 2020 to 140 in 2021, an increase from 6.35% of overall 

hate crimes to 18.11%. In New York City, the number of reported anti-Asian hate crimes 

increased from 1 in 2019, to 27 in 2020, to 131 in 2021. As a percentage of overall hate 

crimes, this was an increase from 0.2%, to 10.2%, to 25%. 

Barriers: 

● In the United States, 34% of the Asian American population is limited English proficient. 

The most frequently spoken languages amongst Asian Americans with limited English 

proficiency are: Chinese, Korean, Vietnamese, Tagalog, Thai, Khmer, Bengali, Gujarati, 

Hindi, and Punjabi. 

● Few police departments have officers fluent in Asian languages, even in metropolitan 

areas with high numbers of AAPI residents. Therefore, language barriers continue to be a 

major barrier in reporting hate crimes and hate incidents. 

● For hate “incidents,” the fact that not all hateful encounters rise to the legal benchmark of 

a hate crime is another major barrier to developing a comprehensive understanding of the 

magnitude of hate violence against Asian communities. Many incidents reported to 

community organizations, such as being spit on or called racial slurs, are not accounted 

for in official numbers but still invoke fear in community members.

● Under the COVID-19 Hate Crimes Act, funding is provided for state and local incident 

reporting hotlines, and in May 2022 the Department of Justice (DOJ) expanded their 

language services to be available in 18 of the most frequently spoken AAPI languages 

across the nation. However, at the Commission’s briefing, panelists testified that local 
266 The Federal Response to Anti-Asian Racism in the United States

reporting hotlines, victim services, and law enforcement were not accessible to victims 

with limited English proficiency, pointing to a potential discrepancy between federal and 

local resource availability. 

● The COVID-19 Hate Crimes Act1353 and its the No Hate Act authorized federal funding 

to deter hate crimes. In fiscal year 2022, the DOJ awarded only eight (8) organizations to 

support community-based approaches to addressing hate crimes. The total amount 

awarded was $3,400,000.

● Lack of hate crime prosecutions may also be a contributing factor to low reporting of hate 

crimes. Prosecution of hate crimes is difficult, even in states with comprehensive hate 

crime legislation, because there is no one legal standard to which courts have agreed and 

because the standard to prove bias is extremely high.

● Most nonprofit and community organizations trying to provide the public with ways to 

combat anti-Asian violence include methods such as: encouraging the reporting of hate 

incidents and hate crimes to local law enforcement; collecting community hate incident 

data; educating on the history of discrimination against Asian Americans; and lobbying 

elected officials to pass anti-hate legislation. However, these organizations often 

have limited financial and organizational capacity, relying on grant funding and 

volunteer labor.

● For communities, the federal grant-seeking and grant-making process to address hate 

crimes is cumbersome and difficult to maneuver. Federal programs and funding for 

prevention programs should also provide direct services and support for both victims and 

community members who experience racial trauma as a result of vicarious racism. 

● The challenge in assessing whether the federal government is doing enough to combat a 

rise in hate crimes lies in the absence of proper performance measurements. Absent such 

performance measurements, The White House Initiative on Asian Americans, Native 

Hawaiians, and Pacific Islanders (WHIAANHPI),1354 has made strides in ways the 

government can advance equity, justice, and opportunity for AA and NHPI communities. 

Recommendations

Data & Reporting:

● The FBI should require local law enforcement to submit hate crime data. Congress should 

consider making local law enforcement data submission mandatory, along with a range of 

other options to expand the implementation of hate crimes data collection.

● Congress should also consider authorizing a new grant program that would provide 

funding to state and local governments for expenses related to transitioning to the 

National Incident-Based Reporting System (NIBRS), such as purchasing new software 

and computers, or training officers on how to use NIBRS.

1353 COVID–19 Hate Crimes Act, 135 Stat.§ 265, Pub. L. No. 117-13 (May 20, 2021).

1354 President Biden’s Executive Order (EO) 14031 at https://www.federalregister.gov/documents/2021/06/03/2021-

11792/advancing-equity-justice-and-opportunity-for-asian-americans-native-hawaiians-and-pacific-islanders.
Statement of Commissioner Magpantay 267

● Federal civil rights agencies should be required to collect and report key data related to 

civil rights enforcement, and the Attorney General should annually publish this data.

● The DOJ should fund state and local government efforts, in partnership with community 

groups, to address discrimination and other hate incidents.

● Law enforcement agencies should improve data collection, require the tracking and 

reporting of both hate incidents and hate crimes, and ensure that reporting forms make it 

easy to mark an incident or crime as a suspected hate incident or crime.

Training & Partnerships:

● The DOJ should provide safety training and workshops in the respective languages of 

targeted communities and expand federal funding for community advocacy groups 

fighting hate crimes.

● The DOJ should also codify the role of the language access coordinator into federal law 

to ensure that all individuals have equal access to federal programs and benefits 

regardless of language ability.

● The DOJ should also create guidelines for state and local law enforcement agencies to 

produce written policies that establish hate crime standards and instructions for 

implementing hate crimes legislation. A written policy within a law enforcement 

organization can serve as a bridge between hate crimes legislation and implementation of 

that law, by providing officers information and a standard that the agency expects them 

to follow.

● The DOJ should support and incentivize state and local law enforcement agencies to 

provide resources and referrals to individuals who report to the police hate incidents that 

are not “crimes” per se but racial harassment. Law enforcement agencies should create 

written policies and train their officers to provide these resources and referrals.

● Increased funding for the Community Relations Service (CRS) will help CRS hire more 

staff to address.

● Prosecutors and law enforcement should engage in joint training on hate crimes and 

community engagements. Law enforcement agencies may also consider recommending 

that the prosecutor’s office have a designated attorney to prosecute hate crimes in 

the community.

● First responders should be provided with training for a clear understanding of what 

constitutes a hate crime in their jurisdiction. 

● The FBI encourages state and local officials to utilize the FBI’s resources, publicity tools, 

forensic expertise, and experience in identifying and investigating hate-based motivations 

even if federal hate crime charges are not pursued.
268 The Federal Response to Anti-Asian Racism in the United States

● A public health and gender-based approach to preventing hate in public spaces needs to 

be created, including a focus on the street harassment of AAPI women and other 

vulnerable communities.

● Strengthen and expand local networks by investing in community-based support for 

victims of hate crimes, so that they have ready access to places where they can report 

attacks, receive support services, and take safety training and workshops in their 

own languages.

Civil Rights Protections:

● Prosecutors and law enforcement should vigorously investigate and prosecute hate crimes 

and harassment against Asian Americans. 

● Title II of the Civil Rights Act should be expanded to include retail stores and other 

businesses where discrimination occurs, to protect employees and customers from biasbased discrimination and harassment.

● Businesses frequented by the public should be required to train employees so that they 

know their responsibility to maintain a space free from bias-based harassment and 

discrimination, even if perpetrated by other customers.

Language Access:

● Regarding language access, federal agencies should review their compliance with Title 

VI in Executive Order 131661355 along with The Attorney General's Memorandum on 

Strengthening the Federal Government’s Commitment to Language Access1356 and they 

should take proactive steps to address any potential violations, to ensure that they provide 

linguistically competent services to the public. As recipients of federal funding, local law 

enforcement and victim services should also comply with Title VI in Executive Order 

13166 by providing spoken language access services such as interpreters and bilingual 

officers who speak Asian languages.

● Federal, state, and local law enforcement agencies and victim services need to identify 

critical deficiencies in existing Limited English Proficient programs for individuals who 

need language assistance.

● Expand reporting hotlines and in-person contact for individuals who are limited 

English proficient.

● Develop a language access policy prohibiting discrimination based on national origin 

which grants equal access to all individuals, including those with limited English 

1355 65 Fed. Reg. 50123 (Aug. 16, 2000) https://www.govinfo.gov/content/pkg/FR-2000-08-16/pdf/00-20867.pdf. 

1356 Memorandum for Heads of Federal Agencies, Heads of Civil rights Offices, and General Counsels, From The 

Attorney General, Nov.21, 2022, at 

https://www.justice.gov/d9/pages/attachments/2022/11/21/attorney_general_memorandum_-

_strengthening_the_federal_governments_commitment_to_language_access_508-2.pdf.
Statement of Commissioner Magpantay 269

proficiency, and promotes effective communication through interpreting services, 

document translation, and staff training.

Local Asian Language Assistance: 

● Executive Order 13166 provides a standard for language access provisions across the 

federal government. This guidance is published in the Federal Register, Vol. 65, No. 159 

(Notices), August 16, 2000 at 50123-25. The standard examines the number or proportion 

of limited English proficient individuals served by the agency’s service area or 

population and resources available. The U.S. Census Bureau provides publicly available 

data on the most spoken languages and rates of limited English proficiency for each city.

● The Census Bureau also lists jurisdictions that are required by the Language Assistance 

Provisions (Section 203) of the federal Voting Rights Act to provide translated ballots, 

voting materials, and bilingual poll workers for specific language minority groups. 

● Jurisdictions are covered under Section 203 when the Census finds that 5% or more than 

10,000 voting-age citizens in a town or county speak another language, are limited 

English proficient, and have high illiteracy rates. Although this test only determines

limited English proficiency of citizens over 18 years of age, the determinations are 

instructive for localities to translate hotlines, victim services, and local law 

enforcement efforts. 

● Moreover, since these jurisdictions are covered under Section 203, they have already 

developed the capacity to provide oral interpretation services and translations of written 

materials. Therefore, the Section 203 determinations can help guide local law 

enforcement and victim services on which Asian languages to provide assistance in. 

● Local law enforcement and victim services in the following jurisdictions should provide 

assistance at least in these Asian languages, since they are already mandated to provide 

the same for elections: 

ALASKA

Aleutians West Census Area: Filipino

Kodiak Island Borough: Filipino

CALIFORNIA

Alameda County: Chinese (including Taiwanese), Filipino, Vietnamese

Contra Costa County: Chinese (including Taiwanese)

Los Angeles County: Cambodian, Chinese (including Taiwanese), Filipino, Korean, Vietnamese

Orange County: Chinese (including Taiwanese), Korean, Vietnamese

Sacramento County: Chinese (including Taiwanese), Vietnamese

San Diego County: Chinese (including Taiwanese), Filipino, Vietnamese

San Francisco County: Chinese (including Taiwanese)

San Mateo County: Chinese (including Taiwanese), Filipino

Santa Clara County: Chinese (including Taiwanese), Filipino, Vietnamese
270 The Federal Response to Anti-Asian Racism in the United States

HAWAII

Honolulu County: Chinese (including Taiwanese), Filipino

Maui County: Filipino

ILLINOIS

Cook County: Chinese (including Taiwanese), Asian Indian (including Sikh)

MASSACHUSETTS

Lowell City: Cambodian

Malden City: Chinese (including Taiwanese)

Quincy City: Chinese (including Taiwanese)

Randolph City: Vietnamese

MICHIGAN

Hamtramck city: Bangla

MINNESOTA

Ramsey County: Hmong

NEVADA

Clark County: Filipino

NEW JERSEY 

Bergen County: Korean

Middlesex County: Asian Indian 

NEW YORK

Kings County (Brooklyn): Chinese (including Taiwanese)

New York County (Manhattan): Chinese (including Taiwanese)

Queens County (Queens): Bangladeshi, Chinese (including Taiwanese), Korean, Asian Indian 

PENNSYLVANIA

Philadelphia County: Chinese (including Taiwanese)

TEXAS

Dallas County: Vietnamese

Harris County: Chinese (including Taiwanese), Vietnamese

Tarrant County: Vietnamese

VIRGINIA

Fairfax County: Vietnamese

WASHINGTON

King County: Chinese (including Taiwanese), Vietnamese

● These 32 jurisdictions in 14 states already translate voting materials and provide oral 

interpretation to limited English proficient Asian American voters in specific languages. 
Statement of Commissioner Magpantay 271

Local law enforcement and victim services in these jurisdictions can and should do 

the same. 

Outstanding Issues 

The COVID-19 Hate Crimes Act1357 contains provisions that allow for an alternative to 

incarceration. Perpetrators convicted of federal hate crime offenses can be placed on supervised 

release to “undertake educational classes or community service directly related to the community 

harmed by the defendant’s offense.” Sec 5(e).1358 The U.S. Commission on Civil Rights 

(USCCR) was not able to fully explore the extent to which prosecutors have employed 

this option. More investigation is needed to assess the use and efficacy of this restorative 

justice approach. 

President Joe Biden’s Advisory Commission on Asian Americans, Native Hawaiians, and Pacific 

Islanders was unable to submit testimony in time for the USCCR’s consideration. The 

Commission advises the President on ways the public, private, and non-profit sectors can work 

together to advance equity, justice, and opportunity for Asian American, Native Hawaiian, and 

Pacific Islander (AA and NHPI) communities. The Commission is part of The White House 

Initiative on Asian Americans, Native Hawaiians, and Pacific Islanders (WHIAANHPI), which 

is charged with driving an ambitious, whole-of-government agenda to advance equity, justice, 

and opportunity for AA and NHPI communities.1359 President Joe Biden has forcefully 

stewarded a federal response to anti-Asian racism in the United States, which should be 

acknowledged and credited. 

Acknowledgments 

I commend the several witnesses at the USCCR’s briefing on March 24, 2023, especially: 

● AAPI Equity Alliance of Los Angeles 

● Asian Americans Advancing Justice / AAJC 

● Asian American Federation (AAF)

● Pro Bono Attorney Jennifer Wu 

● Chinese for Affirmative Action

● Stop AAPI Hate

I thank the organizations and advocates who submitted statements and public comment, 

including: 

● Asian American Bar Association of New York (AABANY) 

● Asian American Legal Defense and Education Fund (AALDEF) 

● Congressional Asian Pacific American Caucus (CAPAC) 

● National Asian Pacific American Bar Association (NAPABA)

● National Council on Asian Pacific Americans (NCAPA)

● OCA - Asian Pacific American Advocates (OCA)

1357 https://www.congress.gov/117/bills/s937/BILLS-117s937enr.pdf.

1358 Sec 5(e), https://www.congress.gov/117/bills/s937/BILLS-117s937enr.pdf.

1359 President Biden’s Executive Order (EO) 14031 at https://www.federalregister.gov/documents/2021/06/03/2021-

11792/advancing-equity-justice-and-opportunity-for-asian-americans-native-hawaiians-and-pacific-islanders.
272 The Federal Response to Anti-Asian Racism in the United States

● OCA - Greater Houston Chapter 

● Southeast Asia Resource Action Center (SEARAC) 

● Stop AAPI Hate 

● The Asian American Foundation (TAAF)

Lastly, I must acknowledge President Joe Biden, U.S. Senate Majority Leader Chuck Schumer, 

U.S. Senator Mazie Hirono, and U.S. Representatives Grace Meng and Judy Chu for their 

tremendous leadership and support. 
Statement of Vice Chair Victoria Nourse 273

Statement of Vice Chair Victoria Nourse

Challenges to Hate Crime Prosecutions 

By Vice-Chair Victoria Nourse

I am delighted to join this report, which was well underway when President Biden 

nominated me to be Vice-Chair of the Commission. It bears note that this is only the second 

report on issues related to Asian-Americans in the history of the United States Commission on 

Civil Rights. Its focus on hate crimes against Asians is timely, given their sharp rise during the 

pandemic, as a fearful nation lashed out to blame Asians for the coronavirus.

Asian-Americans have helped to build this nation, but they have not always been welcomed 

with open arms or treated with fairness. During the pandemic, age old stereotypes emerged as 

some sought to blame Asians for what a former President dubbed “Kung-Flu.” As this report 

details, the result was vitriolic speech, racial harassment, and hate crimes directed toward honest 

American citizens because of their Asian heritage. And, as the report also demonstrates, most of 

this vitriol was imposed on Asian-American women, who were doubly at risk of bias. 

The Commission’s hearing on these matters showed clearly that the Asian-American 

community is very concerned that state and federal authorities have ignored them. I concur with 

all the Commission’s bipartisan and formal recommendations to respond to those concerns. The 

recommendations are common sense and modest: greater language access within the criminal 

justice system, improved training of state and local law enforcement, and vigorous investigation 

and prosecution of racially motivated hate crimes and harassment.

In this statement, I highlight some aspects of the report that may go unnoticed, and offer 

my own recommendations for changes in our hate crimes laws and administration. I start with the 

fact that the hate crimes statute imposes requirements not present in the vast majority of criminal 

laws. I conclude by emphasizing the importance of federal aid to state and local prosecutors and 

law enforcement, given the difficulties of federal prosecution.

First, this report documents the small number of hate crime prosecutions brought by the 

Department of Justice over this period for all groups (only 3 for Asian-Americans in a two-year 

period). Why? The federal hate crimes law, 18 U.S.C. 249, is extremely difficult to enforce. For 

example, the law requires that the Attorney General sign off on all prosecutions as consistent with 

certain jurisdictional elements. 18 U.S.C. 249(b). That is a highly unusual requirement. There 

are hundreds of other federal crimes, none of which require the Attorney General’s certification of 

jurisdiction. Defendants have tried to make use of this requirement to dismiss hate crime 

convictions. Dylan Roof, who shot up a Black church and killed nine people during bible study 

argued that his conviction under 18 U.S.C. 249 should be reversed because the Attorney General 
274 The Federal Response to Anti-Asian Racism in the United States

erred in his certification. 1360 This requirement is unnecessarily burdensome: Federal courts must

consider whether they have jurisdiction whatever the Attorney General determines. The 

certification requirement should be repealed as duplicative and unnecessary.

Congress should also address federal courts’ struggles with the statute. Defendants 

continue to attack their convictions on jurisdictional bases. Recently, the Pittsburgh Tree of Life 

synagogue shooter, who killed at least seven people, argued that the statute was unconstitutional 

as applied to crimes motivated by religious hate.1361 And, at least one appellate judge has argued 

in dissent that Congress may not constitutionally criminalize some attacks involving gay 

persons.1362 Because of the Supreme Court’s decision in United States v. Morrison,1363 there have 

been persistent doubts about the jurisdictional predicates and constitutionality of hate crimes 

prosecutions under 18 U.S.C. 249, including cases based on race and ethnicity (as would be the 

case involving Asian-Americans). Appellate courts have been forced to go out of their way to 

affirm that Congress has the power to pass laws criminalizing racial assaults under the Thirteenth 

Amendment.1364 Attacks based on gender are particularly likely to create legal controversy today; 

and, as we saw in this report, Asian American women were disproportionately the victims of racial 

harassment and criminal acts.

Hate crimes should not be second-class citizens among our federal laws, more difficult to 

prosecute and prove than other federal crimes. Congress should, in my opinion, repass the Act to 

state that the constitutional bases include the Thirteenth Amendment and the Fourteenth 

Amendment; clarify that such prosecutions are appropriate remedies under those Amendments; 

and state that the jurisdictional conditions are the same as applicable to all other criminal laws.

1365

When Congress reenacts a statute responding to judicial rulings, even the current Supreme Court 

is more deferential. See Allen v. Milligan, 143 S. Ct. 1487 (2023) (applying the Voting Rights Act 

amendments that Congress repassed in response to judicial decisions). The Founders believed in 

a system of separated powers in which each department has the duty to say what the Constitution 

requires. Efficiency alone suggests that such amendments would save the federal courts’ precious 

time, and allow prosecutors to focus on prosecution as opposed to unnecessary legal challenges. 

1360 United States v. Roof, 10 F. 4th 314, 380-382, 390-97(2021).

1361 United States v. Bowers, 495 F. Supp.3d 362 (W.D. Pa. 2020).

1362 See, e.g., United States v. Hill, 182 F. Supp. 3d 546 (E.D. Va.) (barring application of 18 U.S.C. 249 in 

a case involving an attack on a gay person), reversed, 984 F. 3d 188 (4th Cir. 2019); but see United States 

v. Hill, 984 F.3d at 210 (dissenting opinion agreeing with the district court that the court had no jurisdiction 

in that case); see also Glenn v. Holder, 690 F. 3d 417 (6th Cir. 2012) (pastors who hate homosexuality sue 

to declare 18 U.S.C. 249 unconstitutional as a restriction on their free speech, but challenge fails for lack 

of standing).

1363 529 U.S. 598 (2000). This case involved a civil damages remedy not a criminal penalty, but the 

Supreme Court treated it as if it involved crime rather than tort. Notably, this decision has not limited 

Congress’s ability to pass standard criminal laws with jurisdictional elements. 

1364 See, e.g, United States v. Diggins, 36 F. 4th 302 (2022) (having to reaffirm that the Thirteenth 

Amendment, passed after the Civil War to free the enslaved, allows Congress to enact a law barring hate 

crimes based on race).

1365 Many federal crimes, whether about guns, fraud or terrorism, include jurisdictional elements essential 

to constitutional prosecution.
Statement of Vice Chair Victoria Nourse 275

Second, given the difficulty of prosecuting these cases at the federal level, the federal 

government must provide greater assistance to state and local governments in policing and 

prosecuting hate crimes. In 2019, this Commission reported several ways in which the Justice 

Department could improve its assistance to state law enforcement. I will not repeat those 

recommendations here. I will note, however, that the Commission heard testimony showing how 

important it is to train officers to accurately report hate crimes. Many, too many, state law 

enforcement officers, not to mention state prosecutors, believe that hate crime prosecutions are 

about speech. Hate crimes depend upon conduct, not speech. When a man enters an Asian-owned 

business and shoots Asian-Americans, any astute law enforcement officer should investigate 

further to determine whether the crime is bias motivated, whether any slurs are uttered or not. 

Place and identity of the victim and perpetrator are key markers of hate crimes and may be enough 

without any speech whatsoever; we see this clearly in cases of attacks in churches or synagogues; 

the same is true of many other hate crimes. 
276 The Federal Response to Anti-Asian Racism in the United States

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Rebuttal of Commissioner Heriot 277

Rebuttal of Commissioner Heriot

I learned an unfortunate lesson with this project: In politically mixed company, only certain 

kinds of anti-Asian race discrimination are considered appropriate for discussion. Bringing up 

others can result in a sharp rebuke. 

In this Statement, I will therefore begin by discussing the issue that we are allowed to discuss—

anti-Asian hate crimes (and so-called bias incidents). The problem is that talking about them is 

fashionable these days—perhaps a bit too fashionable. Such talk has become a way to score 

political points. By contrast, talking about effective solutions is decidedly unfashionable. Doing 

so exposes conflicts within the progressive coalition and therefore is discouraged. 

If we’re serious about preventing anti-Asian hate crimes, that needs to change.

Toward the end of this Statement, I will also briefly comment on the topic that was pushed 

aside—college and university admissions policies that penalize Asian Americans for being 

Asian. Several of our Asian American public commentators made it clear that this was the issue 

that mattered most to them. But such talk also exposes conflicts within the progressive coalition 

with some favoring race-preferential admissions and others victimized by them. I regret, but am 

not surprised, that the Commission failed to give the issue due attention. What surprised me was 

that the Commission’s staff director actually interrupted our briefing to prevent our expert 

witnesses from bringing it up. That’s taking coalition politics to extremes.

Perhaps now that the Supreme Court has decided Students for Fair Admissions v. President and 

Fellows of Harvard College (2023) the Commission will give the issue of anti-Asian 

discrimination in college and university admissions the attention it deserves. But I am not 

expecting it. 

I. Anti-Asian Hate Crimes

A. Enforcing the Criminal Law Generally Will Go a Long Way Toward Preventing 

Anti-Asian Hate Crimes.

It is understandable that hate crimes would be a part of this report. The Commission’s job is to 

study discrimination. And while the problem of crime is much broader than hate crimes—only a 

tiny percentage of the crime committed against Asian Americans are hate crimes1366—they are 

the only crimes that involve intentional race discrimination. They are thus an obvious issue of 

interest to the Commission. 

1366 In her written testimony, Diane Yap stated that while Asian Americans were targeted in about 305 hate crimes in 

2021, they were the victims of 102,650 violent crimes. Yap at 1.
278 The Federal Response to Anti-Asian Racism in the United States

But it’s important not to get carried away thinking of hate crimes as an issue separate and apart 

from crime in general. The solutions are similar.1367

In a 2021 opinion essay in the New York Post entitled Asians Want Action Against Violence—Not 

More Rhetoric on Racism, Wai Wah Chin, founding president of the Chinese American Citizens 

Alliance of Greater New York, vented her frustration:

We Asians in New York City are fed up with woke politicians and their media going on and on 

about hate crimes. They are all talk about hate, but no action on crime.

And we want action on all crimes, not just “hate” crimes. Without catching, charging, and 

putting criminals away, our subways, streets, stores, and homes will never be safe. When you 

are being pushed into the subway tracks or face a knife in a robbery, whether the expletive used 

by the attacker qualifies as a hate crime is a remote concern to you.1368

She has it right. If we want to bring violent hate crimes under control, we need to bring violent 

crime under control. For that, we need effective law enforcement. Special attention should be 

given to crimes committed by repeat offenders and by mentally ill individuals with a history of 

violence, because these are the crimes we have the best chance to prevent before they happen. 

Since these two overlapping offender populations also commit a disproportionate number of hate 

crimes, getting them off the streets will be an effective way to prevent hate crimes too. (In the 

case of the mentally ill, there is evidence that they account for a larger percentage of hate crimes 

than they do of non-hate crimes.)1369

To be sure, the solutions will not be simple. Fashioning a fair and effective criminal justice 

system is a difficult job, especially when dealing with the mentally ill.1370 But political rallies 

1367 Often, it’s hard to draw a line between hate crimes and non-hate crimes. When a violent crime is committed for 

no apparent reason—a random stranger is savagely beaten—we may suspect that race, ethnicity, religion, sex, sexual 

orientation or another protected classification played a role, but if it can’t be proven beyond a reasonable doubt, the 

conviction will be for a non-hate crime. We may never know what actually motivated the crime. On the other hand, 

if a racial, ethnic, religious, sex, or sexual orientation slur is involved, it may well be charged as a hate crime, and 

the offender may be convicted on that charge. And yet sometimes it will be true that the slur had nothing to do with 

the offender’s motivation. The offender was simply using the most convenient epithet that came to mind. If the 

victim had been a different race, ethnicity, religion, sex, or sexual orientation, a different insult—perhaps one that 

had nothing to do with protected classifications—would have been used. For the remainder of this Statement, for 

brevity’s sake, I will shorten the list to race and ethnicity.

 

1368 Wai Wah Chin, Asians Want Action Against Violence—Not More Rhetoric on Racism, N.Y. Post, April 10, 

2021.

1369 Charles Fain Lehman, What Motivates Hate Crime? Why Hate Criminals Are Still Criminals, Manhattan 

Institute, May 2023, https://media4.manhattan-institute.org/wp-content/uploads/Why-Hate-Criminals-Are-StillCriminals.pdf#page=14 (In 2021, half of the hate-crime offenders were mentally ill).

1370 The Biden Administration has instead gotten off on the wrong foot by suggesting in a draft policy that federal 

law enforcement officers “should not use statistics about arrest rates in particular communities when making 

decisions about where and how to focus their activities.” Put differently, but not unfairly, the policy indicates that 

officer and agents should not focus efforts on where the crime is. Rather, they should put as much energy into 

patrolling the safest, most privileged, crime-free neighborhoods in in America as they do in the most crime-infested 
Rebuttal of Commissioner Heriot 279

where politicians and activists urge attendees to “stop the hate” don’t get us closer to achieving 

that goal. The focus needs to be on stopping the crime, not on making sure everyone knows we 

oppose hatred.

Consider, for example, some of the more egregious crimes that have victimized Asian Americans 

in the last few years:

*Christina Yuna Lee was a 35-year-old Korean American with a talent for the visual arts. 

Assamad Nash followed her into her apartment in New York’s Chinatown, where he stabbed her 

more than forty times with her own kitchen knife. Police were alerted by neighbors who heard 

her screams, but they arrived too late to save her young life. Her killer was a chronically 

homeless and mentally disturbed man with an extensive criminal record. According to the New 

York Daily News, that record included charges for robbery, carjacking, and burglary.1371 At the 

time of the murder, he was out on supervised release on three open criminal cases, including one 

in which he was accused of punching a random stranger on the subway.1372 

*Yao Pan Ma, a resident of the East Harlem neighborhood in New York, was a 61-year-old dim 

sum chef who had lost his job on account of the COVID-19 pandemic. Reduced to collecting 

cans on the street for a living, he was jumped from behind in a brutal and unprovoked attack. 

His assailant, Jarrod Powell, literally stomped him to death. Powell had a long arrest record 

that included kidnap and multiple assaults, including one on a fellow inmate at Rikers Island.1373 

neighborhoods. That’s great if you happen to live, work or own a business in a privileged neighborhood. But it’s 

not so great if you’re in a high-crime neighborhood instead. James Lynch, EXCLUSIVE: DOJ Proposal Would Ban 

FBI Agents From Using Community Crime Statistics In Law Enforcement, Docs Show, May 9, 2023.

1371 Emma Seiwell, Rocco Parascandola, Chris Sommerfeldt and Leonard Greene, Homeless Suspect Accused of 

Following Christina Yuna Lee and Stabbing Her Inside Her NYC Apartment Charged with Murder, N.Y. Daily 

News, February 14, 2022. See Lisa Fernandez, Why the Stabbing Death of Christina Yuna Lee Reaches Far Beyond 

New York City, Fox 2 San Francisco ktvu.com, February 16, 2022. See also Dean Moses, “It’s Like a Zombie 

Land”: The Sorry State of Sara Roosevelt Park a Year After Christina Yuna Lee’s Murder, amNY.com, February 

15, 2023 (“One year since Christina Yuna Lee was brutally stabbed to death inside her Chinatown apartment, locals 

say the area of Sara Roosevelt Park—steps away from her former home—remains rife with drug use and the 

mentally ill”).

1372 Luke Funk, Who is Assamad Nash, the NY Man Accused of Killing Christina Yuna Lee?, Fox 2 San Francisco 

ktvu.com, February 17, 2022.

1373 Adam Schrader, Man Arrested for Stomping on the Head of Chinese Immigrant, 61, Who Was Collecting Cans in 

NYC is Convicted Sex Attacker with Lengthy Criminal Record, Daily Mail, April 27, 2021. Yao Pan Ma remained in a 

coma for months before his death. Alyssa Guzman, Asian Man, 61, Who Was Repeatedly Kicked in the Head in NYC 

Hate Crime that Left Him in a Coma Dies Eight Months After the Savage Attack: Thug Charged with Attempted 

Murder Has Been Arrested 15 Times, Daily Mail, January 9, 2022.
280 The Federal Response to Anti-Asian Racism in the United States

*GuiYing Ma, a 61-year-old grandmother, was sweeping the sidewalk when Elisaul Perez, for no 

apparent reason, picked up a large rock and bludgeoned her with it.1374 She later died from her 

injuries.1375 Perez had eight prior arrests.

1376

*Michelle Go, a 40-year-old mergers and acquisitions specialist at Deloitte, often volunteered 

her time to, among other things, help the homeless. She died on the scene after being pushed 

into the path of an oncoming subway train by Martial Simon. Simon, a chronically homeless 

man, had been twice convicted of attempted robbery. At the time of the incident, there was a 

warrant out for him for a parole violation.1377 

It’s not just the homicide cases that follow this pattern. Consider these cases too:

*Tommy Lau, a Chinese American bus driver, was on his lunch break when he noticed an older 

Asian couple being harassed by a homeless man. When he tried to intervene, the homeless man, 

Donovan Lawson, spat on him, punched him in the face and called him by an anti-Asian slur. 

This was Lawson’s 33rd arrest and the fourth time police had been called upon to help when he 

was in the grip of a mental breakdown.

1378

*Vilma Kari, a 65-year-old immigrant from the Philippines, was walking to church when she 

was suddenly kicked in the stomach by Brandon Elliott. When she collapsed on the sidewalk, he 

kicked her in the head, shouted an obscenity and added, “You don’t belong here.” Kari suffered a 

broken pelvis but survived. Elliott, who lived in a nearby shelter, was on parole from prison 

after being convicted of killing his own mother. 1379

*Carl Chan, the president of the Oakland Chinatown Chamber of Commerce, was walking down 

the street, minding his own business, when James Lee Ramsey shouted a racial slur and struck 

him on the back of the head. Chan was left sprawled on the pavement, scraped and bleeding. 

1374 Sabrina Souza & Eric Levenson, New York City Man Who Fatally Struck Chinese Woman with a Rock 

Sentenced to 20 Years in Prison, CNN.com, January 10, 2023.

1375 Amir Vera & Liam Reilly, Asian Woman, Attacked Last Year in New York by Man with Rock Has Died, Family 

Says, CNN.com, March 1, 2022. 

1376 Carl Samson, Repeat Offender Sentenced to 20 Years in Prison for Killing Guiying Ma in NYC Rock Attack, 

Yahoo.com, January 11, 2023. Perez pleaded guilty to manslaughter. In a statement read by the family attorney, the 

victim’s husband said, “He should be taken away so he can never hurt anyone else again. That is what justice means 

to me.”

1377 Rana Novini, DA: Man in Woman’s Deadly Times Square Subway Shove Used Both Hands to Kill Her, 

NBCNewYork.com, Jan. 19, 2022.

1378 Nicole Hong, Ashley Southall & Ali Watkins, He Was Charged in an Anti-Asian Attack. It Was His 

33rd Arrest, N.Y. Times, April 6, 2021. The article went on to say: “[Lawson] is not unique. Many of the 

people charged recently with anti-Asian attacks in New York City have also had a history of mental health 

episodes, multiple arrests and homelessness, complicating the city’s search for an effective response.”

1379 Nicole Hong, Juliana Kim, Ali Watkins & Ashley Southall, Brutal Attack on Filipino Woman Sparks Outrage: 

“Everybody Is on Edge,” N.Y. Times, March 30, 2021; Joe Marino, Amanda Woods & Lia Eustachewich, Man 

Busted for Midtown Attack on Asian Woman Was on Parole for Killing His Mom, N.Y. Post, March 31, 2021. 
Rebuttal of Commissioner Heriot 281

Ramsey was on parole from state prison, chronically homeless and schizophrenic. Less than an 

hour after the attack, he was arrested by the Oakland police, who reported he said he had been 

seeing “crazy things” like “half-dog and half-humans and half-cat and half humans.”1380

These cases are not outliers. Both long criminal records and a history of mental illness coupled 

with violence are common among offenders. According to the Manhattan Institute’s Charles 

Fain Lehman, 52.2% of those arrested for a hate crime in New York State between 2019 and 

2021, had a prior conviction, 31.9% had a prior felony conviction, and 36.6% had a pending case 

against them.1381 Judging from the newspaper reports, those arrested for the more serious hate 

crimes were especially likely to have such a record.1382 

Similarly, on May 3, 2022, the head of the New York City Police Department’s Hate Crime Task 

Force, Deputy Inspector Andrew Arias, told the New York City Council that out of 100 suspects 

arrested in 2022 for hate crimes, 47 had “prior documentation of an EDP incident.” By “EDP 

incident” he was using the NYPD’s acronym for an “emotionally disturbed person”. Officers 

with the NYPD are directed by their procedural guide to document whether an individual 

“appears to be mentally ill or temporarily deranged.”1383

1380 Eyal Press, The Deadly Collision of Racism and Mental Illness, N.Y. Times, October 4, 2022.

1381 See Written Statement of Charles Fain Lehman, fig. 3 at 5.

1382 See, e.g., Wai Wah Chin, Asians Want Action Against Violence—Not More Rhetoric on Racism, N.Y. Post, April 

10, 2021(citing several serious cases involving perpetrators with prior arrests and convictions); Pervaiz Shallwani, 

Man Charged With Murder as Gay Hate Crime, Wall St. J., May 19, 2013, 

https://www.wsj.com/articles/SB10001424127887323648304578493541799661834 (Hate crime offender had an 

extensive criminal record which included extended stays in prison).

1383 Arun Venugopal, Nearly Half of Those Arrested in Hate Crime Attacks Had Mental Health Issues: NYPD, 

Gothamist, May 4, 2022.
282 The Federal Response to Anti-Asian Racism in the United States

Not all these crimes are being prosecuted as hate crimes, though in all cases racial motivations 

were suspected by at least some.1384 In the end, it hardly matters. Four innocent lives have been 

lost. Three innocent people have been injured. 1385 

All the funding for bias education programs and “stop the hate” public service announcements in 

the world won’t solve this problem.1386 The sort of person who commits these crimes is not 

likely to be attending bias education programs or listening to public service announcements.1387 

1384 Jarrod Powell was prosecuted for and pleaded guilty to a hate crime. Associated Press, NYC Man Pleads Guilty 

in Brutal Hate Crime Stomping Death of Chinese Immigrant, nbcNewYork.com, January 12, 2023; Suspect Arrested 

in Vicious, Unprovoked, Assault on Asian Man in Manhattan, abc7NY.com, April 29, 2021. Because Assamad 

Nash’s and Elisaul Perez’s motivations were difficult to prove, they were not. But their crimes nevertheless 

understandably raised fear in the hearts of many Asian Americans. Elisaul Perez pleaded guilty to first degree 

manslaughter. David Propper, Brooklyn Man Gets 20 Years in Prison for Deadly Attack on Asian Woman, N.Y. 

Post, January 10, 2023. Assamad Nash was initially charged with murder but was found unfit for trial. Suspect in 

Gruesome Chinatown Stabbing Death of Christina Lee Deemed Unfit for Trial, NBC New York, June 12, 2023. 

Martial Simon was turned over to the New York Department of Mental Health and Hygiene after being found 

incompetent to stand trial. Tamar Lapin & David Meyer, Man Accused of Fatally Shoving Michelle Go, Found 

Unfit to Stand Trial, Court Official Says, N.Y. Post, March 22, 2022. 

Brandon Elliott has been charged with a hate crime. Man Charged in Brutal Attack on Asian Woman Out on Parole 

for Killing his Mom, abc7NY, April 1, 2021. But while James Lee Ramsey was initially charged with a hate crime, 

the hate charge was later dropped as part of a plea bargain, and he pleaded guilty to a lesser offense. Amber Lee, DA 

Drops Hate-Crime Charges vs. Man who Attacked Oakland Chinatown Leader, Fox KTVU, September 17, 2021. 

Donovan Lawson has been charged with assault-hate crime, aggravated harassment, menacing and harassment. Jaime 

DeJesus, Man Charged in Hate Crime Assault, Brooklyn Reporter, March 26, 2021.

1385 My colleague Commissioner Magpantay states that hate crimes should not be a partisan issue, and he is exactly 

right. But I am disappointed that the report demonstrates a much deeper interest in attempting to link Donald Trump 

(who is mentioned 33 times) to anti-Asian hate crimes than it does in ensuring that perpetrators are taken off the 

streets. That makes it seem more partisan than I would like. (For my view on Trump’s references to COVID-19 as 

the “Wuhan Virus,” etc., please see my footnote 22). 

1386 Professor Russell Jeung, a professor of Asian-American Studies at San Francisco State University, launched 

Stop AAPI Hate, a project of Chinese for Affirmative Action, in 2020. In his written testimony before the 

Commission, he advocated efforts “to mediate intergroup conflicts through restorative justice approaches” and the 

promotion of “anti-harassment awareness and safety campaigns against racism.” He also called for “preventing 

health stigmatization, denouncing xenophobic political rhetoric, and proactively countering hate speech on social 

media.” Russell Jeung Statement at 16. Similarly, Jo-Ann Yoo of the Asian American Federation asked that the 

federal government assist communities to “[d]evelop anti-bias programming to educate within and across 

communities to dispel misconceptions, address the root cause of hate crimes, and build relationships that create 

safety at the local level.” Jo-Ann Yoo Statement at 4. I have serious doubts that these measures would have had a 

significant effect on actual hate crimes. 

1387 It seems unlikely that they were affected by Donald Trump either. I have no desire to be an apologist for the 

former president, who has been known to say things that nearly everyone (including me) wishes he hadn’t. But 

calling COVID-19 the “China Flu” or the “Wuhan Flu” doesn’t strike me as over the line. There is a long history 

behind naming diseases for the place they were thought to be first detected—the Spanish Flu, the Asian Flu, Rocky 

Mountain Spotted Fever, Lyme (Connecticut) Disease, African Sleeping Sickness, West Nile Disease, Lassa 

(Nigeria) Fever, Middle East Respiratory Syndrome (MERS), Argentine Hemorrhagic Fever, Pontiac (Michigan) 

Fever, Rift Valley Fever, Marburg (Germany) Virus Disease. Ebola is named for a river in the Democratic Republic 

of the Congo. Zika is named for a forest in Uganda. Tularemia (or rabbit fever) is named for Tulare County, 

California. 
Rebuttal of Commissioner Heriot 283

It is also unlikely the problem will be solved by hate crimes hotlines or by gathering better hate 

crimes statistics. It may be true that hate crimes, especially low-level hate crimes, are underreported, just as crime in general is under-reported. Interestingly, despite what the staff-written 

part of this report states, the evidence is that hate crimes are somewhat more likely to be reported 

than non-hate crimes of similar magnitude.1388 Alas, the heart of the problem lies elsewhere. 

It seems to me that, if anything, a disease that is named for a specific group of people is worse, and the fact that the 

media do not shrink from using such terms is evidence of their political motivation in their panic over Trump’s use 

of “China Flu.” A good example is Legionnaires’ Disease, which is named for members of the American Legion, a 

veterans’ organization, who suffered an outbreak of the disease at a convention at the Bellevue Hotel in Philadelphia 

in 1976. I recall my father, a member of the American Legion, good naturedly objecting to the name. But I don’t 

think it would have occurred to him that was somehow malicious to use it. I note that ABC News, the New York 

Times, USA Today, and a host of other mainstream media outlets, have recently used the term. See Nathan Diller, 

FDA Sends Warning to American Cruise Lines after Guests Contract Legionnaires’ Disease, USA Today, February 

21, 2023; Knvul Sheikh, What Is Legionnaires’ Disease and How Can I Protect Myself?, N.Y. Times, September 

21, 2022; Paul Sisson, SDSU to Reopen Buildings Closed During Legionnaires’ Disease Investigation, San Diego 

Union Tribune, April 19, 2023; Meredith Delison, 1 Dead, 11 Sickened in Legionnaires’ Disease Outbreak in 

California County, ABCnews.go.com, August 4, 2022.

Even if Trump’s use of the terms “China Flu” and “Wuhan Flu” were somehow wrongful, it is unlikely that 

individuals like Donovan Lawson, Assamad Nash, James Lee Ramsey, and Martial Simon were influenced by it. 

They may not have even known about Trump’s description of the disease. Homeless people seldom spend their time 

following Trump or his Twitter feed. It used to be standard procedure for psychiatrists in the United States to 

determine if patients are alert and oriented by asking their name, the date, and the identity of the president of the 

United States. If they couldn’t answer those questions, they had serious problems. Of course, Nash, Ramsey, and 

Simon really had serious problems and might well have been unable to identify Trump as the president. It seems far 

more likely that if their motivations had anything to do with COVID-19, it had more to do with the fact that 

COVID-19 did indeed originate in China than with Trump’s behavior.

Commissioner Jones and the staff-generated portion of the report both suggest “a correlation” between Trump’s 

tweet and anti-Asian crime. I strongly suspect they are right that there is a correlation. How could there not be? 

But correlation is not causation. Both were responding to the same stimulus: the outset of the COVID-19 

pandemic. See Sean Darling-Hammond, Eli Michaels, Amani Allen, David Chae, Marilyn Thomas, Thu Nguyen, 

Mahasin Mujahid, and Rucker Johnson, After ‘The China Virus’ Went Viral: Racially Charged Coronavirus 

Coverage and Trends in Bias Against Asian Americans, 47 Health Education and Behavior, Sept. 2020,

https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.1177/1090198120957949.

 

1388 Somehow the Commission’s report has gotten the idea that hate crimes are less likely to be reported than other 

crimes. The report states: “It is well-established that hate crimes are less likely to be reported to the police in 

comparison to other types of crimes.” Rep. at 71. I didn’t see that demonstrated in the data. The report cites a 2005 

Department of Justice report that does indeed show that only 44.1% of violent hate crime victimizations are 

reported, while 49.3% of violent non-hate crime victimizations are reported from July 2000 through December 

2003. (Caroline Harlow, “Hate Crime Reported by Victims and Police,” National Criminal Victimization Survey 

and Uniform Crime Reporting, Bureau of Justice Statistics at 4, Table 4, November 2005, 

https://bjs.ojp.gov/content/pub/pdf/hcrvp.pdf). But there is a lack of equivalence between the hate crime 

victimizations and the non-hate crime victimizations to which they are being compared. I had to do some of my 

own calculations using data in the 2005 report, but it turns out the violent non-hate crime victimizations in the 

comparison are, on average, somewhat more serious than the violent hate crime victimizations, so one would have to 

expect higher reporting rates. For example, the proportion of non-hate crime victimizations that were robberies (a 

felony) was much higher than the proportion of hate crime victimizations (10.9% vs. 5.9%). On the other hand, the 

proportion of non-hate crime victimizations that were simple assaults (a misdemeanor) was lower. In particular, the 

least serious simple assaults—those involving verbal threat only—were only 26.2% of the non-hate crime 

victimizations, while they were 33.5% of the hate crime victimizations. (Id. at 3, Table 3.) In order to make the 
284 The Federal Response to Anti-Asian Racism in the United States

More needs to be done to ensure that those who are committing the crimes are taken off the 

streets. Until that happens, crime is likely to remain a problem.1389 

A policy of “de-incarceration” has often been urged in recent times. Second thoughts about this 

may well be in order. As Wai Wah Chin alludes to in her New York Post article, it is rather 

awkward to fret over anti-Asian hate crimes and at the same time advocate for radically reducing 

comparison to the figures in Table 4, I calculated these percentages using only the violent victimizations in Table 3. 

Because the reporting rates are not broken down by seriousness of offense, one cannot conclude from this whether 

hate crime reporting was higher or lower than non-hate crime reporting. But it is entirely possible that this would 

fully account for the lower reporting rate for hate crimes that the 2005 article found.

More important, the 2005 report appears to be seriously outdated. The more recent report from the Department of 

Justice--Hate Crime Victimization, 2005–2019—found that 57% of violent hate crime victimizations were reported 

to the police in the period from 2015-2019. (Grace Kena and Alexandra Thompson, Hate Crime Victimization, 

2005–2019 at 4, Table 2, September 2021, 

https://bjs.ojp.gov/sites/g/files/xyckuh236/files/media/document/hcv0519_1.pdf). 

No directly comparable figure for violent non-hate crime victimizations is included in that report. But it is possible 

to go outside of Hate Crime Victimization, 2005–2019, and find nearly comparable figures for violent non-hate 

crime victimizations. Criminal Victimization, 2018 states that the non-hate crime reporting rate for 2017 was 44.9% 

and for 2018 was 42.6%. Put differently, contrary to what the staff generated portion of this report states, the 

reporting rate for violent hate crimes was actually higher than the rate for violent non-hate crimes. (See Rachel E. 

Morgan & Barbara A. Oudekerk, Criminal Victimization, 2018 at 8, Table 5, September 2019. See also Alexandra 

Thompson & Susannah N. Tapp, Criminal Victimization, 2021 at 5, Table 4, September 2022 (reporting that in 

2020, the rate that violent non-hate victimizations were reported to police was 40.2% and that the rate for 2021 was 

45.6%)). That isn’t surprising given how many resources have been devoted to increasing hate crime reporting 

rates. Why should anyone be surprised that such efforts have been successful? 

1389 Ms. Chin pointed out how Critical Race Theory (CRT) training could even increase the likelihood of an antiAsian hate crime:

When a black man told a Chinese father in Central Park on March 27 that “you guys always have 

the advantage,” then sucker-punched him, he acted out the two fundamental tenets of CRT. The 

first tenet is that you must judge people, not as individuals, but by their race only—i.e., to be 

racist—so the unlucky Chinese father became “you guys,” part of a collective racial judgment. 

The second tenet is that the only relationship between black and whites—and Chinese by 

extension—is that of unjust oppression. Oppression justifies retaliation, making it “socially just” 

to sucker-punch.

Wai Wah Chin, Asians Want Action Against Violence—Not More Rhetoric on Racism, N.Y. Post, April 10, 2021. 
Rebuttal of Commissioner Heriot 285

incarceration rates,1390 eliminating cash bail,1391 and defunding the police.1392 It’s naïve at best. 

And at some point, it starts to look insincere.

It’s also taken for granted that the problem of the homeless mentally ill is intractable—that miles 

and miles of makeshift tents in our nation’s largest cities are something we must learn to live 

with. I have been told—perhaps conveniently—that there is little to worry about, because they 

have very little tendency toward violence. But, as many urban dwellers have experienced, a not 

insubstantial number—including Donovan Lawson, Assamad Nash, and James Lee Ramsey—

obviously do. 

The most important reason we have governments is to protect us from aggression, both foreign 

and domestic. For the past few years, our criminal justice system has not earned high marks in 

this most fundamental of governmental tasks. That needs to change.

1390 See, e.g., Michelle Alexander, The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness 

(2010)(advocating radical de-incarceration and viewing incarceration rates in the United States to be anti-African 

American). Compare Wendy Sawyer & Peter Wagner, Mass Incarceration: The Whole Pie 2023, Press Release: 

Prison Policy Institute, March 14, 2023 (stating that prison populations were reduced 15% during 2020 and jail 

populations were reduced 25%, but lamented that rates have begun to climb again) with Tom Cotton, Our 

Underincarceration Problem, National Review, August 11, 2021 (“Ill-conceived anti-prison policies rooted in 

platitudes, lies, and misleading statistics have unleashed thousands of criminals onto the streets”).

1391 For a discussion of recent changes in the law of various states in connection with cash bail, see U.S. 

Commission on Civil Rights, The Civil Rights Implications of Cash Bail (January 20, 2022).

1392 In 2023, some have argued that reductions in police budgets was never advocated and never happened—that it is 

all a myth. But that’s nonsense. For example, in Seattle, about $45 million was whacked out of the police 

department budget for 2021. In 2022, another $7 million was taken away. See Seattle Open Budget, 

https://openbudget.seattle.gov/#!/year/2023/operating/0/service/Public+Safety/0/department. The number of sworn 

police officers was 1,420 in 2018 and decreased steadily after that and was down to 1,077 in 2022. See FBI Crime 

Data Explorer, Law Enforcement Employees Breakout, https://cde.ucr.cjis.gov/LATEST/webapp/#/pages/le/pe. 

Minneapolis is similar. Its 2021 police budget was slashed by almost $28 million. Compare City of Minneapolis, 

2020 Budget, https://www.minneapolismn.gov/media/-www-content-assets/documents/2020-adopted-budget.pdf

with City of Minneapolis, 2021 Adopted Budget, https://lims.minneapolismn.gov/Download/FileV2/23271/2021-

Adopted-Budget.pdf. In 2019, it had 861 sworn officers. By 2020, this had declined to 833, and by 2021 it fell off a 

cliff with only 648. Rather than improving in 2022, it got worse with only 592. See FBI Crime Data Explorer, Law 

Enforcement Employees Breakout, https://cde.ucr.cjis.gov/LATEST/webapp/#/pages/le/pe. 

Chicago had almost $80 million cut from its police budget from 2020 to 2021. Compare City of Chicago Annual 

Appropriation Ordinance for the Year 2020, https://chicityclerk.s3.us-west-2.amazonaws.com/s3fspublic/document_uploads/budget/2020/2020_Annual_Appropriation_Ordinance_1.pdf with City of Chicago Annual 

Appropriation Ordinance for the Year 2021, https://chicityclerk.s3.us-west-2.amazonaws.com/s3fspublic/document_uploads/budget/2021/2021_Annual%20Appropriation_1.pdf. 

See Chelsia Rose Marcius, N.Y.P.D. Officers Leave in Droves for Better Pay in Smaller Towns, N.Y. Times, 

December 9, 2022 (“Police departments across the country are grappling with increasing resignations and 

retirements. And while hiring levels rose last year after a sharp decrease in 2020, they have not made up for the 

losses, according to a March report from the Police Executive Research Forum, a law enforcement policy group.”).
286 The Federal Response to Anti-Asian Racism in the United States

Some of the witnesses at the briefing as well as many of those who submitted public comments 

discussed the need for law enforcement.1393 For example, the Asian American Coalition for 

Education, an alliance of over 300 Asian-American organization, wrote to us:

Notably, the majority of violent attacks on Asian Americans were reported in states that either 

defunded the police, or released many violent criminals irresponsibly during COVID-19 

pandemic, or failed to address their rampant homeless and mental health issues .... 

AACE’s comment noted that law and order are “essential to protect Asian Americans and all 

Americans.” It urged us to demand that “relevant state and local governments reverse their 

failing policies of defunding and releasing violent criminals irresponsibly” and “effectively 

address their homeless and mental health issues.” 

Similarly, a coalition of eleven Asian American and civil rights organizations wrote a 

public comment that urged the Commission to focus on “threats to public safety in general.” 

They stated that it is a mistake to focus attention “on relatively minor incidents that do not 

constitute crimes at all,” while “ignor[ing] violent crime the motivations [for which] don’t 

happen to be classified by the police authorities as ‘hate crime.’”1394

The reference, of course, is to law enforcement agencies like the Sacramento Police 

Department, which urges citizens to report on their neighbors when they use racial or ethnic slurs 

or otherwise behave in a way that suggests bias.1395 It is hard to imagine a good reason for such 

a policy, especially in this era in which everything has been labeled “racist.” Police should stick 

to their core mission—to stop murder, mayhem, armed robbery, and other conduct that actually 

1393 Charles Fain Lehman stated in his written submission to the Commission, that “hate crime offenders are not 

specialists—they tend to resemble non-hate crime offenders in their history of criminal behavior, an indicator that 

they commit other, non-hate crimes as well.” For example, in New York State between 2019 and 2021, 52.2% of 

those arrested for a hate crime had a prior conviction, 31.9% had a prior felony conviction, and 36.6% had a pending 

case against them. The numbers for those arrested for other crimes were similar—51.4% had a prior conviction, 

33.1% had a prior felony conviction, and 33.0% had a case pending against them. Mr. Lehman concluded from this 

that “the best way to combat hate crime is not by targeting “hate,” e.g. through bias reduction programming or 

content moderation, but the target “crime” through aggressive law enforcement.” Statement of Charles Fain 

Lehman at 1.

1394 Public Comment submitted by Californians for Equal Rights Foundation, et al., April 24, 2023. Comments from 

individual members of the public also sounded this theme. YangMing Cao of Fresno, California wrote about the 

witnesses who addressed the Commission about our March 24 briefing. In his view, many of them disregarded the 

Asian American community’s actual interests in order to “sell their ideological rhetoric of ‘Stop Asian hate,’ 

pretending that ‘white supremacy’ or ‘systemic racism’ is the biggest threat to the Asian American community.” He 

further stated:

Such fear mongering and race politicking can’t be further away from the truth: Asian Americans, 

just like other Americans, deserve equal treatment, not special treatment. Make American cities 

safer, crack down on crimes and criminal, and grant our children equal education rights. Everything 

else is either window dressing or counter-productive.

1395 “Anonymous Crime Tip, Gang, Drug or Suspicious Tip Lines/Hotlines”, City of Sacramento, 

https://www.cityofsacramento.org/Police/Contact/Crime-Tips. The hotline for hot crimes doubles as a hot line for 

bias incidents. 
Rebuttal of Commissioner Heriot 287

violates the criminal law. Given that this report is about anti-Asian discrimination, it is worth 

pointing out that some Asian Americans—recent immigrants from China—will likely be 

sensitive to a practice that sounds a lot like China’s social credit policy.1396 For some, avoiding 

that policy may have been the reason they left China. 

Asian American voting patterns also reflect Asian American concern over the failure of 

our criminal justice system to keep violent crime under control. 1397 As Michael Hartney and 

Renu Mukherjee wrote in connection with the successful effort to recall San Francisco’s 

progressive district attorney Chesa Boudin: 1398 

On June 7, San Franciscans voted overwhelmingly to recall their city’s progressive district 

attorney, Chesa Boudin, from office—an outcome foreshadowed by pre-election polling showing 

that a majority of residents were so tired of Boudin’s soft-on-crime policies that they were 

1396 According to Katie Canlaes and Aaron Mok, China’s social credit policy assigns rankings to both individuals 

and organizations. The ranking is based upon “good” or “bad” behavior as determined by the National Development 

and Reform Commission, the People’s Bank of China, and the Chinese court system. “Incentive mechanisms 

encourage keeping trust” and “punishments” discourage “breaking trust.” Infractions include “bad driving, smoking 

in non-smoking zones, buying too many video games, and posting fake news online, specifically about terrorist 

attacks or airport security.” Punishments include travel bans, bans from better hotels, and reduced internet speeds. 

Katie Canales and Aaron Mok, China’s ‘Social Credit’ System Ranks Citizens and Punishes Them with Throttled 

Internet Speeds and Flight Bans if the Communist Party Deems Them Untrustworthy, Business Insider, November 

28, 2022. 

1397 The New York Times has written on more than one occasion about Asian American voters in the New York area 

who are voting for candidates they believe will be tougher on crime. Jason Kao, Where New York’s Asian 

Neighborhoods Shifted to the Right, N.Y. Times, March 5, 2023; Luis Ferré-Sadurní & Ellen Yan, Crime Concerns 

Drove Asian Americans Away from New York Democrats, N.Y. Times, January 10, 2023. See also Hannah Hartig, 

Andrew Daniller, Scott Keeter & Ted Van Green, Republican Gains in 2022 Midterms Driven Mostly by Turnout 

Advantage, Pew Research Center, July 12, 2023, https://www.pewresearch.org/politics/2023/07/12/voting-patternsin-the-2022-elections/ (noting that the Republican share of the Asian American vote has been increasing with 26% 

in 2018, 30% in 2020, and 32% in 2022).

1398 In a hotly contested election in 2019, Boudin emerged as the winner after campaigning for “radical change to 

how we envision justice.” According to NBC News, he pushed for “sweeping reform over incarceration” and “said 

he wants to tackle racial bias in the criminal justice system, overhaul the bail system, protect immigrants from 

deportation and pursue accountability in police misconduct cases.” Associated Press, Chesa Boudin, Whose Parents 

Were Imprisoned, Win San Francisco D.A.’s Race: The Son of Anti-War Radicals Sent to Prison for Murder When 

He Was a Toddler, Said He Wants to Reform the Criminal Justice System, NBC News, November 10, 2019. His 

parents, Kathy Boudin and David Gilbert, were members of the far-left Weather Underground and participated in 

the infamous Brinks armored car robbery that left two police officers and a security guard dead. His mother spent 

22 years in prison as a result and his father remains there. He was reared by fellow Weather Underground members 

Bill Ayers and Bernadine Dohrn, who themselves spent years as fugitives. Id. 

As to anti-Asian crime in particular, Boudin was criticized for one of his statements concerning the vicious murder 

of an 84-year-old Thai American grandfather named Vicha Ratanapakdee. Mr. Ratanapakdee was taking his 

morning walk when 19-year-old Antoine Watson, for no apparent reason, sprinted across the street and brutally 

pushed him down. As he fell, his head hit the pavement, causing his death. Boudin described Watson as having 

“some sort of temper tantrum,” which outraged Ratanapakdee’s family and evidently many other San Franciscans. 

Dion Lim, Family Outraged Over SF DA’s Description of 84-Year-Old Asian Man’s Suspected Killer, ABC7 News, 

March 2, 2021. 
288 The Federal Response to Anti-Asian Racism in the United States

willing to fire him after just two years on the job. ... [O]bservers would do well to understand 

the vital role that San Francisco’s Asian voters played in the Boudin recall.1399

I do not pretend to be an expert in matters of enforcement of the criminal law. But it seems to 

me that if policymakers are concerned about violent hate crimes, they would do well to focus on 

violent crime in general.1400 The steep increases in crime that the nation witnessed over the last 

1399 Michael Hartney & Renu Mukherjee, The Asian Recall, City Journal (June 17, 2022). They further wrote:

Our evaluation of two key data points largely validates the anecdotal evidence showing that AsianAmericans played a key role in ousting Boudin. We compared support for the recall across the 

city’s 11 supervisor districts relative to the share of registered voters in each district who requested 

a Chinese language ballot. In the three districts with the smallest share of Chinese ballots (2 percent 

or less), just 50 percent of voters supported the recall (5 percentage points less than the citywide 

average). In contrast, in the three supervisor districts with the highest share of Chinese language 

registrants (10 percent or more), 65 percent of voters voted to recall Boudin.

We also examined another measure of citizen support for the recall: campaign donations. Using 

publicly available campaign-finance data, we examined the share of donor to the pro- and antiBoudin campaign committees who had Asian surnames. What we found largely confirmed the 

thesis that the pro-recall movement drew heavily on Asian support. Notably, one in five individual 

contributors to the Boudin recall effort had an Asian surname. By contrast, a much smaller share of 

pro-Boudin contributors (closer to one in ten) had an Asian surname. ...

While Asian residents of one of the nation’s most progressive cities are unlikely to become reliable 

Republicans, these dynamics suggest that many of these voters have begun to feel meaningful 

political cross-pressures. Democrats have embraced positions on education and crime that are 

unpopular with many Asian voters, including recent immigrants. With Asian-Americans 

representing the fastest-growing racial or ethnic group in the United States, events like the Boudin 

recall suggest that a potentially major national development may be underway.

See Claire Wang, How San Francisco’s D.A. Recall Election Shows a Rift in the Asian American Community, 

nbcnews.com, June 10, 2022 (“Asian Americans, galvanized by rising crime rates and violent attacks against elders, 

appeared to be a driving force in Tuesday’s recall election that ousted San Francisco’s reformist District Attorney 

Chesa Boudin”). 

1400 Commissioner Nourse, to credit, is more focused on the need for prosecution. In particular, she is focused on 

hate crimes prosecutions, especially federal hate crimes prosecutions. She takes issue with the requirements set 

forth in Section 4707(b) of the Matthew Shepard and James Byrd Jr. Hate Crimes Act. 18 U.S.C. § 249(b). Under 

that law, a prosecution cannot take place unless the Attorney General has certified in writing that: 

(b) Certification Requirement.—

``(1) IN GENERAL.— No prosecution of any offense described in this subsection may be undertaken by the 

United States, except under the certification in writing of the Attorney General, or a designee, that—

``(A) the State does not have jurisdiction;

``(B) the State has requested that the Federal Government assume jurisdiction;

``(C) the verdict or sentence obtained pursuant to State charges left demonstratively unvindicated the Federal 

interest in eradicating bias-motivated violence; or

``(D) a prosecution by the United States is in the public interest and necessary to secure substantial justice.

Those requirements were put in place to deal with special aspects of federal hate crime prosecutions. In essence, 

they allow state law enforcement authorities to conduct the prosecution unless good reason exists for federal 

prosecutors to act instead.
Rebuttal of Commissioner Heriot 289

For one thing, those requirements were intended to cut down on the likelihood of duplicative effort in prosecution. 

Because prosecuting major hate crimes tends to be viewed as a feather in the cap of a state or federal prosecutor, 

Congress feared that the federal statute would cause a rush to prosecute as ambitious prosecutors vied for the 

publicity the prosecution would surely bring. They wanted to avoid the jockeying for position and waste.

There is also another reason for the Section 4707(b) requirements. To understand that reason, some background on 

federal criminal jurisdiction would be useful: Our Constitution protects us against double jeopardy. An individual 

cannot be tried twice for the same crime. If the individual is acquitted, that’s the end of it. 

But there’s a catch. Under the “dual sovereignty rule,” the federal government cannot be ousted from jurisdiction 

just because a state has undertaken a prosecution first. And vice versa. Each must be accorded an opportunity to 

exercise its authority to protect the public from crime. See United States v. Lanza, 260 U.S. 377 (1922).

That is a genuine cause for worry. The potential for abuse is obvious. On the other hand, the dual sovereignty rule 

makes some logical sense. The federal government cannot allow states to thwart federal policy. There have been 

actual cases of efforts by state authorities to interfere with federal authority during Prohibition by conducting 

intentionally botched prosecutions of bootleggers. Nor should a botched federal prosecution be permitted to prevent 

states from exercising their authority to protect the public. 

The whole thing worked tolerably well back when federal criminal jurisdiction was very limited (as it was intended 

to be by the Constitution). It is worth noting here that the Constitution does not grant the federal government a 

general police power. That’s for the states. Consequently, when Congress passes a criminal statute, it must relate it 

to one of the federal government’s enumerated powers. Typically, these statutes have dealt with such things as 

crimes committed on federal property, crimes that victimize federal actors in the performance of their duties, crimes 

conducted through the use of the U.S. Mail, and crimes that implicate interstate or foreign commerce. Back when 

federal jurisdiction over crime was very narrow, the dual sovereignty rule rarely caused problems.

But in recent decades, the federal criminal code has expanded in ways that for the first time, allow prosecutors to get 

two bites at the apple on a routine basis. That’s intolerable. The federal hate crimes act is a major factor in this. 

For example, it covers violent crimes that occur “because of” someone’s disability. But victims of crimes are 

frequently targeted because of some real or perceived weakness. And there are those who take the position that all 

rapes are hate crimes because rapists almost always target victims of a particular sex. See Hearing Before the 

Committee on the Judiciary of the United States Senate on the Matthew Shepard Hate Crimes Prevention Act of 

2009 (S. Hrg. 111-464), June 25, 2009.

The requirements of Section 4707(b) were also intended to cut down on the double jeopardy issue by making sure 

that a re-prosecution would not occur except when determined to be truly necessary and in the public interest. This 

was the product of compromise. Out of concern for double prosecutions, I would have favored more stringent 

limitations on re-prosecutions. Others were less bothered by the prospect of prosecutors getting two bites at the 

apple this way and would have preferred fewer constraints on federal prosecutions.

Commissioner Nourse also calls upon Congress to re-promulgate the Matthew Shepard and James Byrd Jr. Hate 

Crimes Prevention Act in an effort to re-assert Congress’s view that it has constitutional authority to pass such a 

statute in its current configuration. I, too, would prefer to see the statute re-promulgated, but not in the way 

Commissioner Nourse suggests. For reasons I have commented on at greater length elsewhere, I don’t think there is 

anything Congress can do to make Section 4707(a)(1) of the Act (18 U.S.C. § 249(a)(1)) constitutional (though 

other parts of the Act appear to be constitutional). That section depends on the Thirteenth Amendment for its 

authority, but the Thirteenth Amendment only gives Congress the broad power to see to it that slavery and 

involuntary servitude are prohibited and never return. Unless the statute was intended by Congress in good faith as 

a means of preventing the return of slavery or involuntary servitude, it’s without constitutional authority. See 

United States v. Hougen, No. 21-10369 (9th Cir. August 1, 2023)(Ikuta, J. dissenting); United States v. Cannon, 750 

F.3d 492, 509 (5th Cir. 2014)(Elrod, J., specially concurring to her own majority opinion); Gail Heriot & Alison 

Somin, Sleeping Giant?: Section Two of the Thirteenth Amendment, Hate Crimes Legislation, 13 Engage (Feb. 12, 

2013); Brief Amicus Curiae for Gail Heriot & Peter N. Kirsanow in United States v. Metcalf, No. 16-4006 (8th Cir. 
290 The Federal Response to Anti-Asian Racism in the United States

few years seem to have leveled off in the last year or so—in part because post-pandemic 

incarceration rates have started to climb again. But that slight decrease in the crime rate is hardly 

cause for celebration. The rate leveled off in a bad place—still higher than it was prior to the 

rise. We can do better. And we must.

B. Of the Making of Hate Crime Statistics There Is No End.1401

What Do Aggregate Hate Crime Statistics Tell Us? The answer to that question is probably “not 

as much as we like to think.”

It is generally agreed that, beginning around the time of the COVID-19 lockdown, the country 

had a spike in anti-Asian hate crimes. The most notorious example may be the case of José 

Gomez III of Midland, Texas, who, on the very day the lockdown began, tried to kill a Burmese 

American family that was shopping at Sam’s Club. Gomez, who acted in full view of other 

shoppers, thought the family was Chinese and somehow blamed them for the pandemic.1402 

Exactly how large the spike was and how long it lasted is hard to say. Extensive media coverage 

tends to corrupt the numbers. It can increase the reporting rate rather than the crime rate itself. 

It can also encourage victims and law enforcement officers to interpret incidents as hate crimes 

that they might otherwise have viewed as ordinary crimes or even not crimes at all. On the 

other hand, the increases in crime can be real, and the publicity itself can sometimes cause the 

increase by inspiring copycat crimes. The bottom line is that arriving at accurate numbers 

is impossible.1403

filed December 22, 2016)(available on SSRN). No one will believe that Congress was genuinely concerned that 

without the statute there would be a risk that slavery or involuntary servitude as that term was understood in 1865 

would return. Such a claim would be obviously insincere. See McCulloch v. Maryland, 17 U.S. 316 (1819)(“Let 

the end be legitimate” ... i.e. let Congress’s purpose in promulgating the statute be a legitimate one under Article I’s 

enumerated powers and courts will be deferential as to means). On the other hand, Congress could easily repromulgate the statute to put all of the prohibitions into Section 4707(a)(2) (18 U.S.C. § 249(a)(2)), which is 

premised on Congress’s power under the Commerce Clause. See Art. I, sec. 8, cl. 3. That would require 

prosecutors to prove an interstate commerce nexus with each prosecution, but that is a small price to pay for 

compliance with the Constitution

1401 Ecclesiastes 12:2.

1402 Julian Mark, Man Sentenced to 25 Years for Violent Anti-Asian Assault at Sam’s Club, Wash. Post, August 8, 

2022. The fact that he acted in full view of other shoppers suggests mental illness was a factor here.

1403

 The truth is that accurate statistics on any kind of crime are hard to come by, particularly, though not only, 

during the rocky transition from UCR to NIBRS. I tend to trust only the statistics for homicide (and then only when 

apples-to-apples comparisons are made). Sure, there is slippage with the handful of cases that are incorrectly 

classified as accidents or suicides when they are really homicides (and vice versa). And there are the rare cases of 

an individual who disappears and whose body is never found. But when the UCR data show that 16,374 homicides 

occurred in the United States in 2018 and 16,425 in 2019, those figures are as close to on target as any national 

crime statistic you’re likely to run across. See 2019 Crime in the United States, tbl. 1 https://ucr.fbi.gov/crime-inthe-u.s/2019/crime-in-the-u.s.-2019/tables/table-1

By contrast, everything else is likely to be less accurate—especially for low-level crimes like simple assault. It's not 

that the federal government doesn’t try. It collects statistics both from law enforcement agencies and from the 
Rebuttal of Commissioner Heriot 291

But even if we had rock-solid numbers—whether we’re talking about anti-Asian hate crimes or 

hate crimes in general—there would still problems with understanding what those numbers 

mean. It’s easy to be misled. One problem is that when Americans think of hate crimes, they 

often think of a gang of skinheads attempting to kill or seriously injure a randomly selected 

member of a racial, ethnic, or sexual orientation minority—for no reason other than to feed their 

public. Both methods have their drawbacks. Putting them together is useful. Among other things, when the 

numbers don’t match up (and they never do), it reminds us of how difficult it is to get an accurate picture of 

something as complicated as crime. 

Data from law enforcement agencies is less than optimal in part because those agencies can’t report crimes that 

weren’t reported to them. Judging from the chatter on my neighborhood email list, lots of crimes, especially lowlevel ones, go unreported. This is in part because victims perceive that nothing will be done about them. They don’t 

want to waste their time. Note that from neighborhood to neighborhood or from demographic group to demographic 

group, crimes go unreported at different rates. For example, immigrant communities may trust the government less 

than more established communities, at least in part because in the place they came from the police may have been 

entirely unworthy of trust. 

In addition, even when crimes are reported, it is sometimes in the interest of local law enforcement to downgrade 

reports of crime to non-crimes in order to improve the locality’s reputation for safety and to reduce their workload. 

In the 1980s, WBBM-TV in Chicago received numerous awards for an extensive exposé that it entitled “Killing 

Crime,” which documented how Chicago police downgraded many credible reports of crime to non-crimes. See 

WBBM: Killing Crime: A Police Cop-Out, Vimeo.com, https://vimeo.com/73164896. See also Ben Poston, Joel 

Rubin & Anthony Pesce, LAPD Underreported Serious Assault, Skewing Crime Stats for 8 Years, L.A. Times, 

October 15, 2015; Leslie Griffin, Chicago’s Police Accused of Dismissing Unsolved Crimes to Better Their Record, 

UPI.com, May 7, 1983. As a resident of Chicago at the time, I found it shocking. These days, I don’t get shocked 

nearly so easily.

Then there is the problem of getting the data from the local law enforcement agency to the federal government. 

Here, too, it turns out that there is many a slip from the cup to the lip. For years, the Uniform Crime Reporting 

(UCR) Program compiled official data on crime in the U.S. More recently, however, a more complex database has 

been implemented—at least partially. As I understand it, the National Incident-Based Reporting System (NIBRS) 

differs from original UCR in part because it eliminates the “hierarchy rule” which recognizes the most serious 

offense committed during an incident. NIBRS, agencies are required to submit detailed information, not just about 

the most egregious offense in an incident, but about each and every offense committed in a single incident, as if each 

offense is a separate and distinct crime. Put differently, it is more work. It’s also expensive to convert from a UCR 

system to a NIBRS system. (Cost Issues of Implementing the National Incident-Based Reporting System in Local 

Law Enforcement Agencies, NIBRS Project Staff Report 2, May 1997, https://www.search.org/files/pdf/costs.pdf) 

As a result, many fewer local law enforcement agencies participate. For 2022, the largest city to report data was San 

Diego. That means New York, Chicago, and Los Angeles did not report. I feel very uncomfortable with national 

numbers like that. For gauging basic crime trends, looking at the issue city by city may yield more useful 

information.

The federal government also looks to the public for its crime data in the form of the National Crime Victimization 

Survey. But victim-reported information has its problems too. Ordinary Americans may make mistakes about what 

constitutes a crime and what doesn’t. For example, they may believe that actions that are protected by the First 

Amendment are criminal when they are not or that actions that create civil liability are also punishable as crimes 

when they are not. Ordinary Americans may also err when asked if they have been victimized in the last year and 

report a crime that actually took place 14 months ago. One reason to believe that victims make mistakes is that they 

often respond to the survey by saying they did report a hate crime to the police. Yet the police data reported via 

UCR and NIBRS do not reflect the same number of such crimes. Although several explanations for the 

inconsistencies exist, I believe the most obvious is that the police made the decision either that the reported incident 

was not a hate crime or that there was insufficient evidence that it was. See Rep. at 69-71.
292 The Federal Response to Anti-Asian Racism in the United States

seething hatred. Many remember the horrific murder of James Byrd, Jr., who was chained to a 

pick-up truck and dragged to his death by a gang of thugs.1404 

If that’s your image of the “typical” hate crime, the number of hate crimes that are said to occur 

each year will be terrifying. President Biden’s very peculiar claim that “[w]hite supremacy ... is 

the single most dangerous terrorist threat in our homeland” will seem like understatement.1405 

But only a tiny number of hate crimes even come close to fitting that stereotype. Those that do 

shock the nation. If they didn’t, there’d be something wrong with us. It’s disorienting to think 

that there are bloodthirsty individuals out there with an all-consuming hatred directed at entire 

racial or ethnic groups. 

But in a nation of over 330,000,000, there will always be a number of human scorpions. 

Mercifully, they are rare. To me at least, it is fitting that the men responsible for James Byrd, 

Jr.’s grisly murder—John William King and Lawrence Brewer—were executed pursuant to the 

laws of the state of Texas. 

Was their crime worse because Byrd was targeted for being African American? Would they 

have been less culpable if they had selected the victim of their monstrous crime completely 

randomly? While a reasonable argument can be made that the answer is yes, I will leave that 

question to others to ponder. In any event, it’s important not to confuse the typical hate crime, 

which are certainly bad enough, with the astonishing evil of King and Brewer and similar killers. 

They have less in common than one might think. Consider: 

Who commits violent hate crimes? Very few are committed by “white supremacists” in the sense 

of card-carrying members of the Ku Klux Klan.1406 Indeed, the hate crimes reported to the 

1404 James Byrd, Jr.’s Killer Executed for Notorious 1998 Hate Crime, BBC, April 25, 2019.

1405 Giselle Ruhiyyih Ewing, Biden Calls White Supremacy “Most Dangerous Terrorist Threat” in Speech at 

Howard, Politico, May 13, 2023. The statement was made in Biden’s commencement address to Howard 

University’s graduating class. He added, “And I’m not just saying this because I’m at a Black HBCU. I say this 

wherever I go.” See also Rob Crilly & Geoff Earle, Conservatives Slam Biden for Saying White Supremacy is the 

“Most Dangerous Terrorist Threat” to the Nation During Howard Commencement Address, Daily Mail, May 14, 

2023.

The New Oxford American Dictionary defines “terrorism” as “the unlawful use of violence and intimidation, 

especially against civilians, in the pursuit of political aims.” Under that definition, the September 11 attacks were 

terrorism because they were intended to discourage the United States from intervening in Middle Eastern affairs. 

Similarly, the bombing of the Alfred P. Murrah federal building in Oklahoma City by anti-government extremists 

was terrorism, because it was an intended to retaliate for the Waco siege in 1993 and the Ruby Ridge incident in 

1992 and to discourage the federal government from acting in a similar way in the future. Also, many of the 

participants in the 2020 riots were engaged in terrorism, since their aim was to encourage de-incarceration, a 

reduction in funding to the police, and other public policy changes. Other participants—like those who simply saw 

the riots as an opportunity to steal from retail stores—were not terrorists. The same principle applies to all violent 

crime: If it was part of a strategy to influence political decisionmakers, it was terrorism. If it was committed for its 

own sake, it was not. President Biden did not elaborate on how he arrived at his conclusion.

1406 Of course, the term “white supremacist” gets tossed around very lightly these days with some so thoroughly 

imbued with critical race theory as to view nearly everyone as a white supremacist, including non-whites. See John 
Rebuttal of Commissioner Heriot 293

federal government are disproportionately committed by African Americans relative to their 

numbers in the population at large 1407 (though there are plenty white offenders too as well as 

offenders of other races). 

As I noted in the previous section, many hate crime offenders are mentally ill. In the context of 

the anti-Asian hate crimes that were triggered by COVID-19 that’s easy to understand. What 

sort of a person over the age of 12 would irrational enough to blame the pandemic on Asian 

Americans generally (or even Chinese Americans generally)? A mentally ill person, that’s who. 

Also contrary to the stereotype, about a third of hate crimes are committed by family members, 

intimates, neighbors, or at least acquaintances of the victim.1408 That should tell us something 

about the context of these crimes: Often the offenders are not simply looking to target a random 

member of a particular racial or ethnic group. Rather, they are engaged in a dispute with a 

particular person over something that is itself unrelated to race, ethnicity, etc. The dispute 

escalates, epithets fly, and a crime is committed. Perhaps without the added element of race or 

ethnicity, it wouldn’t have escalated. Or perhaps it would have. In any event, the encounter may 

not have started out as a crime. It may even have started as one neighbor arguing that the other 

Blake, White Supremacy, With a Tan, CNN.com, September 4, 2021 (taking the position that individuals who would 

be viewed by most as non-white are frequently white supremacists).

1407 See Charles Fain Lehman, What Motivates Hate Crime? Why Hate Criminals Are Still Criminals tbl. 1, 

Manhattan Institute, May 2003, https://media4.manhattan-institute.org/wp-content/uploads/Why-Hate-CriminalsAre-Still-Criminals.pdf. 

Between 2005 and 2019, the perpetrators in 45.3% of the hate crime incidents were non-Hispanic whites, while in 

33.3% of the hate crime incidents, the perpetrators were non-Hispanic blacks. The percentage of hate crime 

incidents in which Hispanics or “Other” were the perpetrators was 15.4% and 4.3% respectively. In addition, in 

1.6% of the incidents, the perpetrators were listed as belonging to more than one group. Grace Kena and Alexandra 

Thompson, Hate Crime Victimization, 2005–2019 at 11, Table 6, September 2021, 

https://bjs.ojp.gov/sites/g/files/xyckuh236/files/media/document/hcv0519_1.pdf. Taking the 2010 census as the best 

source for comparison, the only group that appears to be over-represented as perpetrators is African Americans. See 

also Rep. at. 82-83, Table 9; pp 90-91, Table 13; pp. 92, Table 16; pp. 101-102, Table 22; pp. 111, Table 26 

(perpetrator race statistics not adjusted for population share.)

Diane Yap submitted written testimony (in addition to her oral testimony) that indicated that anti-Asian hate crimes 

are disproportionately committed by African Americans and that the disproportionality is not explained by 

proximity. Yap at 1-4. Ms. Yap lamented what she considered an overemphasis on hate crimes and hate incidents 

(or as she put it “nonviolent behaviors like tweets and shunning”) and an underemphasis on actual violent crime. 

1408 Grace Kena and Alexandra Thompson, Hate Crime Victimization, 2005–2019 at 11, Table 6, September 2021, 

https://bjs.ojp.gov/sites/g/files/xyckuh236/files/media/document/hcv0519_1.pdf. According to the data from 2015 to 

2019, 30.7% of violent hate crime are committed by individuals who are “at least casually known” to the victim. 

For 56.2%, the offender was a stranger. For 13.1%, the relationship was listed as “unknown” (or at least unrecorded 

by police investigating the crime). Interestingly, just a few years earlier, in 2012, a majority (53%) of violent hate 

crime offenders were intimates, family members or acquaintances and only 40% were strangers with 7% 

“unknown.” See Bureau of Justice Statistics, Office of Justice Programs, U.S. Department of Justice, Hate Crime 

Victimization, 2004-2012 tbl. 7 at 7 (February 2014), 

https://bjs.ojp.gov/content/pub/pdf/hcv0412st.pdf. This leads me to wonder if a change in methodology occurred.
294 The Federal Response to Anti-Asian Racism in the United States

neighbor’s dog barks too much or a customer insisting that the store clerk gave him incorrect 

change.1409

How serious does the underlying crime tend to be? More than two thirds (69.4%) of violent hate 

crimes are simple assaults—a misdemeanor.1410 Note that a simple assault need not involve 

actual violence. It is enough that violence was explicitly or implicitly threatened. An offender 

who walks up to the victim, fists raised, and saying “I am going to beat the daylights out of you” 

is almost certainly guilty of a simple assault. That would be true even if he never lands a blow. 

It is sufficient that he intended to put the victim in apprehension of such a blow. Lesser factual 

showings can also amount to a simple assault: Suppose an offender, in the midst of a shouting 

match with the victim, comes within inches from the victim’s face in a menacing manner (even 

without specifically saying that he intends to strike the victim). That may well be enough to 

1409 In the civil rights course that I teach, I sometimes ask students to consider a hypothetical about an argument over 

a parking space. In it, one of the parties steps up close to the other and hurls a racial epithet at her. There is no other

evidence he has any particular view of her racial group. Since she is a stranger to him, the only things he knows 

about her are her race, sex, rough age, the car she drives, and the clothes she was wearing that day. Should it be 

charged as a hate crime? He’s initially angry because he believes he was entitled to a parking space that she took, 

not because she is, say, Asian American. If she had not been Asian American, perhaps he would have been just as 

aggressive and come up with another insult to hurl at her—perhaps a sexual epithet or perhaps he would have called 

her fat, ugly, or stupid. On the other hand, perhaps if she had not been Asian American, he wouldn’t have attempted 

to put her in fear for her safety by shouting at her inches from her face. Perhaps he really doesn’t like Asian 

Americans. The victim herself is not in a good position to judge. The offender himself may not know what he 

would have done if he had not been dealing with an Asian American. We could leave it to the jury, but how are they 

supposed to decide? Under the circumstances, there is little hope of ever getting “accurate” statistics on hate crimes.

Last year, I was surprised to find myself a (very limited) witness to an altercation rather like my 

hypothetical. As I walked down a busy sidewalk, I saw what appeared to be a frightened transgender woman 

wielding a cord like a whip and telling what appeared to be an angry, young cisgender man to stay away. I came too 

late to observe what the fight was about or who was right and who was wrong. I stopped and made a mental note of 

what each of the parties looked like. When the young man backed away and got into his car, I took down as much 

of his license plate number as I could in case it was needed. 

The transgender woman thanked me for stopping at a time when others were just walking by. She told me 

the young man had become irate when she told him that he was parking his car illegally, that he had gotten out of his 

car, come toward her and called her a “fake woman.” She feared he would strike her and viewed his actions as a 

hate crime. I gave her the license plate number and my phone number. The police did indeed interview me about 

the incident as a potential hate crime. I have no idea whether the matter was pursued further. But I suspect it is not 

terribly different from some of the borderline cases that make their way into the statistics. If the police determine 

that the young man came at the transgender woman in a physically threatening manner and would not have done so 

if she had been a cisgender man, then the charge would be plausible under many hate crimes statutes. On the other 

hand, if he treated her no differently than he would have treated anybody else under those same circumstances, it

may arguably have been a simple assault (misdemeanor), but it was not a hate crime. 

1410 Grace Kena & Alexandra Thompson, Hate Crime Victimization, 2005–2019 at 4, Table 2, September 2021, 

https://bjs.ojp.gov/sites/g/files/xyckuh236/files/media/document/hcv0519_1.pdf. The National Crime Victimization 

Survey is a national survey conducted twice a year by the U.S. Census Bureau. Data on non-fatal crime 

victimizations are collected from a representative sample of approximately 150,000 households. For the years 2015, 

2016, 2017, 2018, and 2019, the survey found that an average of 240,770 hate crimes (as perceived by the victim 

survey respondents) each year. Of those, on average, 215,094 were violent hate crimes (again, as perceived by the 

victim survey respondents). Of those violent hate crimes, on average, 149,202 were simple assault, 43,342 were 

aggravated assault, 16,000 were robberies, and 6552 were rapes or other sexual assaults. The rest of hate crimes 

(non-violent) were property crimes that included trespass, theft, and burglary. Id.
Rebuttal of Commissioner Heriot 295

establish a simple assault. Add a racial or ethnic epithet, and it often enough to sustain a hate 

crime charge.

What role need hatred play in hate crimes? None whatsoever. Contrary to the popular 

understanding of hate crimes, there is no requirement that the offender be motivated by hatred of 

individuals because of their race, ethnicity, etc. As the Department of Justice’s web site states:

The term “hate” can be misleading. When used in a hate crime law, the word “hate” does not 

mean rage, anger, or general dislike. In this context, “hate” means bias against people or groups 

with specific characteristics that are defined by the law.1411

Suppose a thug targets an Asian Americans for an attack, not because he hates Asian Americans, 

but because he believes, correctly or incorrectly, that Asian Americans are less likely to be 

armed than other potential victims. The lack of race hatred doesn’t matter a bit. What matters is 

that the victim was targeted because of his race.1412

The upshot of this is that there is a broad range of crimes that can be labeled “hate crimes.” 

Most of them would be misdemeanors but for the racial or ethnic element: Two neighbors get 

into a dispute over parking.1413 One routinely parks in a way that makes it difficult for the other 

to exit his driveway. In a burst of anger, one hurls a racial epithet at the other and threatens to 

punch the other in the nose, but in fact does not intend to do so. Others are deadly. 

1411 U.S. Department of Justice, Learn About Hate Crimes, https://www.justice.gov/hatecrimes/learn-about-hatecrimes. If anything, the Department of Justice website may have understated the point. The particular hate crime 

law that I am most familiar with is the federal statute passed in 2009—the Matthew Shepard and James Byrd Jr. 

Hate Crimes Prevention Act. The word “hate” appears in the title and in the section caption of the statute, but it 

doesn’t appear at all in the definition of the crime. 18 U.S.C. § 249. It therefore isn’t that the word “hate” means 

something different from its usual meaning. It’s that it isn’t used at all in the part of the statute that counts. Rather 

the statute creates a special crime for certain violent acts that occur “because of” someone’s race, color, religion, 

national origin, sexual orientation, disability, etc. Other hate crimes statutes are often similar. Under the federal 

statute, it would seem that an employer who becomes irate and strikes his assistant for working too slowly may have 

violated the statute if the assistant is disabled and would have worked more quickly without that disability. 

1412 Similarly, the home invader who listens to the Rapper YG’s song Meet the Flockers has also acted “because of” 

someone’s Chinese national origin. The song instructs the listener on how to commit a burglary or home invasion. 

The lyrics to that song are as follows: 

First, you find a house and scope it out

Find a Chinese neighborhood

‘Cause they don’t believe in bank accounts

The victims in that case are again being chosen on the basis of their Chinese national origin. Again, it may be a hate 

crime as that offense is defined in many states, since it targets the Chinese. It is not surprising that many Americans, 

especially those of Chinese descent and including some of our public commentators, find this song offensive. See 

Chris Fuchs, Rapper YG's Song “Meet the Flockers” Sparks Protests, Accusations of Targeting Asian Americans,

NBCNews.com, October 14, 2016. 

1413 See supra at n. 44 for my personal experience as a witness to a parking incident. 
296 The Federal Response to Anti-Asian Racism in the United States

My worry is that when Americans hear statistics reflecting the total number of hate 

crimes were reported to the FBI in a given year, they may not have a sense that the typical such 

crime would be a misdemeanor but for the racial or ethnic element. They may not know that 

frequently the parties were arguing about something other than race or ethnicity and that the 

evidence of a racial or ethnic motivation may consist solely of an epithet. And they may not 

realize that if the offender hadn’t used an epithet that relates to a protected classification, he 

might have used a vulgar insult that doesn’t happen to reflect protected categories like a*****e 

or he may have simply called the victim ugly, stupid, fat, etc. 

Consequently, sometimes hate crimes statistics, without more context, can cause Americans to 

believe that the level of racial and ethnic animosity in the country is greater than it is. That in 

turn can fuel further racial and ethnic resentment and social fragmentation. Instead of working to 

build a stronger, common identity as Americans, this can work to fuel divisive identity politics. 

Add to the mix, so-called bias incidents and the aggregate numbers may seem even more 

alarming, while average seriousness of the event declines rather sharply. For example, the 

numbers as collected by Stop AAPI Hate include 10,905 reported cases of “avoidance or 

shunning” (16.1% of the Respondents).1414 It is perfectly understandable why Asian Americans 

in particular would feel sensitive about shunning during the pandemic. But it is worth pointing 

out that very few Americans were spared the experience of being avoided or shunned during that 

period. My own most memorable experience came an hour or two before the lockdown took 

effect. Many people had gone to the small grocery store in my San Diego neighborhood to stock 

up while they still could. As I was entering the store through the entrance lane, an obviously 

distraught woman was exiting through that lane rather than through the exit lane. She shouted at 

the top of her lungs (and at great length) that I should stay far away from her. I was stunned. To 

my knowledge, there was not yet a single case of COVID-19 in San Diego County. Of course, 

she was only the first of many to keep their distance from me over the last three years—some 

rationally so given the information available to them, others not so rationally. I strongly suspect 

that Asian Americans (especially schoolchildren who have to be around other schoolchildren) 

have had far more than their fair share of this shabby treatment—though the numbers have likely 

declined precipitously, just as the number of reported anti-Asian hate crimes appears to be 

declining.1415 

1414 Aggie Yellow Horse, Russell Jeung, and Ronae Matriano, Stop AAPI Hate National Report, 03/19/2020 –

12/31/2021, Mar. 1, 2022, https://stopaapihate.org/national-report-through-december-31-2021/.

1415 One of the experts the Commission consulted believed that the uptick in anti-Asian hate crimes has subsided 

along with COVID-19 itself. See Statement of Dr. Barry Latzer, Emeritus Professor of Criminal Justice, John Jay 

College of Criminal Justice, CUNY at 4 (“As the pandemic fades away preliminary data indicate that anti-Asian bias 

is diminishing as well. Along these lines, it is noteworthy that both New York City and Los Angeles experienced 

significant declines in Asian bias crimes in 2022”); see also Nora Mishanec, S.F. Touts Drop in Hate Crimes 

Against Asians, S.F. Chron., January 14, 2023. Another of our experts pointed to gaps in the data and noted that 

even with the 2022 decline, the numbers were still unacceptable. See Statement of Dr. Brian Levin, Director of the 

Center for the Study of Hate and Extremism, California State University at San Bernadino (stating that violent crime 

spikes have demonstrated “a disturbing resiliency”). Both experts can be correct. My points are these: (1) the best 

way to fight hate crimes is to fight crime in general, not to fund more bias education, to hold more “anti-hate” 

events, or to urge Americans to report non-criminal “bias incidents” to the police; (2) fighting crime in general 

requires that we be serious about the dealing with repeat offenders and with the mentally ill with a history of 
Rebuttal of Commissioner Heriot 297

Still, all in all, Federal, state, and local governments would do well to put their resources into 

preventing Asian Americans (and all Americans) from being victimized by serious crime. It’s not 

disproportionality that makes serious crime important to Asian Americans (and all Americans). 

The data suggest that Asian Americans are actually somewhat less likely to be victimized by 

violent crime than other racial groups.1416 What matters most is the crime itself and the harm it 

inflicts, all of which is substantial and unacceptable for all races and ethnicities.

II. Race-Preferential Admissions Disadvantage Asian Americans in Particular.

Meanwhile, discrimination against Asian Americans is hardly confined to hate crimes. Racebased admissions policies under which selective high schools, colleges, and universities hold 

Asian Americans to higher academic standards than other students, are very prevalent.1417

The problem—if you can call it that—is that many Asian American subgroups, especially 

Chinese Americans, Korean Americans, and South Asians, on average, perform well in 

school.1418 This is at least in part due to the fact that, on average, they spend more time 

studying.1419 Consequently, if selective schools applied their academic standards fairly, without 

violence; (3) aggregate hate crime statistics may cause some Americans to overestimate the extent to which racial 

and ethnic animosity fuels violence; and (4) overestimating the extent to which racial and ethnic animosity fuels 

violence may itself fuel social fragmentation.

1416 In 2019 and 2020, Asians were the victims of violent crimes 90,560 and 80,100 times, respectively, compared to 

Non-Hispanic whites - 1,836,520 and 1,593,170, Non-Hispanic blacks - 367,030 and 361,940, and Hispanics -

610,690 and 417,570. Rachel Morgan and Alexandra Thompson, Criminal Victimization, 2020 – Supplemental 

Statistical Tables at 4, Table 2, U.S. Department of Justice, February 2022, 

https://bjs.ojp.gov/content/pub/pdf/cv20sst.pdf. According to the Census Bureau’s current estimates, 6.6% of the 

population was Asian/Native Hawaiian/Other Pacific Islander, 58.9% was Non-Hispanic white, 13.6% was black or 

African American, and 19.1% was Hispanic. See Quick Facts, https://www.census.gov/quickfacts/US. That works 

out to Asian Americans being less likely to be victimized (if we can assume roughly similar rates of crime 

reporting).

1417 See Lance Izumi & Rowena Itchon, Race Preferences and Discrimination Against Asian Americans in Higher 

Education in A Dubious Expediency: How Race Preferences Damages Higher Education (Gail Heriot & Maimon 

Schwarzschild, eds. 2021). 

1418 See National Center for Education Statistics, America’s High School Graduates, U.S. Department of Education, 

https://nces.ed.gov/nationsreportcard/pdf/studies/2011462.pdf, Figure 30 (From 1990-2009, Asian/Pacific Islander 

students had higher GPAs than Whites, Blacks, and Hispanics, with the difference between Blacks and Asians being 

the largest.); Jane Nam, Average ACT Score, Best Colleges, December 22, 2022, 

https://www.bestcolleges.com/research/average-act-score/#average-act-scores-by-race-ethnicity (From 2018 – 2022, 

Asians were the only racial group to increase in average ACT scores and in 2022 they had the highest average ACT 

composite score).

1419 Valerie A. Ramey, Is There a “Tiger Mother” Effect? Time Use Across Ethnic Groups, University of California, 

San Diego, February 2011, https://econweb.ucsd.edu/~vramey/research/Tiger_Mothers.pdf (Asian high school 

students spend between seven and nine and a half hours more per week studying than do white, black, or Hispanic 

students, and Asian college students spend 5-7 more hours doing homework than do white, black, or Hispanic 

students.); Michael Hansen and Diana Quintero, Analyzing ‘the homework gap’ among high school students, 

Brookings, August 10, 2017, https://www.brookings.edu/articles/analyzing-the-homework-gap-among-high-schoolstudents/#:~:text=Among%20all%20high%20school%20students,hours%20of%20homework%20per%20day, 
298 The Federal Response to Anti-Asian Racism in the United States

regard to race, they would have to offer Asian Americans seats that they would evidently prefer 

to give to African American, Hispanic, and white students.1420 They would have “too many 

Asians” in the words of some. Instead, these schools hold Asian American students to a higher 

standard than their African American, Hispanic, and even white counterparts.1421 To gain 

admission, they must perform better than their non-Asian peers.1422 

I myself don’t get the concept of “too many Asians.” It seems to me that a university that fairly 

applies its admissions criteria, without regard to race, will have just the right number of Asians, 

whether that’s many or few. Similarly, a National Basketball Association doesn’t have “too 

many African Americans” and Major League Baseball doesn’t have “too many Hispanics.” If 

they are developing and applying their standards without regard to race, they have just the right 

number. The doesn’t mean schools should consider only academic credentials in deciding whom 

to admit. But whatever they choose to consider—musical talent, artistic talent, athletic prowess, 

participation in extra-curricular activities, clean criminal record, or whatever—they should 

develop and apply those criteria without regard to race.

It is worth noting that discrimination against Asians in admissions is an example of history is 

repeating itself. In the 1920s, it was “too many Jews” rather than “too many Asians.” As one 

Harvard alumnus, writing in 1925 to Harvard president A. Lawrence Lowell, put it: 

Naturally, after twenty-five years, one expects to find many changes but to find that one’s 

University had become so Hebrewized was a fea[r]ful shock. There were Jews to the right of me, 

Figure 1 (Asian students spend nearly two hours per day on homework compared to Whites, Blacks, and Hispanics 

who spend nearly one hour, about 35 minutes, and nearly one hour, respectively).

1420 Robert VerBruggen, Does Affirmative Action Lead to “Mismatch”? A Review of the Evidence, Manhattan 

Institute, July 2022, https://media4.manhattan-institute.org/sites/default/files/VerBruggen_Does-Affirmative-ActionLead-to-Mismatch.pdf, at 2 (“If these schools ignored race and admitted students solely on academic credentials, 

black and Hispanic students would be substantially underrepresented there, given racial gaps in those credentials”). 

1421 Robert VerBruggen, Does Affirmative Action Lead to “Mismatch”? A Review of the Evidence, Manhattan 

Institute, July 2022, https://media4.manhattan-institute.org/sites/default/files/VerBruggen_Does-Affirmative-ActionLead-to-Mismatch.pdf, at 2 (At public institutions Asians were disfavored by 3.4 ACT points and at private colleges 

Asians received a 140 SAT point penalty).

1422 A good example is Harvard University’s admissions rate. For those applicants in the top 10% in terms of 

academic credentials, the odds of being admitted are 56.1% for African Americans, 31.3% for Hispanics, and 15.3% 

for whites, but only 12.6% for Asian Americans. See Petition for Writ of Certiorari in Students for Fair Admissions, 

Inc., v. President & Fellows of Harvard College, No. 20-1199 at 11 (filed February 25, 2021). Harvard claims that it 

is not discriminating against Asian Americans and that while Asian Americans, on average, do very well on 

measures of academic talent, they do less well, again on average, than other groups on other talents and 

qualifications that Harvard looks for in its students. That is not an absurd claim on its face. It is certainly possible 

for one racial or ethnic group to do better, on average, than another on some measure; indeed, that is the case with 

Asian Americans and academic measures. But the facts suggest that Harvard is being less than candid. The specific 

claim is that Asian Americans do not interview well, that their personalities are less engaging. But it turns out that 

Asian Americans fare poorly in interviews only when they are interviewed by Harvard staff; when they are 

interviewed by Harvard alumni, who presumably haven’t been let in on Harvard’s diversity practices, Asian 

American applicants do just fine. Anemona Hartocollis, Harvard Rated Asian-American Applicants Lower on 

Personality Traits, Suit Says, N.Y. Times, June 15, 2018. The only way to avoid smelling a rat is to hold one’s 

nose. 
Rebuttal of Commissioner Heriot 299

Jews to the left of me, in fact they were so obviously everywhere that instead of leaving the Yard 

with pleasant memories of the past I left with a feeling of utter disgust ....1423

Jewish Americans were only about 4% of the American population in the 1920s. But by that 

time, Columbia University’s entering class may have been as much as 40% Jewish, and the 

University of Pennsylvania’s was similar. Within a few years, Harvard’s entering class was 

27.6% Jewish, and Yale’s enrollment was 13.3%.1424 Especially given that many of these 

students were the children of recent immigrants, their academic accomplishments were 

impressive.

But some Harvard officials—notably President A. Lawrence Lowell—didn’t like it. Lowell, 

who in his spare time was the vice president of the Immigration Restriction League, an 

organization steeped in that era’s scientific racism, was determined to do something about what 

he called “the Hebrew problem” at Harvard. Among other things, he argued it affected both 

student recruitment and alumni fundraising: 

The summer hotel that is ruined by admitting Jews meets its fate, not because the Jews it admits 

are of bad character, but because they drive away the Gentiles, and then after the Gentiles have 

left, they leave also. This happened to a friend of mine with a school in New York, who thought, 

on principle, that he ought to admit Jews, but who discovered in a few years that he had no 

school at all.1425

Lowell originally wanted to deal with the issue by publicly adopting a ceiling on Jewish 

enrollment. But when the faculty—to its credit—initially balked, he put forth a more subtle plan. 

“To prevent a dangerous increase in the proportion of Jews,” he insisted that future admissions 

should be based on a “personal estimate of character on the part of the Admission 

authorities.”1426 

Harvard adopted such a policy in 1926, but as one might predict, the “personal estimate of 

character” was not what it seemed, just as “holistic admissions” are not what elite colleges and 

universities claim they are today. Shortly after the 1926 policy was adopted, Yale’s Dean 

Clarence Mendell paid a visit to Harvard’s admissions director. He reported that Harvard was 

1423 Jerome Karabel, The Chosen: The Hidden History of Admission and Exclusion at Harvard, Yale and Princeton 

105 (2005) (quoting Dec. 17, 1925 letter).

1424 Id. at 86-88, 105, 114. 

1425 Id. at 88 (quoting May 19, 1922 Lowell letter to William Hocking). 

1426 Marcia Graham Synnott, The Half-Opened Door: Discrimination and Admissions at Harvard, Yale, and 

Princeton, 1900-1970 at 108 (1979). Lowell insisted that “the Faculty should understand perfectly well what they 

are doing” and that their vote for a character test “should not be supposed by anyone to be passed as a measurement 

of character really applicable to Jews and Gentiles alike.” Karabel at 89. In Regents of the University of California 

v. Bakke, 438 U.S. 265 (1978)(opinion of Powell, J.), Justice Powell wrote favorably of Harvard’s longstanding 

efforts for geographical diversity. He was apparently unaware that the policy was part of the effort to limit the 

numbers of Jewish students, who tended to be concentrated in Northeastern urban centers. See Alan M. Dershowitz 

& Laura Hanft, Affirmative Action and the Harvard College Diversity-Discretion Model: Paradigm or Pretext?, 1 

Cardozo L. Rev. 379, 386, 395 (1979).
300 The Federal Response to Anti-Asian Racism in the United States

“now going to limit the Freshman Class to 1,000. They are also going to reduce their 25% 

Hebrew total to 15% or less by simply rejecting without detailed explanation. They are giving 

no details to any candidate any longer.”1427

The Jewish Quota Era at the Ivy League eventually became a source of shame. But the end of 

the Jewish Quota Era was followed within a couple of decades by the rise of affirmative action 

preferences. By the 1980s it was clear that the more things changed, the more they stayed the 

same. Instead of discrimination against high-performing Jewish students, it was discrimination 

against high-performing Asian students. Jewish students were being treated as generically white 

and hence were discriminated against vis-à-vis African Americans, Latinos and American 

Indians, but not within the category of white. But Asian American students were the new Jews. 

Their numbers were depressed even vis-à-vis whites. 

Of course, you’d hardly know that from this report, which has the broad title “The Federal 

Response to Anti-Asian Racism in the United States,” that race-preferential admissions policies 

were an issue among many Asian Americans.

Here’s the background: The project that led to this report was proposed by now-former 

Commissioner Michael Yaki, who is a former member of the San Francisco Board of 

Supervisors. The concept paper, which he submitted to the Commission in mid-2022, was 

entitled The New Exclusion Act: The Re-Emerging Rise of, and Federal Response to, Anti-Asian 

Racism in America. It stated that, among other things, we would hear from “[c]ommunity 

leaders” who could “inform the Commission from a variety of perspectives about their 

experiences with bias/racism, and their recommendations regarding federal, state, and local 

enforcement or lack thereof related to Asian American civil rights.” The concept paper was 

adopted by majority vote in part on the basis of that description and now governs the scope of the 

project. 

The more conservative members of the Commission wanted to assign the Commission staff to 

explore specifically the admissions issue in the report (a proposal that did not pass, since none of 

the progressive commissioners were willing to vote for it). But we were comforted by the fact 

that the concept paper at least made it clear that the report would be on anti-Asian bias/racism in 

general and that witnesses would thus be able to talk about the issue as part of the failure of the 

government to enforce their civil rights. 

1427 See id. at 109. The situation was not quite the same for African Americans. Harvard, for example, takes pride in 

its reputation for relative openness to African Americans, and all things considered, it did indeed have a better record 

than most institutions of the period. It was a record that was tarnished by Lowell, who segregated living and dining 

facilities over the objections of many alumni. On the other hand, at Princeton, perhaps the least friendly of the Ivies 

to racial minorities, not a single black attended in the 20th century until 1945, and at least one was actively discouraged 

from enrolling. Still, even at Princeton, African Americans occasionally attended in the 18th and 19th centuries. See 

Synnott at 47-53, 80-84; Karabel at 228, 232-36. Ivy Leaguers did not believe that African American students would 

come to dominate business and industry. Even at Harvard, their numbers were small, perhaps as few as 165 total 

between 1871 and 1941. Id. Alumni felt no reason to worry, consciously or unconsciously, that African Americans 

would crowd their offspring out of elite status. African Americans students were curiosities. Any “old guard” is likely 

at its worst when its members perceive that a group of newcomers may come to take a take a significant share of the 

benefits that its elite institutions can confer. The group that seemed to present that challenge at the time was Jewish 

Americans, not African Americans. 
Rebuttal of Commissioner Heriot 301

Many of the witnesses at our briefing did indeed want to discuss or at least mention racepreferential admissions. And no wonder. As horrifying as the murders of Christina Yuna Lee, 

Yao Pan Ma, GuiYing Ma and Michelle Go were, they are the rare, one-in-a-million case. On 

the other hand, millions of Asian Americans have been or will in the future be affected by racepreferential admissions policies. Ignoring the issue is like ignoring the proverbial elephant in the 

room.

These witnesses nevertheless were discouraged from discussing the issue.1428 Indeed, when the 

following colloquy took place between Commissioner Magpantay and former Assistant Attorney 

General Eric Dreiband, it was interrupted by Staff Director Mauro Morales to prevent discussion 

of race-preferential admissions.

COMMISSIONER MAGPANTAY: What is an Asian?

MR. DREIBAND: What is an Asian? “Asians” typically refer to people whose ancestry or 

national origin is from the continent of Asia.

COMMISSIONER MAGPANTAY: The reason why is that it is a very large and diverse 

community, which some segments encounter poverty, limitations on proficiency,1429 and I’m just 

curious in the court papers if it is recognized the nuance and diversity that we seek to seek in 

America, like our schools should be -- you know, skin color, whatever, but there is diversity of 

experience and insights, isn’t there, among the Asian community?

MR. DREIBAND: Of course, there is, and that’s why this whole notion of grouping populations 

of people together the way many colleges and universities and other institutions today are doing 

as, quote, Asians, I think is shameful, disgraceful, and illegal. 

So, yes, there is a huge range of diversity among people whose ancestry is from Asia, among 

people who are from East Asia, or South Asia, or various parts of Asia, and I think it’s horrible 

that our institutions in this country today treat these individuals as if they are some monolithic 

group and then subject them to pervasive discrimination. 

And it’s even worse because we’re talking typically about 18-year-old children who are applying 

to further their education at colleges and universities throughout this country, many of whom 

come very poor families many of whom are first generation arrivals to this country, and they are 

lumped together and disadvantaged by Ivy League institutions, by all kinds of institutions in this 

country, and it is a total disgrace in my opinion, and it’s 

Illegal, and immoral, and wrong, and it should stop.

COMMISSIONER MAGPANTAY: And that’s in your papers.

1428 Commissioner Victoria Nourse repeatedly told the witnesses “The Supreme Court is going to rule” in a manner 

that strongly suggested that she thought the topic should be avoided. Former Commissioner Michael Yaki, who was 

given the opportunity to speak, also sounded that theme. Transcript at 165, 173-74. This was the first time I can 

recall anyone making such an argument. There is nothing unusual about a civil rights issue coming before a court, 

including the Supreme Court. That has never been a reason for the Commission to avoid an issue in the past. 

1429 This is what the transcript says, but listening to the recording, it sounds more like with “some segments coming 

from poverty, limited English proficiency” to me.
302 The Federal Response to Anti-Asian Racism in the United States

MR. DREIBAND: What?

COMMISSIONER MAGPANTAY: And that’s in your papers, your litigation papers, yes?

MR. DREIBAND: Well that yes, in the cases I mentioned, yes, we made those allegations yes.

STAFF DIRECTOR MORALES: I’m going to assert my authority under 45 CFR 701.11 and I 

want to remind all Commissioners that they voted for the concept paper on hate crimes against 

Asian Americans on September 16, Transcript page 40. Research timeline voted on October 21, 

transcript page 32. 

An amendment to add admissions of Asian Americans’ status to colleges and universities failed 

by a vote on September 16. Our conversation and the point of the testimony today is limited to 

the four corners contained in the concept paper, so I’m going submit the concept paper and the 

timeline for the record, so thank you.

COMMISSIONER MAGPANTAY: I apologize for my question if it was not appropriate ... not 

germane to the topic.1430

I think we all know why Staff Director Morales, an Obama appointee, was seeking to limit 

Commissioners from asking, and witnesses from answering, questions about the racial double 

standard that works against Asian American in college and university admissions. And he 

succeeded. I have served on the Commission for more than fifteen years, and I do not believe 

that anything remotely like that has ever occurred before. It was unprecedented.

Staff Director Morales read from a statement that was obviously prepared prior to the briefing in 

anticipation of the possibility that a discussion of discrimination against Asians in college and 

university admissions would occur. Weirdly, he claimed to be asserting his “authority under 45 

C.F.R. § 701.11” to intervene in this manner. But there is nothing in that provision about the 

limiting the questions a commissioner can ask at a briefing or limiting answers that a witness 

may give in response.1431 Moreover, the provision lays out the duties of the chairperson, not the 

duties of the staff director. At the time of the briefing, the Commission had no chairperson, but 

1430 Federal Response to Anti-Asian Racism in the United States, Mar. 24, 2023, transcript pp. 179-182, 

https://www.usccr.gov/files/2023-05/aa-hc-usccr-transcript_3.24.23-edited.pdf (hereinafter cited as Anti-Asian 

Briefing).

1431 § 701.111 Commission meetings—duties of the Chairperson.

(e) At a meeting of the Commission in each calendar year, the Commission shall, by vote of the majority, 

adopt a schedule of Commission meetings for the following calendar year.

(f) In addition to the regularly scheduled meetings, it is the responsibility of the Chairperson to call the 

Commission to meet in a special open meeting at such time and place as he or she shall deem appropriate; 

provided however, that upon the motion of a member, and a favorable vote by a majority of Commission 

members, a special meeting of the Commission may be held in the absence of a call by the Chairperson.

(g) The Chairperson, after consulting with the Staff Director, shall establish the agenda for each meeting. The 

agenda at the meeting of the Commission may be modified by the addition or deletion of specific items 

upon the motion of a Commissioner and a favorable vote by a majority of the members.

(h) In the event that after consulting with the members of the Commission and consideration of the views of 

the members the Chairperson determines that there are insufficient substantive items on a proposed meeting 

agenda to warrant holding a scheduled meeting, the Chairperson may cancel such meeting.
Rebuttal of Commissioner Heriot 303

the Commission’s most senior member, Commissioner Peter N. Kirsanow was acting in that 

capacity. In the definition section of the regulations to which the staff director referred, the term 

“chairperson” was defined to someone acting in that capacity.1432 If anyone possessed the 

authority to limit questioning it was Commissioner Kirsanow. He did not choose to do so.1433 It 

is important to note that the job of staff director is to direct the staff, not to direct the 

Commission. If Congress has intended the staff director to direct the Commission (which is 

defined in the statute as the eight commissioners, not as eight commissioners plus a staff 

director), it would have called him the commission director. 

Since the briefing, the Supreme Court has indeed decided that discrimination against Asian 

Americans in admissions is unconstitutional (as to state colleges and universities) and illegal 

under Title VI of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, 42 U.S.C. § 2000d (as to public or private 

universities that receive federal funds). I applaud that decision.

1432 45 C.F.R. § 702.1(c).

1433 Commissioner Kirsanow told me that he was stunned by Staff Director’s intervention, but that given that the CSpan cameras were rolling, his instinct was to let it go. The following month, when the Staff Director Morales again 

attempted to limit what a commissioner could say, Commissioner Kirsanow explained to him that this was 

inappropriate. April Business Meeting Transcript at 64, https://www.usccr.gov/files/2023-04/0421-usccr-businessmeetingtranscript.pdf. 
304 The Federal Response to Anti-Asian Racism in the United States

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Rebuttal of Commissioner Magpantay 305

Rebuttal of Commissioner Magpantay

I write in response to my esteemed colleagues’ statements to the U.S. Commission on Civil 

Rights report on “The Federal Response to Anti-Asian Racism in the United States.”

I write not to criticize my fellow Commissioners but to highlight areas of agreement and 

consistency. In some instances, they make observations with which I concur, but I simply come 

to different conclusions. 

Hate Crimes Are Not Partisan

Early on in the COVID-19 pandemic, the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights issued statements 

expressing concerns about the rise of anti-Asian hate crimes, with Republican and Democratic 

appointees voting together. I applaud my colleagues for recognizing that hate crimes are not a 

partisan issue.

Indeed, Commissioner Gilchrist reminded us that “Sometimes it seems rare that our Congress 

can get together and pass legislation...But when it was time to send a message about hate and 

our values as a country, a strong bi-partisan group of legislators did just that. The Covid-19 Hate 

Crime legislation passed the US House by a vote of 364-62.” 

I echo Commissioner Gilchrist’s sentiments and praise several Republican members of Congress 

who stood together in opposition to anti-Asian hate crimes. Their support of the bill’s prime 

sponsors – Representatives Grace Meng (D-NY) and Judy Chu (D-CA) and Senator Mazie 

Horino (D-HI) – should be commended. 

Understanding Who the Perpetrators of Hate Crimes Are

I commend Commissioner Gilchrist for recognizing that too many people have been promoting a 

harmful narrative that African Americans are the predominant perpetrators of hate crimes against 

Asian Americans. He says, “It’s never my intent nor purpose to create a wedge between the 

Asian community and the Black community. In the United States there has been tension’ 

between minority groups during times of economic and social unrest in our country. 

Acknowledging these tensions doesn’t create the wedge; it can serve as an opportunity to 

investigate and explore how we can do ‘community’ better.” It is relevant, then, that the Asian 

American Legal Defense Fund (AADLEF) submitted comments to the Commission explaining 

that most anti-Asian hate crimes are perpetrated by white people, not African Americans. 

President Biden stated that, “White supremacy is ... [a] dangerous terrorist threat in our 

homeland.” Indeed, it is. But Commissioner Heriot tempers this by stating that “only a tiny 

number of hate crimes [perpetrators] even come close to fitting that stereotype.... Very few [hate 

crimes] are committed by ‘white supremacists’ in the sense of card-carrying members of the Ku 

Klux Klan.” She noted the disturbing truth that, “contrary to the stereotype, about a third of hate 
306 The Federal Response to Anti-Asian Racism in the United States

crimes are committed by family members, intimates, neighbors, or at least acquaintances of the 

victim.” 

Based on this reality, I believe that if we want to meaningfully address anti-Asian violence and 

hate crimes in general, we should look inward at our own communities and neighborhoods, to 

find those who are uninformed and should be given the opportunity to be educated about 

diversity and equity. 

Barriers to Addressing Hate Crimes 

A majority of the Commissioners and I acknowledge that not enough has been done to address, 

curtail, or respond to anti-Asian hate crimes. Commissioner Christian Adams “also agree[s] with 

the reports finding that prosecutors and law enforcement should vigorously investigate and 

prosecute violations of federal criminal laws.” 

Commissioner Gail Heriot recounted the story of Michelle Go, who died after being pushed onto 

the subway tracks in New York City. Her attorney, Jennifer Wu, testified before the Commission 

and emphatically declared, “There has been no federal response to anti-Asian racism.” She has 

represented nearly every victim who has died from anti-Asian violence and “none of [her] clients 

have ever heard from the federal government, except for Congresswoman Grace Meng of New 

York City.” 

Commissioner Adams voted in favor of this report about anti-Asian hate crimes, and notably said 

that this report and a forthcoming USCCR report on crime should be viewed as complementary. I 

share his view and am hopeful that the USCCR’s next report will address the root causes of hate 

crimes and examine how to prevent violent crimes. 

Commissioner Adams also recognizes “that first responders, including law enforcement officers, 

are often insufficiently trained to identify hate crimes. Local law enforcement officials, therefore, 

may over or under-report the number of hate crimes occurring in their jurisdictions because they 

lack a clear understanding of what constitutes a hate crime.” I concur. A majority of the 

Commissioners agree with the report’s recommendation that better training is needed. 

Hate Crimes are Not “Crimes” Per Se 

There are also deficiencies in the reporting data that makes understanding the true breadth and 

depth of hate crimes difficult. Commissioner Adams explained that federal data policy has 

impaired local crime reporting. A majority of the Commissioners and I agree with the report’s 

finding that comprehensive data on hate crimes is lacking. 

Commissioner Adams also pointed out that: 

This lack of objective data has apparently contributed to the Commission’s decision to 

award undue weight to self-reported statistics collected by non-profits that conflate “hate 
Rebuttal of Commissioner Magpantay 307

incidents” with “hate crimes.” Hate incidents are not hate crimes. Discourtesy, boorish 

behavior, rudeness and even misdirected anger may be unsettling, but they are usually not 

crimes.

Admittedly, the legal definition of a hate crime under federal law is narrow and specific. It is 

only bias motivated violence that results in death or serious bodily injury. 

The group Stop AAPI Hate concurred with Commissioner Adams. Stop AAPI Hate documented 

over 11,000 anti-Asian hate incidents and found that the incidents were not “crimes” per se (i.e., 

resulting in death or serious bodily injury) but instead hateful verbal harassment, gestures, 

and vandalism. 

To address this, the Department of Justice should incentivize and support state and local law 

enforcement agencies to provide resources and referrals for individuals who report hate 

“incidents,” not “crimes” per se but instances of racial harassment. Law enforcement agencies 

should create written policies and train their officers to provide these resources and referrals. 

Address Root Causes of Crime

I agree with my colleagues that some of the root causes of hate crimes are similar to the root 

causes of other violent crimes. Commissioner Gail Heriot noted that the solutions to both hate 

crimes and crimes in general are similar.

Commissioner Heriot wrote, “If we want to bring violent hate crimes under control, we need to 

bring violent crime under control. For that, we need effective law enforcement. Special attention 

should be given to crimes committed by repeat offenders and by mentally ill individuals with a 

history of violence, because these are the crimes we have the best chance to prevent before they 

happen.” 

The Asian American Coalition for Education, which Commissioner Heriot cited, wrote that 

“most violent attacks on Asian Americans were reported in states that ... failed to address their 

rampant homeless and mental health issues” within their cities. 

I can agree with Commissioner Heriot in the need to address violent crime. We must give special 

attention to those suffering from mental illness. We must develop and implement effective 

programs to rehabilitate criminal offenders so they do not become repeat offenders. Almost all of 

the advocates who shared public comment with the USCCR said that mental health services, 

along with education, will significantly address anti-Asian hate crimes and will likely help to 

curtail all violent crimes. 

Commissioner Gilchrist correctly pointed to the testimony of Russell Jeung, Professor of Asian 

American Studies at San Francisco State University, who stated that “...those of us living in lowincome, maybe high-crime areas are victims of crime at high rates, but everybody in the 

community are victims of crime in those communities. So, it's not necessarily Black on Asian 
308 The Federal Response to Anti-Asian Racism in the United States

crimes. The Black and African American community, they're also victims of crime in 

those neighborhoods.”

I also agree. I believe that we as a nation should address the root causes of crime. Breaking the 

cycle of poverty and providing drug treatment programs, rehabilitation programs, mental health 

services, and programs for at-risk youth would go a long way in addressing not only anti-Asian 

hate crimes, but crimes and violence against all people. 

If I may borrow Commissioner Gail Heriot’s words, “Still, all in all, Federal, state, and local 

governments would do well to put their resources into preventing Asian Americans (and all 

Americans) from being victimized by serious crime.” 

Agreed Upon Findings and Recommendations 

My statement recounted a series of comprehensive findings and recommendations to address 

anti-Asian hate crimes in the United States. Though the USCCR as a whole did not vote to 

approve them all, I applaud Commissioner Adams for his effort to propose a set of those findings 

and recommendations which a bipartisan majority of Commissioners agreed upon. Those are 

adopted in the full report. 

The lack of language access as a barrier to addressing hate crimes is important to underscore. 

Commissioner Adams highlighted that “because many AAPI victims of such crimes may have 

limited English language proficiency, they may be less likely to initiate reports with law 

enforcement officials.” I would strengthen this statement and add that many Asian Americans are 

simply unable to report hate crimes, both because of their own limited English proficiency and 

law enforcement’s neglect in providing language access to their services. Commissioner 

Gilchrist echoed the same sentiment. 

Many Asian American advocates complained about inaccessible law enforcement and victim 

services due to language barriers, notwithstanding a federal obligation to provide language 

access to those services under Executive Order 13166. More must be done at the federal, state, 

and local levels to ensure limited English proficient Americans have access to law enforcement 

and victim services. 

I also praise Commissioner Gilchrist and concur with his own set of recommendations that the 

President and Congress should: 

• Continue to strengthen the collaboration between our federal, state, and local law 

enforcement officials.

• Fully utilize existing resources to help communities navigate cumbersome bureaucratic 

processes, which make it hard for community groups to access government grants.

• Make language accessibility the norm for the diversity of the population.
Rebuttal of Commissioner Magpantay 309

• Carefully balance the rights of the accused with care for the victims. 

• The government should evaluate every five years whether federal hate crime laws are

substantively beneficial in reducing hate crimes. 

The U.S. Commission on Civil Rights is bipartisan. In an increasingly politically polarized 

country where civility can be hard to find, I hope I have demonstrated how people of different 

opinions and differing political ideas can come together to lead to a better result for all. 
310 The Federal Response to Anti-Asian Racism in the United States

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Rebuttal of Vice Chair Nourse 311

Rebuttal of Vice Chair Nourse

Once upon a time, Americans believed it an honor to serve their country rather than to bash it 

based on imagined wrongs. Most reasonable readers will find it odd that the dissenting 

statements spend so much time on matters unrelated to Asian-American hate crimes. Particularly 

out of place, and demeaning to the Commission, are the statements denigrating the 

Commission’s staff director. Ordinarily, one might just ignore them,

given the Commission’s higher mission. However, there is a pattern here, worth noting for the 

public record, lest it continue.

I confess that I was shocked when I attended the first hearing on Asian-American hate crime, just 

days after being nominated by the President as Vice Chair of the Commission. Commissioners 

had called witnesses on topics completely unrelated to Asian-American hate crime. Does it really 

surprise anyone in Washington that these witnesses were chosen to talk about hot button, 

politicized issues like affirmative action in higher education, or diversity, equity, and inclusion 

programs?

Or that one witness chose to use their testimony to inveigh against the President’s equity 

“fixation” and “agenda” and to single out the first Black-and-Asian Vice President for particular 

disdain. Transcript at 135, 137 (March 24, 2023). What do these topics have in common with 

hate crime? With Asian-American hate crime? Nothing. Frankly, I was embarrassed by this 

performance and I expect that most citizens, whether Republican or Democrat, would have been 

confused by witness statements whose sole purpose appeared to be to criticize the current 

Administration on matters unrelated to Asian-American hate crimes.

After this went on for some time, the staff director called a halt, and that was the prudent and 

appropriate course. Transcript at 181 (March 24, 2023). The Commission’s statute provides no 

way for the Commission to operate without a Chair to enforce Commission rules. 42 U.S.C. 

1975d (requiring concurrence of a majority of Commissioners to the President’s choice of Chair 

and Vice-Chair). There was no Chair in place at the Asian-American hate crime hearing (there 

was no time for a Commission vote as President Biden had just named his proposed Chair 

and Vice-Chair). The staff director acted as the only presidentially-appointed officer who 

had received a majority of Commission votes for his appointment, to enforce the 

Commission’s votes.

The Commission had voted not to hear testimony on affirmative action in higher education at the 

hate crimes briefing as inconsistent with a focus on hate crime. And yet Commissioners appeared 

to have invited witnesses for the express purpose of hearing such testimony. Staff Director 

Morales acted appropriately and temperately. 42 U.S.C. sec. 1975b; see 45 C.F.R. sec. 701.11; 

Transcript at 181 (March 24, 2023). Let us hope that the Commission’s staff will be treated 

with greater civility in the future, and that the Commission will hold to germaneness rules 

moving forward.
312 The Federal Response to Anti-Asian Racism in the United States

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Appendix 313

Appendix

U.S. Commission on Civil Rights Public Briefing:

The Federal Response to Anti-Asian Racism in the United States

Friday, March 24, 2023 | Washington, D.C.

Expert Panels: 1:00-5:00 pm ET

AGENDA

Live-streamed: https://www.youtube.com/user/USCCR/videos

I. Introductory Remarks: 1:00-1:05 pm

II. Panel 1: Research and Policy Experts: 1:05-2:15 pm

• Dr. Russell Jeung, Professor, Asian American Studies, San Francisco State 

University; Co-Founder, Stop AAPI Hate

• Charles Lehman, Fellow, Manhattan Institute 

• Jo Ann Yoo, Executive Director, Asian American Federation (AAF)

• Diane Yap, Founding Member, Friends of Lowell Foundation; Board Member, 

The Lowell Alumni Association

• John Yang, President & Executive Director, Asian Americans Advancing Justice 

– AAJC

• Dr. Brian Levin, Professor, California State University – San Bernardino; 

Director, Center for the Study of Hate & Extremism (CSHE); Commissioner, 

California Commission on the State of Hate

III. Break: 2:15-2:25 pm

IV. Panel 2: Community Stakeholders and Advocates: 2:25-3:35 pm

• Cynthia Choi, Co-Executive Director, Chinese for Affirmative Action

• Dr. Wenyuan Wu, Executive Director, Californians for Equal Rights Foundation 

• Aryani Ong, Director, Anti-Hate & Belonging Program, The Asian American 

Foundation (TAAF)

• Jennifer Wu, Partner, Groombridge, Wu, Baughman & Stone LLP

• Lee Cheng, Co-Founder, The Asian American Legal Foundation

• Manjusha Kulkarni, Executive Director, AAPI Equity Alliance
314 The Federal Response to Anti-Asian Racism in the United States

V. Break: 3:35-3:45 pm

VI. Panel 3: Law Enforcement & Federal Officials: 3:45-4:55 pm

• Eric Dreiband, Former Assistant Attorney General, Civil Rights Division, 

Department of Justice; Partner, Jones Day

• Devon Westhill, Former Assistant Secretary for Civil Rights (OASCR) at USDA;

President and General Counsel, The Center for Equal Opportunity

• Detective Orlando Martinez, Hate Crimes Coordinator, Los Angeles Police 

Department 

• William Scott, Police Chief, San Francisco Police Department

VII. Closing Remarks: 4:55-5:00 pm

VIII. Adjourn Meeting

**Public Comments will be written testimony only
1 

NEAL R. GROSS

COURT REPORTERS AND TRANSCRIBERS

1716 14TH ST., N.W., STE 200

(202) 234-4433 WASHINGTON, D.C. 20009-4309 www.nealrgross.com 

U.S. COMMISSION ON CIVIL RIGHTS 

+ + + + + 

COMMISSION BRIEFING 

+ + + + + 

FRIDAY, MARCH 24, 2023 

+ + + + + 

The Commission convened at the National 

Press Club, 529 14th Street, Northwest, 13th Floor, 

Washington, D.C., at 1:00 p.m. EDT, Peter Kirsanow, 

Commissioner and Moderator, presiding. 

PRESENT: 

PETER N. KIRSANOW, Commissioner, Moderator 

STEPHEN GILCHRIST, Commissioner 

JOHN CHRISTIAN ADAMS, Commissioner 

GAIL HERIOT, Commissioner 

GLENN MAGPANTAY, Commissioner 

VICTORIA NOURSE, Commissioner 

ROCHELLE GARZA, Commissioner 

MONDAIRE JONES, Commissioner 

MAURO MORALES, Staff Director 

DAVID GANZ, General Counsel 
2

NEAL R. GROSS

COURT REPORTERS AND TRANSCRIBERS 

1716 14TH ST., N.W., STE 200

(202) 234-4433 WASHINGTON, D.C. 20009-4309 www.nealrgross.com

STAFF PRESENT: 

CODY BOWLER 

SHERYL COZART 

PAMELA DUNSTON, Chief, ACSD 

PATRICIA FLETCHER 

JULIE GRIECO 

NICOLE HEWITT 

JOE KIM 

TINALOUISE MARTIN 

PILAR MCLAUGHLIN 

PRINCE OLUBAKINDE 

ESSENCE PERRY 

SWASTI SHAH 

MARK SPENCER 

MICHELE YORKMAN-RAMEY 

MARIK XAVIER-BRIER 

COMMISSIONER ASSISTANTS PRESENT: 

ALEXIS FRAGOSA 

JOHN MASHBURN 

CARISSA MULDER 

THOMAS SIMUEL 
3

NEAL R. GROSS

COURT REPORTERS AND TRANSCRIBERS 

1716 14TH ST., N.W., STE 200

(202) 234-4433 WASHINGTON, D.C. 20009-4309 www.nealrgross.com

A G E N D A 

INTRODUCTORY REMARKS...............................6 

PANEL 1: RESEARCH AND POLICY EXPERTS 

A. Russell Jeung, Ph.D., Professor of Asian 

American Studies, SF State University.............13 

B. Charles Lehman, Fellow, Manhattan Institute....18 

C. Jo-Ann Yoo, Executive Director, Asian 

American Federation (AAF).........................25 

D. Diane Yap, Founding Member, Friends of 

Lowell Foundation; Board Member, The Lowell 

Alumni Association................................30 

E. John Yang, President & Executive Director, 

Asian Americans Advancing Justice -- AAJC........... 

F. Prof. Brian Levin, Professor, California State 

University -- San Bernardino; Director, Center for 

the Study of Hate & Extremism (CSHE)..............42 

PANEL 2: COMMUNITY STAKEHOLDERS AND ADVOCATES 

A. Cynthia Choi, Co-Executive Director, Chinese 

for Affirmative Action; Co Founder, 

Stop AAPI Hate..............................69 

B. Dr. Wenyuan Wu, Executive Director, 

Californians for Equal Rights Foundation..........74 

C. Jennifer Wu, Founding Partner, Groombridge, 

Wu, Baughman & Stone LLP..........................81 

D. Lee Cheng, Co-Founder, The Asian American 

Legal Foundation..................................88 

E. Manjusha Kulkarni, Executive Director, AAPI 

Equity Alliance; Co-Founder, Stop AAPI Hate.......97 

PANEL 3: LAW ENFORCEMENT & FORMER FEDERAL OFFICIALS 

A. Eric Dreiband, Former Assistant Attorney 

General, Civil Rights Division, Department of 

Justice; Partner, Jones Day......................127 

B. Devon Westhill, Former Assistant Secretary 

for Civil Rights (OASCR) at USDA; President and 

General Counsel, The Center for 

Equal Opportunity................................134 

C. Detective Orlando Martinez, Hate Crimes 

Coordinator, Los Angeles Police Department.......142 

D. William Scott, Police Chief, San Francisco 

Police Department................................147 

E. Michael Yaki, Former USCCR Commissioner.......154 

CLOSING REMARKS..................................181 

ADJOURN MEETING 
4

NEAL R. GROSS

COURT REPORTERS AND TRANSCRIBERS 

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1 P-R-O-C-E-E-D-I-N-G-S 

2 (1:00 p.m.) 

3 COMMISSIONER KIRSANOW: Good afternoon and 

4 welcome to the U.S Commission on Civil Rights briefing 

5 on anti-Asian racism in the United States. Thank you 

6 to the witnesses, staff, and guests who are joining us 

7 today -- whether in-person or virtually. 

8 The briefing comes to order at 1:00 p.m. 

9 Eastern Standard Time; we're holding the briefing in 

10 the National Press Club. 

11 I'm Commissioner Peter Kirsanow, I'll be 

12 moderating the briefing today. I'll be joined by 

13 Commissioner Adams, Commissioner Garza -- try to do 

14 this in alphabetical order -- Commissioner Gilchrist, 

15 Commissioner Heriot, Commissioner Magpantay -- tay, 

16 I'm sorry, Magpantay -- and Commissioner Nourse. 

17 A quorum of the Commissioners is present.

18 Staff Director is present right to my 

19 right here -- is it Morales -- is the Court Reporter 

20 present? 

21 COURT REPORTER: Present. 

22 COMMISSIONER KIRSANOW: Thank you very 

23 much. 

24 Before we begin, I'd like to welcome our 

25 newly appointed Commissioners who are with us today. 
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1 Commissioners Garza, Magpantay -- I keep screwing that 

2 up, Magpantay -- and Nourse. Commissioner Mondaire 

3 Jones is unable to join us today, but we look forward 

4 to welcoming him in the future. 

5 Since we're a little pressed for time 

6 today, I'll briefly introduce each of our new 

7 Commissioners, and they may wish to say a few words. 

8 Commissioner Rochelle Garza was appointed 

9 by President Biden and sworn in on March 17 of this 

10 year, she's an attorney from the Rio Grande Valley, 

11 currently serving as president of the Texas Civil 

12 Rights Project. She has expertise in immigration, 

13 family, criminal, and constitutional law. 

14 Commissioner Glenn Magpantay was appointed 

15 to the commission by Senate Majority Leader Chuck 

16 Schumer and sworn in on February 15 of 2023. He's a 

17 longtime civil rights attorney, professor of law in 

18 Asian-American studies, and LGBTQ rights activist. He 

19 is a principal at Magpantay and Associates, and a 

20 Soros Equality Fellow. 

21 And last, Commissioner Victoria Nourse was 

22 appointed to the commission by President Biden and 

23 sworn in on March 16 of 2023. She's the Ralph 

24 Whitworth Professor of Law at Georgetown University 

25 Law School. She's also taught at a number of other 
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1 institutions such as Yale, NYU, and Northwestern. 

2 She's authored textbooks and dozens of legal articles.

3 Welcome to our new Commissioners. Would 

4 each of you, starting with Glenn, like to say a few 

5 words? 

6 COMMISSIONER MAGPANTAY: Sure. It's an 

7 incredible honor to be here to have this opportunity 

8 to serve our country, and to raise these issues that 

9 so importantly affect our community. 

10 As Asian-Americans are growing in this 

11 country, the distinct honor of being an Asian-American 

12 member of this commission, but really looking at the 

13 rights and issues that affect all Americans across 

14 this country. 

15 It was 30 years ago that this commission 

16 unveiled a report called Civil Rights Issues in the 

17 90s, and I remember when I was a young law student 

18 researching my law review article, there was nothing 

19 out there about the Asian-American community. And yet 

20 this commission, well before I even became an admitted 

21 attorney, provided the insights and information that 

22 we needed to look at the growing community in our 

23 country. 

24 I'm so excited for all the panelists to be 

25 on this commission, to serve our country, and for the 
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1 important issues that we have here today, and for the 

2 work of the commission for the next couple of years. 

3 Thank you. 

4 COMMISSIONER KIRSANOW: Commissioner 

5 Nourse? 

6 COMMISSIONER NOURSE: Well, thank you so 

7 much. I've been delighted and honored to be nominated 

8 by President Biden, who I've known since I was a 30-

9 year-old lawyer working on the Senate Judiciary 

10 Committee. And I'm delighted to be nominated with a 

11 phenom from Texas, Rochelle Garza, who's going to 

12 speak in a minute. 

13 But I just know that the president, if he 

14 were here today, he would say this is exactly the 

15 example of what I used to do in the Senate. We work 

16 better together than apart, and that the United States 

17 needs right now so much, in particular in the Asian 

18 sphere, to be a leader in human rights. 

19 So, I'm delighted that this is our first 

20 hearing and I look forward to hearing from your 

21 testimony. 

22 COMMISSIONER GARZA: Good afternoon, 

23 everyone. It is truly an honor for me to have been 

24 appointed by President Biden to this very important 

25 position, I deeply deeply care about civil rights. 
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1 You know, I'm a civil rights attorney from South 

2 Texas, my father was a farmer -- he was one of 13 

3 children. 

4 I've been thinking a lot about my 

5 grandmother, a lot about the future of my daughter --

6 she turns one today, and -- 

7 (Applause.) 

8 COMMISSIONER GARZA: So, I want to make 

9 sure that we make this country -- or, continue to go 

10 on the path where there is equal protection for 

11 everyone in this country, because I deeply believe 

12 that. I am very excited that this is the first panel 

13 that we will be hearing from about this incredibly 

14 important topic about anti-Asian bias that is 

15 impacting people across this country. 

16 So, thank you so much for being here and I 

17 look forward to hearing from all of you. 

18 COMMISSIONER KIRSANOW: Thank you very 

19 much and welcome to the new Commissioners, or 

20 condolences. 

21 (Laughter.) 

22 COMMISSIONER KIRSANOW: The subject of 

23 today's hearing, the federal response to anti-Asian 

24 racism in the United States. This is a topic that 

25 former Commissioner Yaki, from whom we will be hearing 
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1 a little bit later today, and who, by the way, speaks 

2 fluent Klingon, had the pleasure -- he proposed this 

3 topic last year. 

4 And all of us have been alarmed by news 

5 reports of attacks against Asian-Americans, this has 

6 been going on for some time, I had been involved in 

7 this and tried to get a briefing on this issue myself, 

8 and here we are. 

9 I'm happy that we're going to be 

10 addressing this at this time, and I thank the 

11 commission staff, and our special assistants, and 

12 everyone for putting this thing together -- all the 

13 hard work that it entailed and getting knowledgeable 

14 witnesses to testify in front of us. 

15 The commission will hear from three panels 

16 of expert witnesses. The first panel consists of 

17 policy and research experts, the second panel will 

18 consist of community stakeholders and advocates, and 

19 the third and final panel consists of law enforcement 

20 and federal officials. 

21 Now, the logistics of it are each panelist 

22 gets seven minutes in which to speak. Now, there's a 

23 system of warning lights there set up so you know how 

24 long you have left, if it turns from green to yellow 

25 that's your signal that you now have two minutes left 
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1 to speak. And, of course, when the light turns red 

2 you are to stop, otherwise SEAL Team Six comes in the 

3 door and escorts you out. 

4 After each presentation, commissioners 

5 will have an opportunity to ask some questions of the 

6 witnesses, and then there will be a 10-minute break 

7 between panels. So, with that, we'll begin the 

8 briefing. 

9 PANEL 1: RESEARCH AND POLICY EXPERTS 

10 COMMISSIONER KIRSANOW: This first 

11 witness, our first witness panel, consists of Dr. 

12 Russell Jeung, who's professor of Asian-American 

13 studies at San Francisco State University, and a co14 founder of Stop AAPI hate. 

15 Second panelist is Charles Lehman who is a 

16 fellow at the Manhattan Institute. Jo-Ann Yoo is next 

17 to him, Executive Director of Asian-American 

18 Federation. Diane Yap, founding member of Friends of 

19 Lowell Foundation and board member of the Lowell 

20 Alumni Association. And John Yang, who is President 

21 and Executive Director of Asian-Americans Advancing 

22 Justice. 

23 And I see we've got Brian Levin here, and 

24 I don't have a bio for you -- sorry about that. 

25 MR. LEVIN: My father wanted me to be a 
11

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1 doctor. 

2 (Laughter.) 

3 COMMISSIONER KIRSANOW: His father wanted 

4 him to be a doctor, and that's why he's been consigned 

5 to being here today. And you are a professor at 

6 California -- I've seen your name before -- California 

7 State University, San Bernardino, Director of the 

8 Center for the Study of Hate and Extremism. 

9 Thank you very much all for appearing and 

10 for testifying today. Dr. Jeung, you may proceed. 

11 PANEL 1: RESEARCH AND POLICY EXPERTS 

12 Dr. JEUNG: Good afternoon, commissioners. 

13 I'd like to thank the Commission on Civil Rights for 

14 hosting this hearing, it's a really important topic. 

15 I'd also like to thank the staff who so professionally 

16 and -- organized this event. Next slide, please. 

17 I'd like to start with an incident that we 

18 received at Stop AAPI Hate that, sadly, is all too 

19 common. As you can see and read, it's not necessarily 

20 an issue of a hate crime but one of racial harassment 

21 where a woman -- customer -- was denied access at her 

22 pharmacy. 

23 The perpetrator, using yellow peril 

24 rhetoric, not only saw her as being a disease25 carrying, threatening person of color, but instead 
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1 stated that she was the infection, that our racialized 

2 bodies themselves were the defiling elements to the 

3 United States. And so, he told her to go home, we 

4 don't want you here. 

5 And you could see the traumatizing result, 

6 this person was in shock, and cried and left, saying 

7 no one came to help. She left isolated, marginalized. 

8 And I think that's the experience of the Asian9 American community at this moment, one of collective 

10 racial trauma. Thanks. Next slide. 

11 So, according to surveys, national surveys 

12 random samples in translated in different languages, 

13 eight to 45 percent of Asian-Americans have faced this 

14 type of racism, this type of harassment, across the 

15 nation. 

16 Since we make up the fastest growing 

17 minority in the United States, these numbers translate 

18 to 2,000,000 to 10,000,000 cases of hate during the 

19 pandemic. So, it clearly is an epidemic of hate, it 

20 clearly is a time of collective racial trauma. Next 

21 slide. 

22 But the racism we're seeing now have 

23 particular sources, Asian-Americans face a sort of a 

24 unique set of factors that lead to racism against us. 

25 Clearly, people were afraid of COVID-19 because of 
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1 the disease, but the political rhetoric and social 

2 media today really did exacerbate the issue. 

3 When politicians used the term Chinese 

4 virus, it really did two things -- it racialized the 

5 virus, so it made it Chinese, and it stigmatized the 

6 people, so Chinese people were the ones carrying the 

7 disease. That association that the Chinese -- that 

8 the virus was Chinese and Chinese had the virus really 

9 did go viral on social media, and that's been 

10 correlated with anti-Asian hate. 

11 The other key factor really fomenting 

12 anti-Asian hate, that maybe other groups don't 

13 experience as much, is that U.S./Asian foreign 

14 relations translates to American race relations for 

15 Asian-Americans. And those who see China as the 

16 country's main threat, then tend to see Asians in the 

17 U.S negatively and that leads to greater anti-Asian 

18 sentiment. 

19 So, we have to get at these factors, we 

20 have to get at these sources if we really want to 

21 uproot the racism. 

22 The impacts have been devastating. Racism 

23 has incurred severe costs in our community. Asian 

24 businesses have lost 60 percent of their income since

25 the start of the pandemic, compared to 12 percent of 
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1 the national average -- five times more. And, because 

2 of this business loss, large swaths of our community 

3 have been unemployed during the pandemic. 

4 Because of the fear of COVID, because 

5 we're seen as the yellow peril, or the dusky peril, 

6 policies have been institutionalized that, actually, 

7 again see us as dangerous outsiders to be banned, to 

8 be excluded. 

9 Individually, these policies may be 

10 unintentionally benign but, taken as a whole, these 

11 policies have really had a chilling effect on our 

12 community, have deprived us of the rights to migrate, 

13 deprived us of the rights to reunite our families, 

14 deprived of the rights to free speech, deprived us 

15 even of freedom of religion on social media. 

16 So, again, this institutionalized policy 

17 have sanctioned greater anti-Asian hate. Next slide.

18 And finally, over 50 studies have 

19 concluded that this trauma -- or, this period has been 

20 really traumatizing. And those of us who experience 

21 direct racism are even more traumatized, leading to de 

22 facto segregation. People are not going out, being 

23 sequestered in certain neighborhoods for fear of 

24 danger. Next slide. 

25 So, to wrap up, I make these suggestions. 
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1 I think we do need to get at the particular sources 

2 of anti-Asian hate, we need to really pay attention to 

3 how U.S foreign relations impacts Asian-Americans. 

4 Next slide. 

5 We have to see this period as not one of 

6 just hate crimes, but really a civil rights issue. 

7 And so, we need to make sure that Asian-Americans and

8 other groups receive public accommodations, that they 

9 have safe access to goods. We have to really ensure 

10 that the COVID-19 Hate Crimes Act is fully 

11 implemented, and that would then promote anti12 harassment campaigns to promote empathy. Next slide.

13 And finally, I think we really need non14 punitive efforts to build racial unity, to educate our 

15 community to create empathy. Education really is key 

16 across the board, Asian-Americans polled --Americans 

17 polled realized that education is the best way to 

18 remedy racism. 

19 But I'm really alarmed at this moment by 

20 the backward movement that is calling on bans of books 

21 that are curbing discussions of race and racism, it's 

22 really impacting teachers and students from having 

23 frank discussions of race. And so, we have to 

24 actually guard the civil rights of our teachers, of 

25 our students, so that they have that freedom of speech 
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1 to address racism. 

2 Now, I'm actually, you know, alarmed -- 

3 I'm a alumnus of Lowell High, and some alumnus at 

4 Lowell High are seeking to file a lawsuit that may 

5 impact other students of color. And I just hope that, 

6 in our efforts, that we would improve the educational 

7 opportunity for everybody, not just a select few. We 

8 can't just gain Asian-American civil rights at the 

9 expense of others. 

10 So, thank you. Again, this period of the 

11 yellow peril is frightening. It's not an Asian12 American issue we're dealing with, it's an American 

13 issue, right? It's Americans who are afraid of COVID, 

14 it's Americans who are afraid for their national 

15 security, it's Americans who are afraid of their 

16 economic standing. 

17 And to the extent that we can address 

18 those fears and create an Asian-American civil rights 

19 agenda, then I think we could expand equal 

20 opportunity, we can expand education for all. Thank 

21 you. 

22 COMMISSIONER KIRSANOW: Thank you, Dr. 

23 Jeung. Mr. Lehman, you have seven minutes. 

24 MR. LEHMAN: Thank you to the Commission 

25 for the opportunity to address you, I am speaking to 
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1 you today in my capacity as an analyst of crime. 

2 With my time I want to make three points. 

3 First, anti-Asian hate crime has risen substantially 

4 thanks to both, the COVID-19 pandemic and to an 

5 increasing criminal offending generally. 

6 This latter is because, second, hate crime 

7 offenders are quite similar to other criminals and 

8 often commit other crimes. 

9 Therefore, third, the best way to combat 

10 hate crime is not by targeting hate, e.g. through 

11 education or content moderation, but to target crime 

12 through aggressive law enforcement. 

13 After decades of decline, anti-Asian hate 

14 crime began rising in 2017 then spiked dramatically in 

15 2020. That year's official count, 279, is a 73 

16 percent increase over 2019. Reported incidents rose 

17 yet again in 2021 a cumulative 89 percent increase 

18 over 2019. 

19 This last finding is particularly 

20 remarkable, given the reported counts of many other 

21 categories of hate crimes fell in 2021 when thousands 

22 of agencies did not report hate crimes because of the 

23 FBI's transition to a new reporting system. The 

24 measured increase in anti-Asian offending is therefore 

25 biased downwards, the true number is probably much 
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1 higher. 

2 Further support for this trend comes in 

3 data from New York, Los Angeles, and Chicago, 

4 collectively home to roughly 10 percent of the U.S. 

5 Asian population -- Anti-Asian hate crimes have 

6 increased in all three cities. 

7 At least in these cities, though, there 

8 have been two waves of crime, but Los Angeles and New 

9 York incidents spiked in the second quarter of 2020, 

10 around the time the coronavirus began spreading in the 

11 United States. Then fell before spiking again in 

12 early 2021 when they also began rising in Chicago, a 

13 similar pattern appears in data from San Francisco. 

14 This suggests that the increase in anti15 Asian hate crime is not as simple as the coronavirus 

16 crisis starting a new wave of anti-Asian racism. If 

17 it were, one would expect incidents to have risen 

18 continuously from Q2 2020 onwards. 

19 Most importantly, 2021 -- so not only an 

20 increase in anti-Asian racism but also increased crime 

21 among individuals most likely to convert that racism 

22 into criminal behavior. Homicides rose nearly 30 

23 percent in 2020, another five percent in 2021, a 

24 similar trend obtains for shootings. 

25 And, in many jurisdictions, including the 
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1 ones previously mentioned, other kinds of crime have 

2 risen as well. As social control has ebbed, in other 

3 words, criminal offenders of all types have been more 

4 prone to acting out. 

5 This implies, though, that hate crime 

6 offenders are like other criminals as opposed to being 

7 specialists in hate crime. The data bear this out, 

8 one survey of convicted hate crime offenders found 

9 that 87 percent had a prior conviction, including 60 

10 percent with violent conviction. 

11 Another survey of UK offenders found that 

12 97.7 percent of hate offenders had prior arrests, 

13 including 87 percent who had committed crime of 

14 violence. Data on arrest records from New York also 

15 suggests a similarity between hate criminals and non16 hate criminals. 

17 While hate crime offenders vary 

18 demographically from others, they look essentially 

19 indistinguishable on measures of criminality, 

20 including whether they have previously been convicted, 

21 whether they have an open case, whether they were 

22 rearrested following release on bail. 

23 What about those who commit anti-Asian 

24 hate crimes, high profile incidents suggest that prior 

25 criminality is not uncommon. Antoine Watson, who 
20

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1 murdered 84-year-old Vicha Ratanapakdee, one of the 

2 earliest anti-Asian offenses in 2020, was in the 

3 process of vandalizing another car when he assaulted 

4 Ratanapakdee -- he'd been cited for reckless driving 

5 earlier that day. 

6 Haskell Allen, who allegedly assaulted an 

7 83-year-old Asian man in 2021, was on probation when 

8 he committed his offense. 

9 The reason for this phenomenon is 

10 intuitive, while many people hold bigoted views most 

11 will not convert them into criminal acts. To do so 

12 requires some other disinhibition, that sort of 

13 disinhibition also leads to committing other crimes. 

14 To put it graphically, a hate crime 

15 offender who is someone who thinks it's both, a good 

16 idea to brutalize someone on the street and to scream 

17 racial slurs while doing so. That some other 

18 criminals do not yell racial slurs while they 

19 brutalize people does not mean that they do not share 

20 key characteristics with hate crime offenders. 

21 The consequence of this insight is simple, 

22 to combat hate crime focuses on crime. The wrong 

23 policy is to focus on reducing bias through education 

24 or social media content moderation. Such approaches 

25 are not only ineffective on their own terms, a large 
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1 research literature casts doubt on educational 

2 interventions efficacy, but inefficient because they 

3 poorly target the small subset of the biased 

4 population that will actually criminally offend. 

5 The marginal student or social media 

6 commenter is not likely to become a hate criminal, 

7 spending resources on him is a bad bet on crime 

8 control dollar-for-dollar. Rather, the Criminal 

9 Justice System, including the Federal Criminal Justice 

10 System, is well equipped to combat hate crime as 

11 crime. Multiple statutes, especially the 2009 Hate 

12 Crime Preventions Act -- Hate Crimes Prevention Act --

13 permit the federalization of many bias-related 

14 offenses. 

15 Yet, recent data suggests DOJ has been 

16 slow to use these powers. It investigated only about 

17 120 hate crimes per year from 2015 to 2019, declining 

18 to prosecute in 77 percent of cases -- just 82 

19 defendants faced charges. 

20 Rates have increased in recent years as 

21 Justice charged more than 40 people, and obtained 35 

22 convictions, between January 2021 and May 2022. 

23 Still, the relatively low numbers suggest the 

24 Department could be doing more, including coordinating 

25 more closely with state and federal task forces. 
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1 In addition to directly prosecuting hate 

2 crimes, Department of Justice every year issues tens 

3 of millions of dollars to anti-hate crime grants. 

4 While these are substantial amounts, they don't go 

5 that far. Fiscal year 2022 -- covered just 22 awards, 

6 compared to roughly 2,300 state prosecutors offices. 

7 Many offices do not have specialists to focus on hate 

8 crime prosecutions. 

9 The challenge inherent in prosecuting bias 

10 motivated crime means the federal government could 

11 allocate more funding to, at least, coordinating 

12 between offices and articulating best practices, to 

13 increase the often shockingly low rate of convictions.

14 Another approach is to increase police 

15 hiring, a proven tool for reducing crimes of all 

16 sorts. Across a variety of measures, police to 

17 population ratios have declined steadily since the 

18 Great Recession. DOJ's main hiring grant office is 

19 authorized to spend $386,000,000 in fiscal 2021, 

20 including $156,000,000 for its primary program. It's 

21 a dramatic decline from the $1.4 billion dollars a 

22 year it was given the five years after its 

23 authorization. 

24 Lastly, many particularly heinous hate 

25 crimes are, under federal law, eligible for capital 
23

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1 punishment, including high-profile hate crimes like 

2 the Emanuel AME church shooting and the Buffalo Tops 

3 Market shooting. Light of this, the Biden 

4 Administration's ongoing death penalty moratorium 

5 poses a serious challenge to the orderly proceeding of 

6 justice. 

7 When discussing crime we too often insist 

8 on reducing it -- that to reduce it we must first end 

9 poverty, addiction, despair, other root causes. The 

10 same is often true for hate crime, to reduce it many 

11 insists that we need to weed out hatred in hearts and 

12 minds. 

13 Reality, hate crime offenders are like 

14 other criminals, which means that hate crime offending 

15 should be responsive to the traditional tools of crime 

16 control. Smart policing and prosecution should be the 

17 front line defense in blunting the spike in anti-Asian 

18 hate crime, the federal government is well positioned 

19 to enact this agenda, to do so. 

20 Thank you, and I look forward to your 

21 questions. 

22 COMMISSIONER KIRSANOW: Thank you, Mr. 

23 Lehman. Ms. Yoo? 

24 MS. YOO: Commissioners, I apologize in 

25 advance as this has been a very triggering and 
24

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1 emotional three years for me. 

2 My name is Jo-Ann Yoo, and I serve as the 

3 Executive Director of the Asian American Federation in 

4 New York. We're the strongest leadership organization 

5 serving Asian Americans working in collaboration with 

6 70 member and partner agencies who are deeply embedded 

7 in our communities and operate under the larger 

8 umbrella of human services. We are best positioned to 

9 address community issues across different Asian 

10 ethnicities to quickly and efficiently tackle emerging 

11 challenges like the anti-Asian hate. 

12 Today I am here to represent the victims 

13 of anti-Asian violence in New York because they 

14 deserve to be named, to be recognized, and honored. My 

15 organization raised and sub granted more than $3 

16 million to 33 Asian-serving members and partner 

17 agencies to implement our Hope Against Hate campaign. 

18 In our first year of the campaign, we distributed 

19 over 50,000 safety resources and supported nearly 

20 10,000 individuals with safety trainings, helped with 

21 reporting incidents, and connecting connections 

22 through victim services. 

23 In January 2020, the first warning signs 

24 of the brewing storm came from the Asian small 

25 businesses which reported a significant drop off in 
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1 customer traffic due to news of the COVID outbreak in 

2 China. In response, we immediately began working with

3 elected officials to develop response strategies aimed 

4 at keeping Asian Americans -- Asian New Yorkers safe. 

5 By February, we started to receive reports 

6 of anti-Asian violence through our members, partners, 

7 and personal contacts. The stories I heard from

8 strangers who called or emailed me at all hours of the 

9 day and night are beyond heartbreaking, and I want you 

10 to hear some of their stories. 

11 I'm going to tell you about the frontline 

12 healthcare workers who kept us alive during the height 

13 of COVID, who talked about having to consider early 

14 retirement because they were afraid of being 

15 physically attacked going to and from work. 

16 Or how about the 90-year-old grandmother 

17 who was out for an evening walk in a Brooklyn 

18 neighborhood, and she was set on fire by two 

19 teenagers. She was too scared to tell anybody 

20 including her own family. And the hundreds of small 

21 business owners who were afraid for themselves, their 

22 families, their employees, and their customers, and 

23 consulted with us to implement safety protocols. 

24 Let me tell you about Noel, one of the 

25 most gentle people I have ever met who was slashed 
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1 from ear to ear as he was going to work in the morning 

2 and required over 100 stitches to close the gaping 

3 wound, scars that are still healing two years later, 

4 not to mention his mental and emotional trauma. He 

5 has chosen to forgo plastic surgery as a reminder that 

6 hate violence continues to plague our community. 

7 Velma was on her way to mass on Palm 

8 Sunday when she was knocked to the ground and kicked 

9 in the face and pelvis by an assailant who yelled, 

10 “you don't belong here,” in a country where she has 

11 lived for decades. 

12 And on March 3rd, just a few weeks ago, 

13 Cecile and her son, Kyle, were returning from family 

14 lunch when they were repeatedly called racial slurs 

15 and beaten in their own neighborhood. Cecile was 

16 punched repeatedly until she lost consciousness. Her 

17 son, who has served our country as a Marine, sustained 

18 skull fractures trying to protect his mother and will 

19 deal with long-term impacts from his injuries. 

20 And then there's my story. I was walking 

21 to visit my local small businesses when a man decided 

22 to block my path and refused to let me pass. I'm a 

23 person with tremendous privilege. I work closely with 

24 the Attorney General's office, the mayor, the 

25 governor, and other elected leaders, but my privilege 
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1 did not protect me from potential harm in my own 

2 neighborhood. 

3 These are the real-life -- real-life 

4 stories of Americans living through this horror right 

5 now. This is our daily reality -- our daily reality. 

6 The pain and trauma of Asian New Yorkers 

7 has motivated the Asian American Federation to launch 

8 the Hope Against Hate Campaign in 2021, which is an 

9 expansive response network of Asian nonprofits working 

10 together to provide safety programming and services. 

11 Together, we connect victims to legal, financial, and 

12 mental health support as well as equip vulnerable 

13 women, children, and young people with safety measures 

14 to prevent attacks from happening in the first place. 

15 If you think you are strong, I invite you 

16 to come and watch 80-year-old grandmothers, some with 

17 canes, learn self-defense techniques to keep 

18 themselves safe from attacks because it will break you 

19 as it has broken me many times. 

20 In April 2020, we launched a reporting 

21 platform in eight Asian languages to make it easier 

22 for victims to report incidents and seek help in their 

23 native languages. In the first six months of the 

24 COVID lockdown, the Federation worked with our members 

25 and partners to track victim reports, some of which 
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1 totaled over 400 in the largest Asian neighborhoods in 

2 New York City. 

3 At the Federation, we have taken on the 

4 responsibility on behalf of our communities to 

5 publicly honor victims of anti-Asian hate with the 

6 singular purpose of sharing their stories because if 

7 we don't, who will speak for the victims? 

8 I am grateful for this opportunity to 

9 speak and give voice to the urgent needs of Asian 

10 Americans who continue to experience anti-Asian 

11 assault on a daily basis more than three years since 

12 the first COVID-related attack. 

13 Concrete actions must begin today if we 

14 aim to prevent more attacks from occurring again. We 

15 urge the following: one, investing in the 

16 strengthening and expansion of local networks so 

17 victims have ready access to community-based places 

18 where they can report attacks, receive support 

19 services, and take safety trainings and workshops in 

20 their own languages. We need system changes to 

21 correctly label and track violence for every category 

22 including religious identification. 

23 For instance, the highest rate of anti24 Sikh attacks are in New York State, but there doesn't 

25 exist a category to track an attack as anti-Sikh, so 
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1 those numbers are ignored. Our partner organization, 

2 the Sikh Coalition, reports that there has been a rise 

3 in attacks against Sikhs because the men wear turbans 

4 making them a visible target for hate violence. 

5 Over 50 percent of Asian New Yorkers have 

6 limited English proficiency. I have heard from 

7 seniors tell me that they try to report a hate attack 

8 only to be turned away because there was no police 

9 officer could take a report in the language the victim 

10 spoke. We must invest in language services and 

11 resources. 

12 Disturbingly, the media gaze has moved on 

13 from anti-Asian hate and the investments have also 

14 waned. Despite these realities, incidents of violence

15 have not stopped. We cannot let this racist, violent 

16 pattern of behavior become the norm. We need a new 

17 normal that recognizes the Asian American community as 

18 being integral to this country's identity. 

19 Our community has yet to see any solutions

20 that we in the front lines have proposed. Statements 

21 of solidarity matter only if they are backed up with 

22 concrete action. Our leaders can and must do more. 

23 In the meantime, we continue with our 

24 work, which remains necessary as one of the only few 

25 resources for the victims. As I have sat with the 
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1 victims, held their hands, and cried with them, I have 

2 asked all of them what does justice look like for you? 

3 And today I want to ask this Commission this same 

4 question. What does justice look like for us Asian 

5 Americans? Thank you. 

6 COMMISSIONER KIRSANOW: Thank you, Ms. 

7 Yoo. Ms. Yap, you have seven minutes. 

8 MS. YAP: Good afternoon. My name is 

9 Diane Yap, and I was born and raised in San Francisco. 

10 Unfortunately, my city has changed over the years 

11 into one where Asian seniors are afraid to leave their 

12 own homes. There's been a surge of violent and often 

13 fatal attacks against Asians. 

14 Just a few examples: 70-year-old Mrs. Ren 

15 was shoved to the floor, beaten, kicked in the head by 

16 three teens and an 11-year-old; two elderly women were 

17 stabbed with a machete while waiting for a bus; a 15-

18 year-old boy was stabbed in the neck on the bus by a 

19 12-year-old boy. However, none of these brutal 

20 attacks have been classified as hate crimes. 

21 Hate crimes, while certainly on the rise, 

22 are a small fraction of the violence faced by Asians 

23 in this country. According to the Department of 

24 Justice's 2021 Criminal Victimization Report, Asians 

25 were the victims in nearly 170,000 violent incidents, 
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1 while the number of anti-Asian hate crimes in 2021 was 

2 just 305. 

3 This is not to minimize the impact of hate 

4 crimes victimization but to put the scope of the 

5 problem into proper context. The danger in 

6 restricting our analysis to just hate crimes is that 

7 we misdiagnose the cause. 

8 Who is responsible for these attacks 

9 against Asians? It appears the attacks against Asians 

10 only stirred interest on Capitol Hill once there was a 

11 way to blame conservatives or white supremacy like 

12 that oft-repeated statistic that 75 percent of anti13 Asian hate crimes are perpetrated by White people. 

14 Diving into the source material reveals 

15 it's based on incidents from 4,337 news articles about 

16 coronavirus-related anti-Asian racism in the United 

17 States. Of these, there were just 16 incidents with 

18 physical contact where the race of the perpetrator was 

19 known. Of those 16, 12 had White perpetrators, hence 

20 75 percent. By comparison, the same study included 55 

21 tweets from Donald Trump alone. Yet, a tweet never 

22 put Grandma in the hospital. 

23 The urgent issue of violence against 

24 Asians predates COVID. The 2018 Criminal 

25 Victimization Report by the Bureau of Justice 
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1 Statistics shows violent incidents by race of victim 

2 and offender. The largest share, 27.5 percent, are 

3 perpetrated by Black offenders, while Asians commit 

4 just 0.1 percent of such attacks against Black 

5 victims. If all those living nearby were equally 

6 likely to attack Asians, Blacks are attacking Asians 

7 at more than three times the expected rate as the 

8 average Asian lives in a neighborhood that's just 8 

9 percent Black. 

10 On the other hand, White and Hispanic 

11 people are attacking Asians at about half the expected 

12 rate. This is not new. A 2008 analysis on physical 

13 assault crimes in San Francisco showed that in 85 

14 percent of cases, the victim was Asian, and the 

15 perpetrators were African American. 

16 Sadly, government policymakers and media 

17 outlets do not want to acknowledge that Black-on-Asian 

18 violence is a problem. And racial resentment is at 

19 the root of the problem. 

20 This resentment is well explained by the 

21 middleman minority concept. Immigrants who occupy a 

22 lower-barrier niche in the economy, like retail, and 

23 via punishing work schedules and self-sacrifice ascend 

24 from poverty to prosperity often within one 

25 generation. Middleman minorities have faced violence 
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1 throughout history because native populations of lower 

2 status feel entitled to the same outcomes. 

3 Today's expectation of equal outcomes can 

4 be summarized by one word, equity. The repetition of 

5 this term in policy discussions implies that all 

6 outcomes should be doled out proportionately amongst 

7 different racial groups regardless of relevant factors 

8 such as behavior. But we should expect proportionate 

9 outcomes only if these are assigned at random. But 

10 police don't arrest people at random. Courts don't 

11 imprison people at random. The government does not 

12 randomly force anyone to drop out of high school, nor 

13 does it randomly assign anyone to a life of poverty. 

14 All of these outcomes depend largely on 

15 behavior and individual choices. When you are 

16 repeatedly told that outcomes are unfair because they 

17 are racially disproportionate, it is natural to resent 

18 the beneficiaries of this imagined unfairness. 

19 Unfortunately, such a mindset breeds racial 

20 resentment, and thus, anti-Asian hate. 

21 While the focus of this hearing is anti22 Asian hate crimes, any given Asian individual in the 

23 U.S., out of a total population of about 18 million, 

24 is statistically unlikely to be the victim of a hate 

25 crime. On the other hand, anti-Asian discrimination 
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1 in education figures prominently in the life of every 

2 Asian American. 

3 When I was 12, I saw my friend sobbing at 

4 school after acceptance letters to Lowell High 

5 arrived. She missed the cutoff score for Chinese 

6 students by just one point. If she had been any other 

7 race, she would have gotten in. 

8 Selective high schools like Lowell High in 

9 San Francisco, the screened schools of New York City, 

10 and number one ranked Thomas Jefferson in Virginia are 

11 all fighting misguided attempts to make their student 

12 bodies match area demographics, equity. All of these 

13 attempts involve degrading or eliminating the 

14 consideration of academic proficiency in admissions. 

15 Asians bear the brunt of these unconstitutional 

16 attempts at racial balancing. 

17 Even at Harvard, an Asian applicant with a 

18 25 percent chance of getting in would have a 95 

19 percent chance if he were only able to check the 

20 African American box instead. Nothing else about him 

21 would have to change. 

22 The role of the government is not and 

23 should not be to put the thumb on the scale in order 

24 to produce racially proportionate outcomes. The goal 

25 should not be equal outcomes or equity but rather 
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1 equal opportunity. The government's role is to ensure 

2 that no one faces discrimination on the basis of race. 

3 On the matter of hate crimes, that means 

4 better crime prevention generally in the form of 

5 increased police presence, surveillance of hotspots, 

6 predictive policing, and especially imprisonment of 

7 repeat offenders. 

8 On the issue of affirmative action, that 

9 means recognizing that such policies discriminate 

10 against Asians in favor of objectively less qualified 

11 applicants. If you believe that underrepresented 

12 groups deserve special help, then you also believe 

13 that there are overrepresented groups that deserve to 

14 be discriminated against. These are inextricably 

15 linked, and the latter is clearly unconstitutional. 

16 If the Supreme Court bans race-based 

17 affirmative action, it is the duty of the government 

18 to enforce the ban as vigorously as it once enforced 

19 Brown v. Board of Education. 

20 Thank you. I yield my time. 

21 COMMISSIONER KIRSANOW: Thank you, Ms. 

22 Yap. Mr. Yang. 

23 MR. YANG: Thank you. Thank you to the 

24 Commission for holding this important hearing. 

25 My name is John Yang. I'm the President 
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1 and Executive Director of Asian Americans Advancing 

2 Justice, AAJC. 

3 Professor Jeung has laid out some of the 

4 root causes of anti-Asian hate and its impact, and Jo5 Ann has contextualized this with the life experiences 

6 that we all feel every single day. 

7 I want to talk about how the government 

8 could move forward by focusing on solutions, on 

9 language, on education, and on community. 

10 First, on language. Professor Jeung 

11 illustrated whenever the United States has an economic 

12 or national security concern, Americans of Asian 

13 descent have faced a backlash. To be clear, I am not 

14 saying that these threats are not real. We do have 

15 real geopolitical tension with the Chinese Communist 

16 Party and authoritarian government, whether it's a 

17 Xinjiang Muslim minority in Xinjiang, whether it's 

18 democracy in Hong Kong, whether it is free speech with 

19 respect to Chinese citizens. But even as we talk 

20 about these issues, we must be careful to use a proper 

21 nuance and exercise responsibility in our language. 

22 We must affirmatively emphasize that Asian 

23 Americans are Americans and contribute to our economy, 

24 our well-being, our liberty, and our prosperity. We 

25 must be careful to distinguish between the Chinese 
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1 governmental action on the one hand and Chinese and 

2 Asian Americans and the society on the other. 

3 When federal officials suggest that this 

4 is an all of society problem or that all Chinese 

5 students or scholars or scientists are suspected of 

6 being spies for the Chinese government, this creates a 

7 suspect class where Chinese Americans and Asian 

8 Americans are deemed to be spies in the minds of all 

9 Americans. References to Asian Americans as being 

10 sneaky, cunning, untrustworthy feed on stereotypes 

11 that lead to this hate that we are talking about. We 

12 would encourage all relevant federal agencies to work 

13 with all stakeholders, develop best practices for 

14 language. 

15 In talking about language, I would also 

16 emphasize the need for language access. One-third of 

17 the Asian American community is limited English 

18 proficient. And that means that if material is 

19 presented only in English, we will not be able to 

20 access it and use it. 

21 Toward that end, this Commission in May of 

22 2020 said that Asian Americans must always -- for this 

23 Commission, the federal government must always take 

24 into account the critical requirement to provide 

25 language access for limited English populations. I 
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1 would note that the media advisory agenda for this 

2 hearing was done in Chinese and Vietnamese. 

3 Under Executive Order 13166, federal 

4 agencies and entities receiving federal funding are 

5 required to provide meaningful access to Asian social 

6 services in limited English proficient individuals. 

7 In practice, we have found that significant gaps in 

8 these resources and for our LEP populations that are 

9 underserved. I would urge federal agencies to review

10 their compliance with Title VI in Executive Order 

11 13166. 

12 Second, let me talk about education. To 

13 dispel the myth of the perpetual foreigner or the 

14 model minority, we need to ensure that education is 

15 inclusive of all marginalized communities including

16 the Asian American community. This is a root cause 

17 that we must address. 

18 This includes ensuring expeditious funding 

19 and work on the creation of a national museum for 

20 Asian-Pacific American history and culture. This 

21 includes Asian-Pacific American history in K through 

22 12 education. This is part of a larger effort that 

23 all of us share, that all of us need to address 

24 together to tell a full account of American history 

25 that is inclusive of Asian-Pacific Americans, African 
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1 Americans, Native Americans, Hispanic Americans, and 

2 LGBTQ Americans. All of these communities have too 

3 often been ignored in history books, left out of 

4 social studies, and these communities' authors have 

5 been silenced, ignored, or banned. 

6 Also, on the subject of education, I 

7 respect my colleagues including friends like Lee 

8 Cheng, who will testify later, on whom I differ on 

9 subjects such as magnet schools and affirmative 

10 action. But in our assessment, these are not examples 

11 of anti-Asian racism, which is the subject of today's 

12 hearing. These policies are designed to create 

13 greater opportunities for bright and meritorious 

14 students who do not have equitable resources and who 

15 are often overlooked. It is recognition that the 

16 merits of a student exclude so much more and extend 

17 beyond test scores and grades. Indeed, many Asian 

18 Americans and Asian-Pacific Americans have benefitted 

19 from these policies. 

20 On affirmative action, there's one 

21 important thing to recognize. It is that Asian 

22 Americans support affirmative action. Polling has 

23 demonstrated this time and again. But more 

24 importantly, affirmative action is not about quotas. 

25 It is not about lowering the bars to admissions. 
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1 Rather, it is simple recognition that race still 

2 matters in our country, and a student must be able to 

3 express their full story including their story about 

4 their own race. 

5 Again, any discussion about college 

6 admissions must be holistic. 20 to 30 percent of 

7 college admissions for prestigious universities are 

8 based on relatives to alumni; relatives to staff; are 

9 based on sports scholarships; and the so-called 

10 President's List, which consists of donors and what 

11 are considered notable figures. We are contorting the 

12 discussion if we only focus on affirmative action. 

13 Lastly, I would want to touch on community 

14 and how the federal government can make itself more 

15 accessible to our community. 

16 Legislation such as the COVID-19 Hate 

17 Crimes Act, the Jabara-Heyer NO HATE Act, has been 

18 helpful to many in our community. It's provided 

19 grants to our community groups fighting hate. It 

20 includes innovative models like restorative justice 

21 that many communities embrace. It recognizes that 

22 reporting hate should happen not only through law 

23 enforcement but health services. Those are examples 

24 of where the federal government is making a difference 

25 and responding. 
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1 I know that Manjusha Kulkarni will dive 

2 into more deeply the subject of data and the work of 

3 Stop AAPI Hate that has been wonderful for 

4 contributing to our community. 

5 One thing I do want to emphasize -- and 

6 respectfully referring to the prior speaker -- one 

7 thing I want to make clear is the narrative cannot be 

8 about African American on Asian hate. That is why 

9 these statistics are important. And I understand we 

10 have disagreements about them, but the statistics 

11 consistently show that African Americans are not 

12 overrepresented in hate incidents against the Asian 

13 American community. And this is important because 

14 this is creating a division, a divisiveness, that is 

15 unnecessary within all of our communities. 

16 While the COVID-19 Hate Crimes Act does 

17 provide examples of where the federal government can 

18 help, federal government can do more. 

19 With respect to grants, the grantmaking 

20 process is often opaque and cumbersome, especially for 

21 communities that really struggle and would benefit 

22 most from the money. Without focused outreach and 

23 local touchpoints, federal government will not be 

24 trusted and will not be used by our community. 

25 Sustained commitment to engagement in culturally and 
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1 linguistically sensitive manners is critical. 

2 Look, there is much work to be done, and I 

3 am hopeful that a report by this Commission 

4 highlighting these issues will spur not only federal 

5 agencies to take greater action but for all 

6 policymakers to do so as well. 

7 Thank you very much, and I look forward to 

8 your questions. 

9 COMMISSIONER KIRSANOW: Thank you, Mr. 

10 Yang. Mr. Levin. 

11 MR. LEVIN: Commissioners, thank you so 

12 much for having me today. 

13 There was a great American who said the 

14 following, “If you have the feeling that something is 

15 wrong, don't be afraid to speak up.” He further said, 

16 “Every day in school we said the pledge to the flag, 

17 ‘with liberty and justice for all,’ and I believed all 

18 that.” That's Fred Korematsu. Okay? 

19 It's time that we set the record straight 

20 for our Asian American brothers and sisters and also 

21 set the record straight on incorrect information that 

22 has just come up today before this panel. But let me 

23 just introduce myself to you. 

24 I'm the son of a felon. My father lied 

25 about his age as a teenager to go to Europe to fight 
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1 the Nazis and was captured as a teenager 78 years ago 

2 and was one step away from death. The rest of my 

3 resume doesn't matter, but you can look it up if you 

4 like. And I’m in the New York Times today. 

5 Thank you so much for your long-standing 

6 work. The year that they barred nine Black students 

7 from Little Rock High was when you got your marching 

8 orders to make America what it aspires to be. And 

9 what an honor to be here with all of you and thank you 

10 all. 

11 I've been doing this for over 36 years, 

12 and my research has been used in the promulgation of 

13 every major federal hate crime law, including the Hate 

14 Crime Statistics Act. So let me just -- I'm throwing 

15 this out because I’ve got to set the record straight 

16 here. 

17 First of all, your data's wrong. The FBI 

18 just updated its data. It's not 305, it's 746, and 

19 that doesn't include Pacific Islanders. 

20 If we could go to some slides. I'm just 

21 going to get straight to it. 

22 This is the increase in reported hate 

23 crime. Okay? By the way, if you look at Bureau of 

24 Justice Statistics, no, it's not the same as violent 

25 crime overall. In fact, violent hate crimes have 
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1 risen more over the last decade that than overall 

2 crime in their research. 

3 If we could go to the next slide real 

4 quick because I don't have a lot of time. 

5 If you look at the bottom, look at that 

6 explosion in 2020. Those months, from June forward, 

7 were worse than any month in the previous decade. 

8 Let's go forward again. We don't have a 

9 lot of time. 

10 This is the latest data. By the way, I'm 

11 sure someone's going to twist it. Okay? This is '20 

12 to '21 where we saw a record. We saw a record in 

13 anti-Asian violence. And this is FBI. 

14 By the way, FBI's also wrong. Okay, they 

15 said there was 11.6 percent increase. It was a 31 

16 percent increase in '21. Just use their top-line 

17 numbers because what they did is they kind of compared 

18 like the DOW Industrials to the Russell 5000. And you 

19 can't do that. So let's move forward. 

20 This is anti-Asian hate crime in the 

21 United States. We have had an invisible record 

22 because we have had instances where the FBI has had to 

23 supplement its data for the last two years. 

24 By the way, the people who are in charge 

25 of that program -- very nice people -- and I asked 
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1 them to supplement it. So I'm not trying to sound 

2 angry. But they have to deal -- like a professor has 

3 to deal with students -- they have to deal with 18,000 

4 police agencies that don't turn in their homework on 

5 time. 

6 And let me just tell you about the data. 

7 Let's look at this because we found, in our latest 

8 multi-city study, which is very accurate, we showed an 

9 overall 29 percent increase in 2021. FBI showed 31. 

10 73 percent rise in anti-Asian hate crime in 2020, and 

11 167 percent in 2021. 

12 In the cities, it was even more. FBI, 

13 2022 data we don't know yet , but we had a 35 percent 

14 decline in the major cities in anti-Asian hate crime. 

15 Guess what? That would still be a record if it

16 wasn't for 2021. 

17 So we're talking about like oh, wow, well, 

18 we had a slightly better Category 5 tornado or 

19 hurricane. And what I'm afraid is people are going to 

20 use that number and say oh, whoa, problem solved. 

21 If we could move forward with the slides, 

22 please. Again, we saw records in 2020 -- I'm sorry -

23 -we saw record months in 2020. And by the way, yes, 

24 you see how it went down? Guess what? If you were to 

25 look at the first quarter of 2021, after the 
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1 insurrection -- and yes, it was an insurrection -- 

2 when we had a shift to debates about vaccines, and we 

3 saw an increase in hospitalizations, we saw more anti4 Asian hate crimes just in New York City alone than --

5 there was about a quarter, I think, of the increase in 

6 the whole country. So we saw quite a bit. 

7 By the way, is all data limited? Yes. I 

8 don't have the time to go into all the limitations. 

9 Now, with respect to hate crime being just like all 

10 crime, you can't cherry-pick homicides. That's like 

11 less -- it's a fraction of 1 percent. Okay? 

12 All the major research, whether it's Nolan 

13 and Bennett in 2006 or McDevitt, there are different 

14 types of offenders, and you can't treat them all the 

15 same. Okay? 

16 In New York City, in the first half of 

17 2021, just 49 percent of hate offenders were listed as 

18 emotionally disturbed persons. And as was the only 

19 person on the panel who actually arrested people in 

20 New York, let me tell you, that's something where 

21 there's a mental health issue that is apparent when 

22 you label someone an EDP. 

23 If we could just go forward again. 

24 No, we do need education. Look at this. 

25 In 2020 -- by the way, do you see how that went down? 
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1 Guess what? That shot up more in 2021. And why 

2 don't I have it? Because the FBI hasn't given us data 

3 that we can disaggregate this year. They've given us 

4 a little bit of data but not that we can disaggregate. 

5 That chart line would pop through the ceiling. 

6 So there's a seasonality with respect to 

7 hate crime and anti-Asian hate crime. And what I'm 

8 concerned about is if you look at correlations with 

9 victimization surveys, if you look to increases with 

10 respect to online hate, let me tell you something, the 

11 best professor in the Cal State system is here with 

12 you today, and he sits at the other end of the table. 

13 His data is correct. And his conclusions are 

14 correct. 

15 The toxic social media landscape -- and 

16 when we saw a Congress person, secretary of state use 

17 stigmatizing language against Asians, and then a week 

18 later we saw the President, guess what? Within days 

19 anti-Asian hate crime on a day-to-day tick peaked. We 

20 do this -- I've been doing this for decades. 

21 Hate crimes are not like all types of

22 criminality. There's a printed circuit of stereotypes 

23 that Dr. Robin Williams of Cornell said label certain 

24 individuals as legitimate targets of aggression, and 

25 there are certain circumstances where people who would 
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1 otherwise not be criminals and not offend do offend, 

2 like probably that person who sprayed Lysol all over 

3 that poor woman. 

4 And I don't understand how we can sit here 

5 today and make this a debate about affirmative action 

6 when we heard the testimony of Jo-Ann Yoo. And I'll 

7 tell you something. Every time I go -- and I'm going 

8 to shut up right now. Just give me one second here. 

9 I came from California. Just give me one second. 

10 Every time I go to panels and this and

11 that, there are people from the Asian American 

12 community that come up to me and say oh, my 

13 octogenarian parents were attacked twice in six 

14 months. Or someone else who's an attorney says my car 

15 was attacked. 

16 We have to stop this, and we have to focus 

17 on education. And yeah, for people who murder Asian 

18 Americans, let them spend the rest of their lives in 

19 jail, but that's less than 1 percent of all offenders.

20 I want to thank you so much for this 

21 privilege today and thank you for what you're doing to 

22 make this country better for all our brothers and 

23 sisters and especially our Asian American brothers and 

24 sisters who I care about so very much. 

25 Thank you so much. 
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1 COMMISSIONER KIRSANOW: Thank you, Mr. 

2 Levin. And thanks to all the panelists. 

3 I'm going to open it up for questions, and 

4 I'll exercise the privilege of the Chair and just ask 

5 if any panelist wants to respond to any other 

6 panelist. 

7 MR. LEVIN: Yeah. The majority of the 

8 anti-Asian hate crime offenders in the United States, 

9 according to the FBI, are White. 

10 One other quick thing. The top 50 cities 

11 -- and we get most of the hard data, the high 

12 reporting is from cities. Okay? They have different 

13 demographics. 

14 So I heard the same thing with regard to, 

15 like, a tweet that went viral about anti-Semitic 

16 attacks. Guess what? It's about 1 percent more, 

17 about 14 percent -- something like that -- Black 

18 offenders on Jews nationally. 

19 But when you have people living right next 

20 door to each other -- right -- you're going to have a 

21 different type of offender mix, and of course, someone 

22 will exaggerate that and not use the overall data that 

23 is available. Thank you so much. 

24 COMMISSIONER KIRSANOW: Yes, Ms. Yap. 

25 MS. YAP: I would like to respond to Mr. 
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1 Levin. 

2 Because you've brought up proximity, that 

3 is why I did include statistics about both directions 

4 of offending because when you live close to somebody, 

5 they also live close to you. So if it's a matter of 

6 proximity, then the rate of violence should be pretty 

7 similar. 

8 I also did analysis on the neighborhood

9 that the average Asian person lives in and like what 

10 percent of each race they live in -- their neighbors 

11 are, so I do believe that's been addressed. 

12 MR. LEVIN: That's still wrong. 

13 COMMISSIONER KIRSANOW: Mr. Jeung. 

14 MR. JEUNG: I'd like to really distinguish 

15 between hate incidents, which make up the great 

16 majority of our cases, and hate crimes, which make up 

17 a small fraction. We really need to address what the 

18 majority of Asian Americans are experiencing, what 

19 we're experiencing trauma from are just regular 

20 microaggressions of verbal harassment. But they're 

21 not micro in their impact. Right? 

22 We're getting shunned. We're getting spat 

23 upon. We're facing 8 percent of Stop AAPI Hate cases 

24 are civil rights violations. So you have to address 

25 the breadth of racism that Asian Americans are 
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1 experiencing if we want to, again, serve our 

2 communities. 

3 So to focus solely on hate crimes, I 

4 think, does a disservice, doesn't get to the roots of 

5 the issue. And again, the hate incidents that can, 

6 then, rise to the level of assault, and so that's why 

7 we need to get at the breadth of incidence. 

8 I think the other danger is conflating the 

9 crime that Asian Americans experience and then 

10 conflating that as any experience of crime is a hate 

11 crime. 

12 So I think Ms. Yap is correct that those 

13 of us living in low-income maybe high-crime areas are 

14 victims of crime at high rates, but everybody in the 

15 community are victims of crime in those communities. 

16 So it's not necessarily Black on Asian crimes. The 

17 Black and African American community, they're also 

18 victims of crime in those neighborhoods. 

19 So you have to be careful on focusing on 

20 race crimes but instead -- like Ms. Yap just said -- 

21 look at the communities where there are high crime 

22 rates and distinguish them from the hate crimes that 

23 other people are experiencing. 

24 MR. LEVIN: Could I just respond to him 

25 for a second? 
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1 COMMISSIONER KIRSANOW: Sure. Go ahead. 

2 MR. LEVIN: He's totally right. And one 

3 of things that we like to do is take that crime data -

4 - and this happens all the time. I'm so glad that you 

5 brought you this up. 

6 We just don't use it singularly. We 

7 combine it where we can measure epithets online. And 

8 we look at the wonderful -- God bless you. You're a 

9 hero of the Cal State system. 

10 This focus on victimizations beyond 

11 crimes. When we look at more data -- like, for 

12 instance, if a weather person just looked at 

13 barometric pressure but didn't look at radar and 

14 didn't look at temperature change -- right -- so we 

15 have to combine them. And we've been seeing what 

16 appears to be a shift in types of offenders. 

17 And that is it looks like, at least 

18 according to Professor James Nolan -- we have a piece 

19 coming out in Northwestern's Criminal Law and 

20 Criminology Review this month -- it looks like we're 

21 seeing an older set of offenders coming around now. 

22 But we have different types of hate offenders. 

23 And one thing with regard to African 

24 Americans because this comes up a lot, and it gets 

25 twisted, and it's wrong. It's not only statistically 
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1 wrong. It's a moral evil. And I'm not going to be a 

2 part of it. 

3 If we look at New York City, for instance, 

4 we certainly did have attacks by African Americans 

5 against Asians. But when we went across the country 

6 where the demographics were different, we had a 

7 change. 

8 The other thing, too, is just look at this 

9 week about maternal deaths per African Americans with 

10 regard to births. Right? So African Americans are 

11 more likely to be in poverty and have all kinds of --

12 I come from a medical family, so this is -- you can't 

13 imagine how funny the rest of my relatives are going 

14 to be looking at this. 

15 But access to healthcare, including mental 

16 healthcare, is far more limited with respect to the 

17 African American community. So some of that -- if we 

18 just went colorblind and said mentally ill offenders -

19 - we see a lot of offenders with respect to hate crime 

20 who have some type of mental illness. And the more we 

21 ignore that -- not looking at it as a race thing, but 

22 looking at a poverty thing and a mental illness issue 

23 -- I think that's more productive. We have to have 

24 education be a part of this. 

25 To say that hate crimes are just the same 
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1 as all criminality, no. And I'm going to quote the 

2 dean, Jack McDevitt, who's the first one to come up 

3 with the typology back in 1989 with the American Study 

4 of Criminology. I added the mentally ill offender, 

5 but he looks at the thrill offender; the defensive6 reactive offender, who's reacting to a threat or a 

7 change in their neighborhood; and the mission 

8 offender, like the neo-Nazi skinheads. There are 

9 different types of offenders, and they require, and 

10 America requires a different response. 

11 MR. LEHMAN: What's the composition -- the 

12 percentage-wise composition? 

13 MR. LEVIN: I'm sorry. Percentage-wide 

14 composition? 

15 MR. LEHMAN: So McDevitt and Levin look --

16 they look at -- they derive their typology from their 

17 analysis of BPD data. Right? 

18 MR. LEVIN: Correct. 

19 MR. LEHMAN: And they say -- what's the 

20 distribution of those three types in those offenders?

21 MR. LEVIN: Well, when they first came out 

22 with it, it was the thrill offenders. 

23 MR. LEHMAN: That's the fourth one but 

24 later. But sure, yeah. 

25 MR. LEVIN: But what was the fourth one? 
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1 MR. LEHMAN: They add the -- 

2 MR. LEVIN: No. They just divide the -- 

3 MR. LEHMAN: This is the Bennett thing. 

4 Sorry. I'd just like an answer to the question, even 

5 the original one, even 89 or 93. 

6 MR. LEVIN: I'm sorry. What is your 

7 question? 

8 MR. LEHMAN: What's the distribution? 

9 MR. LEVIN: They had much more thrill 

10 offenders. I think it was around 60 percent. 

11 MR. LEHMAN: It's 66. It's about 32 

12 percent roughly -- 

13 MR. LEVIN: Right. From 1989. 

14 MR. LEHMAN: -- percent for defensive. 

15 Yeah. But it's roughly the same in the 2003 -- 

16 MR. LEVIN: Right. Which proves my point 

17 that education -- 

18 MR. LEHMAN: -- same in 2010. One percent 

19 are mission offenders. 

20 MR. LEVIN: I mean, who commits the most 

21 homicides? 

22 COMMISSIONER KIRSANOW: Okay. Let's try -

23 - 

24 MR. LEHMAN: Yeah. And that's very -- 

25 COMMISSIONER KIRSANOW: I'm going to have 
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1 to stop the crosstalk because the listeners are not 

2 going to be able to discern what's going on here. So 

3 one person at a time. 

4 I'm going to have to call on Mr. Yang. 

5 MR. YANG: Yeah. Thank you. I would like 

6 to jump in here just to kind of refocus the discussion 

7 a little bit because I think the discussion here the 

8 purpose of this hearing is to talk about federal

9 response to anti-Asian racism. And so I think the 

10 panelists have all done a good job of talking about 

11 different viewpoints. 

12 You know, I still go back to sort of I

13 think where we all agreed to varying extents is on 

14 education, is on investment to the community. We do 

15 have sometimes differing opinions about what that 

16 means, but we have -- I think we need to think about 

17 what data means because I think there's an agreement 

18 that there's data that matters. Having relevant data 

19 matters, and the government plays a large role in 

20 that. Language matters, and the government -- all of 

21 our policymakers -- has a huge difference in how we 

22 talk about these issues and talk about these 

23 responsibilities. So I would like to refocus there. 

24 I do want to speak to one thing that I 

25 want us to be very clear about with respect to sort of 
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1 what I am hearing about the divisions between the 

2 African American and Asian American community. 

3 Let me be clear about this. Is there 

4 anti-Blackness in the Asian American community? Yes, 

5 there is. Is there anti-Asian-ness in the Black 

6 community? Yes, there is. And this is where, again, 

7 education is important. Right? Facts are important 

8 because there are those that are trying to use these 

9 divisions to create wedges within all of our 

10 communities in a manner that is going to prevent 

11 progress. 

12 And so, what I would urge all of us to do 

13 is think about sort of how we get to better facts, how 

14 we get the better data, how we are careful with our 

15 language and responsible with our language in how we 

16 move forward. 

17 COMMISSIONER KIRSANOW: Mr. Lehman, did 

18 you want to respond? 

19 Ms. Yoo? 

20 MS. YOO: I wanted to address the mental 

21 health question. You know, we have to think about the 

22 lack of mental health support for victims, for the 

23 community in general. 

24 You know, we scramble to find 

25 professionals who can speak the language that the 
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1 victims need support in, not just the victims, but the 

2 families and the entire community. 

3 After last year, the entire Asian American 

4 community in New York City, we were afraid to leave 

5 our homes, and we were reeling every time we had to 

6 step outside. We all had tremendous anxiety. 

7 And young professional women working in 

8 corporations making more in one year than I will ever 

9 make in my lifetime, they were calling me, saying, how

10 do I go to work? I'm afraid to get on the subway. 

11 What do I do? Do I -- how do I navigate this? This 

12 has been very scary. We have tremendous, tremendous 

13 anguish right now. 

14 And I appreciate these number 

15 conversations because that's where we need to start 

16 that. We are a census information center, so for us, 

17 at the Federation, everything works starting with data 

18 and numbers. But the realityis there are real people 

19 behind those numbers, and we need to think about what 

20 is happening in my community. 

21 And I will tell you right now, my 

22 community, we are having a meltdown. This entire 

23 country's having a meltdown, and I appreciate these 

24 numbers conversations because that's what needs to 

25 happen, but I need to have solutions. 
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1 I need to have funding to hire and train 

2 mental health professionals in language to be able to 

3 offer culturally competent programming so that that 

4 way nobody's afraid to leave their homes and nobody's 

5 afraid to look at their neighbors and think that 

6 they're going to be attacked. 

7 COMMISSIONER KIRSANOW: Any other 

8 Commissioners? Questions? Ms. Garza? 

9 COMMISSIONER GARZA: Yes. I do have a 

10 question. Professor Jeung? Did I pronounce that 

11 correctly? 

12 MR. JEUNG: Jeung. 

13 COMMISSIONER GARZA: Jeung. Okay. So I 

14 wanted to ask you about -- you mentioned in your 

15 testimony how political rhetoric and what we've seen 

16 happen around anti-Asian rhetoric has sort of fed into 

17 policies that are being put forth. 

18 I'm from Texas, and very recently our 

19 state legislature was considering a ban -- or still, 

20 to an extent, considering a ban on Chinese Americans 

21 owning property. Now it's been reshaped, and now it's 

22 businesses in particular. And so, I was hoping I

23 could hear from you or from any of the other panelists 

24 that have been looking at these issues. 

25 You know, what are we seeing happen at the 
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1 state level in these policies that are implementing 

2 these anti-Asian sentiments and continuing to stoke 

3 anti-Asian sentiments across the country? 

4 MR. JEUNG: Yeah. I think that's a great 

5 question that the policies implemented at the state 

6 level, at the local level, at school boards that, 

7 again, prohibit, for example, non-Americans from 

8 buying property that then sanctions further violence 

9 because citizens recognize well if government thinks 

10 it's okay to exclude noncitizens from owning property, 

11 it's okay for us to then yell at, exclude, mistreat 

12 individuals. And then policymakers are emboldened to 

13 then pass further xenophobic policies. 

14 And I think that's what we see occurring. 

15 It's hearkening back to the 19th century, the early 

16 20th century when we had several anti-Asian alien land 

17 laws, the Chinese Exclusion Act. 

18 And at the same time of the Chinese 

19 Exclusion Act and these alien land laws, we saw 

20 massive mass displacement of Asian communities. And 

21 people don't hear about that in history. Over 168 

22 Chinese communities were actually forcibly driven out 

23 right after the Chinese Exclusion Act. 

24 So there is that sort of cause and effect, 

25 the correlation that if the government sanctions 
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1 xenophobic policies, if it perceives certain 

2 communities as outsiders undeserving of rights, then 

3 mob violence then occurs. 

4 And so, I think we have to be really 

5 careful at the state and local level and be on guard. 

6 And what the federal government's response should be 

7 is to really safeguard the communities. 

8 When you see sites that are banning books 

9 or instituting laws, land laws, those will then become 

10 hotbeds for interpersonal violence against Asians. 

11 COMMISSIONER GARZA: Thank you. 

12 MR. YANG: And if I might add onto that, 

13 as you heard me testify, I recognize the real national 

14 security challenges we have. 

15 So my framework on some of these laws are 

16 how does ACTAS actually benefit national security? 

17 And what expertise does the legislative body, or 

18 whatever body's involved, have in making that 

19 determination? And this is where I have serious 

20 concerns. 

21 Then, the second question I have is what 

22 is the impact, the secondary impact, that such 

23 legislation or policy will have on the community? One 

24 aspect of things such as alien land laws the way that 

25 these are being discussed is would it be the right of 
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1 the prior owner to look at citizenship papers, to look 

2 at business interests? How will this be enforced? 

3 Does the Attorney General get to sue? 

4 So those are the real policy implications 

5 that I think, whether it is the federal government or 

6 state and local government, should be thinking about 

7 in determining these things. 

8 You know, even setting aside, obviously, 

9 what we perceive to be some of the racist quality of 

10 these, again, I want to give some deference to 

11 national security, but let's talk about this in a 

12 smart way. 

13 MR. LEVIN: Could I just interject real 

14 quick? Gallup, I think it was 2018, 11 percent --it 

15 was either 2017, 2018 -- 11 percent China greatest 

16 enemy; 49 percent today. 

17 And again, using the same disclaimer that 

18 my friend John uses, yeah, there are legitimate issues 

19 that we have to address across a variety of things, 

20 but what ends up happening when politics gets thrown 

21 into that stew, you know, once you put some dirt in 

22 the stew, there's dirt in the stew. 

23 And let me just give you an example about 

24 how legislation and other things can seem to 

25 correlate. We saw in 23 states legislation relating to 
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1 transgender Americans and gender-nonconforming 

2 Americans. And we saw our friends at Princeton ACLED 

3 showed a massive increase in protests, including 

4 violent protests, sometimes with folks like the Proud 

5 Boys showing up. Guess what we found is the second 

6 most attacked group in 2022 -- you're getting the 

7 latest data here -- gender-nonconforming. Top five: 

8 other races, gender-nonconforming, LGBTQ mixed, anti9 Semitic, anti-transgender. 

10 So even sometimes when we see like, for 

11 instance, anti-gay male and anti-lesbian either go 

12 down a little bit or stay flat, we see this mutation 

13 of othering. And it correlates to the kind of 

14 discourse that we're seeing in politics and also on 

15 social media, which is a whole other ball of wax that 

16 I'd love to see this Commission handle at another 

17 time. 

18 COMMISSIONER GARZA: Thank you for that. I 

19 do have one more question for Ms. Yoo if I can. 

20 COMMISSIONER KIRSANOW: I think we're 

21 over. I'm sorry, but this will have to be the last 

22 question because we're up on time now. 

23 COMMISSIONER GARZA: Okay. I do want to 

24 take it back to the very human aspect and what our 

25 Asian brothers and sisters are experiencing. 
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1 What kind of support has your organization 

2 received? Where are the gaps? You know, I'd like to 

3 hear more about the gaps in terms of making sure that 

4 the federal response is adequate. 

5 MS. YOO: Thank you for that question. 

6 I agree with John when he talked about 

7 funding coming through. There is a lot of money. You 

8 know, when all the violence is happening, people are 

9 throwing money at you. And for us, we were throwing 

10 money back at the community to be able to build 

11 infrastructure. 

12 Literally, I've been telling my staff we 

13 are building the airplane. We're paving the runway as 

14 we're flying this plane. And I honor my staff who 

15 never got to sleep in the first year because this is 

16 what we were doing. And it was great to have money. 

17 It was great to be able to pay for stuff to be able to 

18 get things going, but the media gaze has slowed, and 

19 so now the money has slowed. And so, we are trying --

20 and the violence hasn't stopped. 

21 We need to be able to -- and some of those 

22 federal applications, it is so cumbersome. Many of 

23 the nonprofit organizations in our community are 

24 small. They don't have the capacity to write 

25 sophisticated proposals. Some of these nonprofits 
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1 function with two, three staff people. There isn't 

2 that capacity. There isn't the language capacity. 

3 There isn't the professional quality proposals that 

4 they can turn out. They've got to get the money 

5 deployed quickly on the ground. And it takes forever. 

6 It takes forever. 

7 And we are struggling because we are 

8 paying for, not just victim services, but also 

9 figuring out how do we have program money so that that 

10 way we can get food programs going for seniors? How 

11 do we make sure that we pay for therapists? How do we 

12 make sure that there's overall mental health 

13 programming in our community? 

14 And so, I think if the government responds 

15 -- if I can change one thing -- if I had a magic wand 

16 that I can change tomorrow, it would be that the funds 

17 deployed to our community comes faster without a lot 

18 of reporting knowing that we are best equipped to know 

19 how to spend this money because this is the work that 

20 we're doing. 

21 COMMISSIONER MAGPANTAY: And your staff is 

22 multilingual? 

23 MS. YOO: Yes. Thank you. Many, many 

24 languages. 

25 (Simultaneous speaking.) 
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1 COMMISSIONER MAGPANTAY: I just wanted to 

2 make sure. 

3 MS. YOO: Many, many languages. Many, 

4 many languages our staff. But we also have member 

5 agencies, so that when we do anything, it gets 

6 translated into seven to ten languages. And our 

7 membership agencies have a lot of language capacity. 

8 So if we do a press conference, for 

9 instance, when we had a press conference on public 

10 charge, it was done in 10 languages. Yes, it took a 

11 little while, but every community needed to know what 

12 their rights were, deserved to know what the facts 

13 were. So it does take a while. It costs money. But 

14 this is how we communicate because this is what we 

15 need to do. 

16 COMMISSIONER GARZA: Thank you. 

17 MS. YOO: Thank you. 

18 COMMISSIONER KIRSANOW: I do have one 

19 question. I just need a clarification. 

20 Was I hearing you correctly that Texas is 

21 proposing some legislation to prohibit Chinese 

22 Americans from owning land or Chinese from owning land 

23 because I heard Chinese Americans? 

24 MR. YANG: Right. It has been a moving 

25 target to have an amendment offered. Right now, it is 
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1 foreign nationals, and now it is more focused on 

2 business rather than on individual personal land 

3 ownership from my understanding. But it is still a 

4 moving target. 

5 COMMISSIONER KIRSANOW: And if such 

6 legislation is passed, my sense is it's because of a 

7 concern for national security. And there has been 

8 considerable purchase of land by the People's Republic 

9 of China in strategically sensitive spots in the 

10 United States of America. How do we address that? 

11 MR. YANG: And you bring up a very good 

12 point. There can be cases made -- and I want to be 

13 careful here because I am not an expert on national 

14 security, and I am not an expert on sort of how -- 

15 sort of when we talk about military installations 

16 where there have been discussions -- but there can be 

17 appropriate things. 

18 And if you think about CFIUS as being one 

19 of the places where we talk about these types of 

20 issues, there are appropriate forums to talk about 

21 these issues and how to address foreign investment and 

22 what that might do. That certainly -- the federal 

23 government in many ways is well-equipped to do. 

24 But when we have state and local 

25 governments implementing these -- certainly the 
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1 political debate in those climates have not focused on 

2 these nuances. That is where there is concern. 

3 And then the repercussions. Again, I 

4 focus also on the impact on all of our communities 

5 being very, very drastic. 

6 COMMISSIONER KIRSANOW: I want to thank 

7 the panelists. This has been very informative. We're 

8 going to be taking a short break. We'll reconvene at 

9 2:25 with Panel 2. 

10 (Whereupon, the above-entitled matter went 

11 off the record at 2:13 p.m. and resumed at 2:24 p.m.)

12 PANEL 2: COMMUNITY STAKEHOLDERS AND 

13 ADVOCATES COMMISSIONER KIRSANOW: 

14 Okay, we're going to begin with panel number two. And 

15 the witnesses for this panel are Cynthia Choi, who is 

16 Co-Executive Director of the Chinese for Affirmative 

17 Action; Dr. Wenyuan Wu, Executive Director for 

18 Californians for Equal Rights Foundation; Jennifer Wu, 

19 partner with Groombridge, Wu, Baughman & Stone LLP; 

20 Lee Cheng, who is co-founder of the Asian American 

21 Legal Foundation; and Manjusha Kulkarni, Executive 

22 Director of the AAPI Equity Alliance. 

23 Because we have five panelists, instead of 

24 the seven minutes that we accorded everyone in the 

25 previous panel, you all have eight minutes now if you 
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1 choose to use that. 

2 PARTICIPANT: Lucky eight. 

3 COMMISSIONER KIRSANOW: I know, it's like 

4 the Gettysburg Address or something. So we may as 

5 well begin. Let's go with Ms. Choi. 

6 MS. CHOI: Thank you. Well, good 

7 afternoon, my name is Cynthia Choi, and I am the Co8 Executive Director of Chinese for Affirmative Action. 

9 And I'm also one of the co-founders of Stop AAPI 

10 Hate. And I serve on the California Commission for --

11 on the State of Hate. 

12 I'd like to thank the Commission for 

13 inviting all of us here today on the perspective of 

14 federal response to anti-Asian racism, as it's been 

15 from my understanding over 30 years since there's been 

16 a real focus on the experiences of our communities. 

17 At Stop AAPI Hate and CAA, we believe that 

18 data and informed analysis should drive our policy 

19 recommendations. Today we have over 11,000 incidents 

20 from all across the country. And for us, these are 

21 not just data points, these are real people who shared 

22 their stories and that of their loved ones. 

23 I do want to state very clearly that a 

24 vast majority of the incidents are not hate crimes, 

25 but rather non-criminal hate incidents like verbal 
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1 harassment, racist comments, and offensive gestures 

2 that those who report to us describe as traumatic and 

3 harmful. 

4 In addition to our data, we also receive 

5 requests from support, like the mother of a student 

6 enrolled at Montana State University, who contacted us 

7 because her daughter was allegedly subjected to anti8 Asian, anti-LGBTQ slurs. And who found a noose in her 

9 closet with a note telling her to kill herself. 

10 At the same time, we don't want to 

11 minimize racially -- racially motivated acts of 

12 violence, like the incident in Bloomington, IL, where 

13 a woman repeatedly -- reportedly confessed to stabbing 

14 18-year-old student because it would mean, quote, one 

15 less person to blow up our country. 

16 I'm here for them. At Stop AAPI Hate, we 

17 remain deeply concerned with the rise in anti-Asian 

18 hate and discrimination that is largely being fueled 

19 by racial scapegoating of Asians and Asian Americans, 

20 and specifically anti-Chinese political rhetoric. 

21 In our latest report on the impact of 

22 anti-Asian political rhetoric, we cite multiple 

23 examples of political leaders and candidates unfairly 

24 blaming Asian people for current events, such as the 

25 economic downturn, the COVID-19 pandemic, and the 
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1 threats to national security. 

2 Our research demonstrates that this 

3 harmful rhetoric poses a significant danger to 

4 millions of Asian Americans in the United States. For 

5 example, we know that political rhetoric associating 

6 Chinese people with COVID-19 contributed to incidents 

7 of hate against our community. 

8 In the week after President Trump first 

9 tweet using the language Chinese virus in March of 

10 2020, Twitter hashtags expressing anti-Asian sentiment 

11 increased 174 times. 

12 Since then, Stop AAPI Hate has documented 

13 more than 2,000 hate incidents that include language 

14 blaming Asian people for COVID-19, some including 

15 threats of violence. And this number is only the tip 

16 of the iceberg. 

17 We've also received hundreds of incidence 

18 reports that include baseless accusations of spying 

19 for the Chinese Government and multiple reports of 

20 incidents where Asian Americans were threatened with 

21 violence and accused of stealing jobs or harassed to 

22 go back to China. 

23 It should be noted that the link between 

24 anti-Asian political rhetoric and anti-Asian hate is 

25 nothing new. And in fact, in 1992, this very body 
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1 commissioned a landmark civil rights report, which 

2 found politicians were in part responsible for hate 

3 and animus directed at Asian Americans. 

4 It stated, quote, “Political leaders 

5 contribute to the problem when they unthinking lash 

6 out at Japan as a cause of United States' economic 

7 difficulties.” The report urged politicians to engage 

8 in responsible rhetoric, cautioning against race9 baiting tactics and remarks that play on -- play upon 

10 racial and ethnic bias. 

11 Three decades later, we find ourselves in 

12 the same situation. We are concerned that increasing 

13 levels of anti-Chinese political rhetoric we're seeing 

14 today will not only embolden others to commit racist 

15 acts, but also enshrine policies and embody 

16 institutional racism. 

17 As been mentioned before, there is a 

18 troubling wave of policy proposals rooted in anti19 Chinese discrimination, with lawmakers in Texas and 

20 other states pushing bans on Chinese land ownership, 

21 having a devastating impact on Chinese immigrants and 

22 others who are being targeted, preventing them from 

23 buying homes, settling their families, and developing 

24 roots in their community. 

25 These proposals are reminiscent of the 
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1 past policies that systematically harmed Asian 

2 Americans, as was mentioned in the prior panel, the 

3 Exclusion Act of 1882, alien land laws in the early 

4 1900s, and Japanese incarceration -- force 

5 incarceration of Japanese Americans. And of course 

6 more recently, the racial profiling and surveillance 

7 of Muslim Americans. 

8 The intense anti-Asian rhetoric of this 

9 area has not only created a hostile environment for 

10 people like Vincent Chin, who was targeted in a brutal 

11 racist attack. It also led to institutionalize racism 

12 in the hands of our government. 

13 Unless we act, the reckless anti-Chinese 

14 rhetoric and the policies of today will lead our 

15 nation down the same slippery slope in which -- in 

16 which racist fearmongering overtakes our shared values 

17 of equity and unity. 

18 The federal government has a duty and an 

19 obligation to step in to enforce civil rights and to 

20 ensure all American are afforded equal opportunities 

21 and are treated with dignity and respect regardless of 

22 race, ethnicity, and immigration status. 

23 We applaud the current administration for 

24 enacting a whole-of-government approach to equity. We 

25 strongly support efforts that entail auditing 
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1 coordination across agencies to ensure our communities 

2 can benefit fully from these programs and policies, in 

3 particular that enforce our civil rights. Which also 

4 includes prioritizing language access. 

5 And finally we want to stress that it's 

6 important that we have sustained and resource 

7 collaborations with community partners so that our 

8 government engages meaningfully with our -- and 

9 understands the community's diverse experiences with 

10 bias and discrimination so that they're fully 

11 understood and meaningfully addressed. 

12 I want to thank you for your time, and I 

13 look forward to your questions later. Thank you. 

14 COMMISSIONER KIRSANOW: Thank you, Ms. 

15 Choi. Ms. Wu. 

16 DR. WU: I want to thank the Commission 

17 for this opportunity to testify on this hugely 

18 important topic of anti-Asian discrimination. My name 

19 is Wenyuan Wu. I represent Californians for Equal

20 Rights Foundation. 

21 I want to first make the following three 

22 points. Number one, criminal incidents targeting 

23 Asian Americans are egregious and must be addressed in 

24 the context of rising threats to public safety in 

25 general. 
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1 Number two, framing anti-Asian hate crimes 

2 in a narrative of systemic racism or systemic inequity 

3 misleads the public on methodological and moral 

4 grounds. 

5 Number three, persistent discrimination 

6 against Asian American students in education, 

7 justified under the names of diversity, equity, and 

8 race-based affirmative action is much more salient and 

9 consequential form of anti-Asian discrimination. 

10 First, data from the FBI Crime Data 

11 Explorer shows a 90 percent increase from 2018 to 2021 

12 in crimes involving Asian American victims. An 

13 initial reading of such an increase could validate the 

14 Asian hate thesis, but further analysis reveals 

15 interlocking nuances. 

16 On violent incidents by victim race and 

17 ethnicity, the percentage change from 2018 to 2021 was 

18 75 percent for White victims, 118 percent for Black 

19 victims, and 138 percent for Hispanic victims. These 

20 numbers also mirror trends in rates of violent crime 

21 offenders desegregated by race and ethnicity during 

22 the same period. 

23 The rates of violent incident victims of -

24 - and offenders per 100,000 people by race and 

25 ethnicity are even more telling. Severe imbalances at 
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1 a group level between Asian Americans with lowest 

2 crime rates and certain minority groups that 

3 disproportionately commit violent crimes and fall 

4 victim to criminal violence deserves attention here. 

5 Taking into account their percentages in 

6 the general population, Asian Americans can be said to 

7 be under-committing crimes by over five percentage 

8 points. And over, they are over-victimized by about 

9 4.5 percentage points. That is only if we were to go 

10 along with a crime to population proportionality 

11 rationale. 

12 Official data between 1985 and 2020 shows 

13 a slight reversal of a historical trend of lowering 

14 crimes in recent years, especially since 2014. In 

15 other words, violent crimes committed by all racial 

16 and ethnic groups and victimizing all groups have been 

17 on the rise lately. 

18 More alarmingly, given the current 

19 political climate in which activists and politicians 

20 have called for structural reforms to abolish 

21 proactive policing, the rates of crimes cleared by the 

22 police have decreased in major U.S. cities where such

23 crime -- such reforms have been adopted to various 

24 degrees. 

25 The crusade against law enforcement has 
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1 done a huge disservice by degrading the dignity of the 

2 profession and the compromise in public safety. In a 

3 vicious cycle, many law enforcement agencies have 

4 responded to staffing shortages by lowering recruiting 

5 and training standards. 

6 In short, when we situate crimes targeting 

7 Asian Americans in the broad context of increases in 

8 violent crimes and decreases in the capacity of law 

9 enforcement to adequately address crimes, the wave of 

10 Asian hate is part and parcel of general crime 

11 patterns. 

12 Secondly, pegging anti-Asian crimes to 

13 racism lacks rigor. FBI reported 7,264 hate crime

14 incidents in 2021, of which 4,470, or 65 percent, were 

15 motivated by race, ethnicity, or ancestry. 

16 There was a 12 percent decrease compared 

17 with the total number of hate crimes in 2020, and a

18 14.5 drop compared with the number of hate crimes 

19 motivated by race, ethnicity, or ancestry. 

20 But the reports by Stop AAPI Hate, which 

21 are frequently cited in media as evidence of Asian 

22 hate endorses a much more expansive conceptualization. 

23 Not only do hate crimes involving physical assaults 

24 are counted. Hate incidents such as verbal 

25 harassment, avoidance or shunning, denial of service, 
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1 and online trolling are also calculated. 

2 Of the 10,905 anti-Asian hate incidents 

3 documents in its 2020 national report, about 67 

4 percent were incidents of verbal harassment, and only 

5 16 percent were physical assaults. The former does 

6 not always result in an actual hate crime. 

7 Therefore, the claim of unprecedented 

8 anti-Asian hate is inflated by events without 

9 traceable criminal element. These pitfalls are 

10 consequential. 

11 Upholding anti-Asian racism as a 

12 structural issue warranting transformative changes can 

13 divert precious public policy focuses on public forums 

14 away from community building to ideological exercises 

15 that ultimately do not improve public safety. 

16 The Stop Asian Hate movement has garnered 

17 tens of millions of funding from various entities. 

18 For instance, in March 2022, the California state 

19 government distributed $40 million in grant funds to 

20 80 regional and local organizations to combat bias21 motivated attacks. 

22 For ideological reasons and also for 

23 profit, proponents of the Stop Asian Hate movement 

24 skew historical data and incorrectly paint a picture 

25 of systemic racism and the most underlying variable of 
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1 hate incidents targeting Asian Americans. 

2 Trumped-up charges of hate incidents can 

3 have a fearmongering psychological effect on members 

4 of the Asian American community, especially those who 

5 are first generation immigrants or low income. 

6 Imagine what bearing the burden of feeling like a 

7 perpetual victim and being pressured to support virtue 

8 signaling practices of condemning racism would do to 

9 an Asian American who has not analyzed the data. 

10 He or she would feel powerless and 

11 threatened by imaginary enemy. He or she may even 

12 partake in unproven reforms of anti-racism and 

13 restorative justice, only to see an escalation in 

14 crimes harming the community because the underlying 

15 issues related to public safety would remain unsolved.

16 Last but not least, if policymakers and 

17 observers are serious about identifying and tackling 

18 discrimination against Asian Americans, they must 

19 confront the elephant in the room: systemic and 

20 ongoing anti-Asian discrimination in education through 

21 the practice of race-conscious admissions. 

22 Whether it is in admissions to selective 

23 U.S. colleges and universities or in recruitment of 

24 gifted and talented students at the K to 12 level, 

25 evidence regarding high standards, de facto quotas, 
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1 racial balancing, and negative stereotypes to limit 

2 the access of Asian American applicants abound. 

3 In higher education admission barriers 

4 hampering the changes of Asian American applicants 

5 have been well documented by statistical evidence and 

6 eyewitness accounts. Racial preferences for the so7 called under-represented minority students at elite 

8 colleges come almost entirely at the expense of Asian 

9 Americans. 

10 The trend of racial preferences also 

11 continue at the graduate school level. Beyond elite 

12 schools, the penalty against Asian American students 

13 is endemic throughout the education ecosystem. A 

14 survey by Inside Higher Education revealed 42 percent 

15 of admission officers from private colleges and 39 

16 percent of admission officers from public colleges 

17 admitted that they hold Asian American applicants to a 

18 higher standard. 

19 COMMISSIONER KIRSANOW: Dr. Wu, if you 

20 could begin to wrap it up. 

21 DR. WU: In summary, I -- to reduce 

22 violence targeting Asian Americans, policymakers 

23 should devise solutions to improve public safety and 

24 support law enforcement. 

25 On the other hand, if public policy 
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1 decisionmakers are committed to combating 

2 discrimination and bias against Americans of Asian 

3 descent, they should not ignore the prevalence of 

4 race-conscious education policies, which 

5 disproportionately harm Asian American students. 

6 Thank you again for hearing my testimony.

7 COMMISSIONER KIRSANOW: Thank you. Ms. 

8 Wu. 

9 MS. WU: Thank you for having me. My name 

10 is Jennifer Wu, and I'm a patent lawyer in New York 

11 City. I am here because I became a civil rights 

12 lawyer, because there has been no federal response to 

13 anti-Asian racism. 

14 Since 2020, I have represented nearly 

15 every victim in New York City who has died of anti16 Asian violence. Michelle Go, the Deloitte consultant 

17 and vibrant woman who was pushed in the Times Square 

18 subway; GuiYing Ma, who is the grandmother sweeping 

19 the street when she was viciously hit with a rock and 

20 later died. 

21 And also Zhiwen Yan, among others, the 

22 small business owner who was on his scooter when he 

23 was ruthlessly gunned down while making a food 

24 delivery order. 

25 I am here because there is no data that is 
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1 accurate and comprehensive and on the federal level. 

2 We have organizations like Stop AAPI Hate who are 

3 collecting data. We have data from the FBI. 

4 But not a single one of my clients, who 

5 are all pro-bono clients, has ever reported a crime to 

6 the federal agencies, and ever heard from the U.S. 

7 Government, beyond Congresswoman Grace Meng of New 

8 York City, who is not even the congresswoman for most 

9 of my victims. 

10 There has been no federal response, which 

11 is why private practitioners like myself have stepped 

12 in to help the victims and develop a response. I am 

13 the editor the Asian American Bar Association's -- or 

14 one of the editors of the Asian American Bar 

15 Association's reports on anti-Asian violence, the 

16 first of which came out in 2021, and the second that 

17 came out in 2022. 

18 I urge you to read them, because this is 

19 the response of the local community to people in our 

20 community dying. This is not about affirmative 

21 action. This is not about lack of education at some 

22 level. This is about people dying in the streets of 

23 New York City, much as they died of COVID-19. 

24 I was drawn and called to action because I

25 am the daughter of immigrants. My parents are from 
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1 different places. My father is native Taiwanese, and 

2 my mother is from China. They met in North Dakota at 

3 North Dakota State University, where they were both 

4 graduate students and my dad thought that my mother 

5 was Taiwanese. By the time he realized that she was 

6 not, it was too late. 

7 It is no surprise that my parents, who 

8 have disagreed politically on nearly everything, 

9 raised two daughters, both of whom became lawyers and 

10 both went to Harvard University. We grew up in the 

11 suburbs of New Jersey in the 1980s, when anti-Japanese 

12 sentiment was high because there was a belief that the 

13 Japanese were taking away the jobs of American auto 

14 workers in Detroit. 

15 Unbeknownst to me, I was Asian. There 

16 were not that many mirrors in my parents' small home 

17 in New Jersey, so I hadn't realized that I looked 

18 different than everyone else. One day when my parents 

19 were driving their station wagon, they had a little 

20 Christmas tree car freshener on it. My dad took it 

21 down and he put an American flag underneath it. 

22 And when I asked him why he was doing 

23 that, he said to me, ”Jennifer, you're Asian." And I 

24 said, “What, what are you talking about? I'm 

25 American. This is the only home that I have ever 
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1 known.” And he said, ”Well, you look Asian, so people 

2 will think that you are loyal to Asia and not to 

3 America, and you need to understand that.” 

4 His words resonated with me then because 

5 it was my first consciousness at the age of five that 

6 I was different than everybody else. But it also made 

7 me realize that sometimes what we feel is what we see 

8 reflected in other people. That the fear that we feel 

9 as Asian Americans in New York City comes because when 

10 we're walking down the street, people cross the street 

11 because they do not want to be near us. 

12 And I had the good fortune of being 

13 partners with the great Ted Wells of Paul, Weiss for 

14 many years, and he would say as Black man, when he 

15 walked down the street in a suit, people would cross 

16 the street in New York City so they did not have to be 

17 in the same side as him. 

18 That fear that you feel is not necessarily 

19 one that you see in yourself, but is reflected in you 

20 in the community. And what I saw in New York City and 

21 continue to see in New York City is that fear. 

22 New York City is home to the largest Asian 

23 population in the country. Nearly a quarter of the 

24 people who are Asian American are in poverty, so it is 

25 also the poorest ethnic group in New York City. 
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1 This is also one of the reasons why 

2 despite the model minority myth, that anti-Asian 

3 violence skyrocketed in New York City. And compared 

4 to 2020, anti-Asian hate crimes reported to NYPD rose 

5 361 percent in 2021, even leaving aside the under6 reporting issue. 

7 This brings me to my point, which is the 

8 call to action. The reason that I have provided pro 

9 bono services completely free to all these victims is 

10 because they need them and because they are human. 

11 They are our family. They are our daughters, they are 

12 our mothers, they are our sisters, they are aunts, 

13 they are uncles. 

14 We provide to them what we would provide 

15 our own family. The first of which is to provide -- 

16 to advocate -- advocacy for victims before the 

17 District Attorney and to interact with police. Much 

18 of the DAs do not have access to interpreter services 

19 that are good. 

20 I often find myself in meetings where I am 

21 using Mandarin Chinese to translate because someone 

22 has brought a translator in a different dialect. I 

23 have never encountered an ADA who is Asian, but for 

24 Hannah Yu, who is Chief of the Hate Crimes Unit at the

25 Manhattan DA's office. 
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1 The Asian community cannot have trust in 

2 the local law enforcement if they are not represented 

3 and people do not speak their language. There are 

4 also mixed messages. When the ADA tells someone that 

5 they are going to do something, the local police will 

6 sometimes say the opposite and say I don't have faith 

7 in the ADA. There are problems there and distrust in 

8 the institutions. 

9 We need training and education. We have 

10 given training and educations to the DA's office in 

11 Manhattan, but we need more of that. For example, the 

12 New York City Council dedicated $1.7 million for heat 

13 crimes work, which expanded the Hate Crimes Unit in 

14 Manhattan from three people to 13 dedicated people and 

15 20 dedicated ADAs. 

16 The other thing that victims need is

17 wraparound services, people to help them with Go Fund 

18 Me. In order to withdraw funds, you need Social 

19 Security number from the United States as well as bank 

20 account from the United States. They also need 

21 ability to apply for U visas if they are undocumented. 

22 They need help with healthcare. They need help with 

23 the media. 

24 There is no easy answer to any of these 

25 problems, but the fact that there is a large 
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1 population of people who are pro bono lawyers 

2 dedicating services here indicates that the community

3 organizations are overwhelmed and that we as a 

4 community has failed the community that's supposed to 

5 trust us. 

6 I want to tell one story that is 

7 noteworthy because it surprised me. The husband of 

8 GuiYing Ma, who's the grandmother sweeping her street, 

9 when her -- when she died in the hospital three months 

10 after she was crushed with a rock, instead of blaming 

11 the perpetrator who had bashed in her head and taken 

12 away her life, he blamed the hospital because he did 

13 not trust the hospital institution to have protected 

14 her. 

15 That is an illustration of the loss of 

16 trust that our community has had in institutions that 

17 are supposed to protect us. Whether it's the 

18 hospital, the police, the DA, even this commission, or 

19 myself. What I have tried to do is create bonds with 

20 the community so that they have someone to go to that 

21 they can trust. 

22 And to be honest with you, I am the mother 

23 of three children who are quite young, six, seven, and 

24 nine years old. And having seen anti-Asian hate when 

25 I was growing up in the suburbs, I yearn for a better 
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1 future. 

2 Thank you to the Commission, all the work 

3 that you are doing. I'm very hopeful that there will 

4 be a federal response to anti-Asian racism. 

5 COMMISSIONER KIRSANOW: Thank you, Ms. Wu. 

6 Mr. Cheng. 

7 MR. CHENG: So Ms. Wu, thank you very much 

8 for your advocacy on behalf of Asian American crime 

9 victims. I feel very humbled. And after this panel 

10 is done, I'd like to find out how I could do more. 

11 Good afternoon, Commissioners, staff 

12 members, distinguished panelists, and guests. I'm 

13 grateful for this opportunity to speak to this 

14 commission on a topic of great personal importance, 

15 racism and its impact on Americans of Asian descent. 

16 By way of background, I am the first 

17 generation in my family to be born in the United 

18 States to immigrant parents. I grew up in the 1970s 

19 in a racially diverse middle class suburb of San 

20 Francisco. I remember being frequently mocked and 

21 even being beaten up for being different. 

22 When I was in eighth grade, I started the 

23 chess club so I could eat lunch indoors to avoid being 

24 beaten up. I have very visceral reasons to hate

25 racism. 
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1 In 1984, I applied to Lowell High School, 

2 an academic merit-based program in San Francisco. As 

3 part of a desegregation initiative, Lowell's 

4 admissions process featured an academic index that 

5 took into account grades and test scores. 

6 However, based on false claims that racial 

7 mixing in schools and classrooms would help improve 

8 the academic performance of Black students, the San 

9 Francisco Unified School District imposed racial caps 

10 on admissions that forced Chinese kids to score higher 

11 than any other ethnic group. 

12 The racial caps harmed most poor Chinese 

13 American kids. I was shocked and dismayed even as a 

14 child to see such blatant discrimination being proudly 

15 promoted by public officials. 

16 After graduating from college in 1994, I 

17 and a group of activists from a Chinese-American 

18 democratic club formed the Asian American legal 

19 foundation in order to organize a law suit that 

20 challenged the racial quotas. 

21 After six years of litigation, the SFUSD 

22 agreed to all of our terms in quotas, and the quotas 

23 were removed. 

24 Since then, the Asian American Legal 

25 Foundation has championed the rights of Asian 
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1 Americans by adopting in judicial and public advocacy 

2 a position that has -- that was surprisingly unique 

3 for many years in Asian American civil rights groups,

4 that discrimination based on race, ethnicity, or 

5 national origin is never justified and should never be 

6 permitted unless subjected to strict scrutiny. 

7 We believed that then and now more than 

8 ever we believe that discrimination and violence 

9 against Asian Americans and all Americans can best and 

10 only be eliminated ultimately by returning to the 

11 foundational principles that every American must be 

12 treated equally under law. 

13 The history of discrimination and ethnic 

14 violence against Asian Americans is as extensive as 

15 the history of Asians in America. One of the largest 

16 lynchings in American history occurred in Los Angeles 

17 in 1871 when a mob murdered ten percent of the already 

18 ghettoized Chinese population. 

19 Racial violence in the West, excuse me, 

20 including by the KKK, targeted Asian Americans as the 

21 -- as did segregation efforts and policies in schools, 

22 employments, and other arenas. The Chinese Exclusion 

23 Act of 1882, the internment of Japanese Americans in 

24 World War II, the list just goes on and on. 

25 While there has been tremendous progress, 
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1 discrimination and violence against Asian Americans 

2 remains pervasive. Asian Americans face growing 

3 levels of discrimination in education, employment, 

4 business, and both anecdotally and statistically are 

5 increasingly victims of violence. 

6 The traditional racism based on racial 

7 animus has been joined by an ugly cousin, racist 

8 discrimination and violence that is supposedly benign. 

9 Most notably in recent years, reportedly benign 

10 discrimination helped advance redistributionist equity 

11 efforts seems to have supplanted ignorance-based 

12 animus as the source of institutionalized 

13 discrimination against Asian Americans. 

14 As previously mentioned, I first 

15 encountered this type of discrimination applying to a 

16 public high school, but programs seeking to limit 

17 Asian American enrollment for the sake of diversity 

18 are now ubiquitous in any selective admissions 

19 setting. 

20 The same attitudes exclude Asian Americans 

21 de facto, if not officially, from being recruited 

22 under DEI programs in employment or other business 

23 contexts as well as for a growing number of 

24 governmental programs. 

25 But the horrifying surge of violence that 
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1 Asian Americans face in the present appears only to be 

2 driven partly by racism by both Whites and non-Whites. 

3 The Commission does not need additional recitations 

4 of horrifying acts of violence that are occurring on a

5 daily basis. 

6 The answer lies in deterring and stopping 

7 crime in bad acts and bad actors and not to focus only 

8 on things called hate crimes. Focusing on hate misses 

9 the forest for the trees. It is true that crimes 

10 against Asian Americans have increased in the wake of 

11 the COVID-19 pandemic. 

12 It is commonly explained by the narrative 

13 that White supremacists or nationalists are 

14 responsible for the surge in violence, often 

15 reportedly because of stupid remarks about the origin 

16 of COVID-19. 

17 Another panelist in a previous -- in an

18 earlier panel, Diane Yap, has shown that claims that 

19 White people are responsible for the upswing in crimes 

20 against Asian Americans are foundationally based on 

21 two biased and misleading studies that conflate often 

22 non-violent hate crimes with violent crime. 

23 Logically the increase in violent crimes 

24 against Asian Americans is predominantly due to a 

25 surge in violent crime overall, particularly in large 
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1 American cities. While the number of reported hate 

2 crimes has increased, many acts of violence against 

3 Asian Americans are not reported or categorized as 

4 hate crimes. 

5 Preventing hate crimes will not and has 

6 not prevented an increase in crimes against Asian 

7 Americans. Three years after the pandemic started, 

8 there's no evidence that posters or rallies have 

9 anything to -- have done anything to actually counter 

10 the early release, for instance, of tens of thousands 

11 of felons in the state of California. 

12 The emphasis on identity politics also 

13 almost certainly plays a role in anti-Asian hate and 

14 violence. Logically, a focus on racial identity 

15 encourages people to regard people from different 

16 ethnic groups as others, less important and 

17 potentially less or even inhuman. 

18 As previously mentioned, the majority of 

19 crimes against Asian Americans and shocking and 

20 dismaying images of brutality that we see daily are 

21 not apparently caused by racial animus but are largely 

22 due to changes in criminal justice. 

23 We've heard from Dr. Wu earlier that 

24 restorative justice initiatives in states like 

25 California have resulted in -- in the release of tens 
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1 of thousands of convicted felons and the 

2 decriminalization or downgrading of many crimes 

3 previously considered and prosecuted as felonies. 

4 The racial focus of criminal justice 

5 reform has also contributed to the surge in crime. 

6 The death of George Floyd in May 2020 added to the 

7 wave of initiatives to eliminate the carceral state. 

8 The focus of criminal justice reform 

9 appears to be on those who commit crimes and the race 

10 of those who commit crimes at the expense of the

11 rights of victims and the families of all communities.

12 The pendulum has swung too far. The 

13 victims of crime do not only include Asian Americans, 

14 but are actually and tragically disproportionately 

15 Black. 

16 The federal government has historically 

17 had a mixed role in protecting civil rights. On the 

18 one hand, the federal government has been the 

19 perpetrator and participant in almost all of the most 

20 egregious civil rights violations. Conversely, the 

21 federal government has often also protected the rights 

22 of minorities. 

23 Historically, when various states and 

24 localities refuse to provide equal access and 

25 protection, the federal government stepped in. The 
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1 civil rights advances of the nation post-Brown could 

2 not have been achieved without -- without active 

3 federal intervention. 

4 In my opinion, the proper role of the 

5 federal government is to uphold the dearly won 

6 constitutional protections for individuals to avoid 

7 discrimination based on immutable characteristics. Of 

8 late, the government has not only abdicated that duty 

9 but facilitated injustice. 

10 A high profile example of the educational 

11 context involves the decision by the current 

12 administration to have the Solicitor General's Office 

13 support Harvard's bogus claim that its admissions 

14 policies do not discriminate against Asian Americans.

15 In the criminal justice arena, the 

16 gathering and reporting of crime statistics have been 

17 overhauled to focus on hate crimes, masking the 

18 increase in violent crimes that actually drives the 

19 increased violence against Asian Americans and 

20 everyone. 

21 I believe that the federal government 

22 should not and cannot treat any American differently 

23 based on race, ethnicity, or national origin, except 

24 under circumstances that can survive strict scrutiny. 

25 That means the federal government should vigorously 
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1 enforce anti-discrimination laws, regardless of 

2 rationale or claim beneficiary. 

3 If an action or program would be illegal 

4 or prohibited in committed against someone Black, it 

5 should be equally illegal if committed against an 

6 Asian American. 

7 In criminal justice, the federal

8 government should focus its data-gathering efforts to 

9 focus on actually objectively defined crimes, 

10 especially violent crimes. The federal government 

11 needs to step in to aggressively pursue justice for 

12 crime victims when local officials refuse to prosecute 

13 criminals. 

14 Accountability for criminals who lack -- 

15 who attack law-abiding citizens and residents will 

16 deter and decrease anti-Asian violence far more than 

17 national demands not called COVID-19, the China or 

18 Wuhan virus. 

19 COMMISSIONER KIRSANOW: Mr. Cheng, if you 

20 can wrap it up. 

21 MR. CHENG: Almost done. Finally, all 

22 forms of racial injustice including violence against 

23 Asian Americans can only be truly controlled and 

24 eliminated with the concerted -- a concerted effort to 

25 get racial neutrality under law a real chance. 
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1 Nothing good can be achieved by trying to fight past 

2 discrimination with racial discrimination. 

3 The federal government must focus its 

4 efforts, policies, and resources to reducing the 

5 number of victims of racism instead of actively making 

6 new ones. 

7 Thank you for your time and consideration.

8 COMMISSIONER KIRSANOW: Thank you, sir. 

9 Ms. Kulkarni. 

10 MS. KULKARNI: Thank you. Good afternoon, 

11 my name is Manjusha Kulkarni, and I serve as Executive

12 Director of AAPI Equity Alliance and co-founder of 

13 Stop AAPI Hate, along with Cynthia Choi and Russell 

14 Jeung, who spoke earlier today. Thank you for the 

15 opportunity to speak at today's very important 

16 briefing. 

17 In the 2019 report Are Rights a Reality: 

18 Evaluating Federal Civil Rights Enforcement, this 

19 Commission stated the nation still has not reached a 

20 time of recognition of and protection for core civil 

21 rights promises as the norm for all Americans. This 

22 is especially true for Asian Americans and Pacific 

23 Islanders since the pandemic. 

24 In the past three years, our communities 

25 have experienced verbal harassment, civil rights 
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1 violations, and in some limited cases, physical 

2 attacks. As Cynthia Choi outlined, we at Stop AAPI 

3 Hate have received over 11,000 incident reports from 

4 all 50 states and the District of Columbia. 

5 Sadly, these hate incidents have impacted 

6 not only East Asians, but also Southeast Asians and 

7 South Asians. According to a 2021 survey Stop AAPI 

8 Hate did with the Edelman firm, 20 percent of South 

9 Asians have experienced hate incidents. This includes 

10 individuals whose families originate from India, 

11 Pakistan, Sri Lanka, Bangladesh, and Nepal, and who 

12 identify most commonly as Hindu, Muslim, and Sikh. 

13 Some of the most devastating examples of 

14 hate directed at South Asians include not only the 

15 Indianapolis shooting that resulted in the deaths of 

16 four Sikh Americans in 2021, but also the murder of 

17 seven Sikh Americans in 2012 in Oak Creek, Wisconsin, 

18 and the homicides of three South Asians immediately 

19 after 911, one Sikh, one Hindu, and one Muslim. 

20 Given the horrific nature of the 

21 Indianapolis and Atlanta shootings in 2021, it is -- 

22 it is not surprising that Congress passed the COVID-19 

23 hate crimes bill and President Biden signed it into 

24 law in May of the same year. 

25 And yet, immediately after the Atlanta 
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1 attack, FBI Director Christopher Wray stated that race 

2 was not a factor in the Atlanta shooting. Such 

3 comments and the failure to prosecute hate crimes 

4 against Asian Americans stems from the very high 

5 federal standard required. 

6 The “because of” standard has been 

7 interpreted by the courts to mean that individuals can

8 only be found guilty if the protected characteristic 

9 of the victim or target is the sole factor in 

10 willfully causing bodily injury. Similar standards 

11 exist at the state level and inhibit the appropriate 

12 prosecution of hate crimes by White supremacists, 

13 including in Atlanta. 

14 Much attention has been paid to violent 

15 attacks and reports of anti-Asian hate. Analysis of 

16 our Stop AAPI Hate data indicates that the vast 

17 majority do not involve a crime, let alone a hate 

18 crime. Only a minority of the 11,000 involve crimes 

19 such as physical attacks and destruction of property.

20 Seventeen percent involve cases of assault 

21 and battery and four percent vandalism. Of the cases 

22 involving personal injury, very few result in serious 

23 bodily injury that necessitate hate crimes

24 prosecution. 

25 Beyond the fact that only a small minority 
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1 involve crimes, an even more compelling reason not to 

2 rely solely on hate crimes enforcement is the lack of 

3 evidence of its efficacy. Little research has shown 

4 that prosecution of hate crimes for sentencing 

5 enhancements they provide serve as a deterrent to 

6 prevent recidivism among perpetrators or future crimes 

7 by other actors. 

8 Rather, they often lead to more mass 

9 incarceration, especially of African Americans and 

10 Latinx individuals, who commit fewer hate crimes than 

11 Whites, as evidenced by the latest FBI data. 

12 Moreover, such prosecutions do nothing to promote 

13 healing of victims and community members. 

14 Of the 11,000 hate incidents reported to 

15 Stop AAPI Hate, 12 percent involve civil rights 

16 violations. They include workplace discrimination, 

17 discrimination in housing refusal of service in retail 

18 and public accommodations, and bullying in schools. 

19 Given these numbers, it is critical to 

20 look beyond criminal law enforcement towards civil 

21 rights enforcement and civil mechanisms that offer the 

22 possibility of redress. 

23 Key to civil and civil rights approach is 

24 the fact that it holds institutions and not simply 

25 individuals accountable, both public as well as 
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1 private, for discriminatory acts committed against 

2 employees, tenants, students, and customers. A 

3 central remedy of such actions is injunctive relief 

4 ending the racial discrimination itself. 

5 With it can come financial penalties which 

6 offer some level of accountability from the 

7 perpetrating institution along with restitution to 

8 victims or survivors. 

9 Given these facts, we offer the following 

10 recommendations. Number one, improve civil rights 

11 reporting nationwide. 

12 Federal, state, and territory agencies 

13 responsible for enforcing civil rights laws receive 

14 hundreds of thousands of complaints every year, yet 

15 few agencies engage in the type of public data 

16 collection, research, and reporting needed to inform 

17 effective civil rights enforcement, as noted by this 

18 very commission in the 2019 report. 

19 By contrast, federal law requires the 

20 collection of hate crimes data and the data informs 

21 law enforcement administration operations managements 

22 and reveals ongoing and emerging trends. We for this 

23 reason strongly recommend requiring federal civil 

24 rights agencies to collect and report key data related 

25 to civil rights enforcement and the Attorney General 
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1 to annually publish this data. 

2 Number two, update Title II to include 

3 retail stores and other businesses where 

4 discrimination occurs. Title II bans thea 

5 discrimination on the basis of race, color, religion, 

6 and national origin in places of public accommodation. 

7 These heretofore have been limited to restaurants, 

8 hotels, and places of exhibition or entertainment. 

9 Excluded are retail stores such as grocery 

10 stores, markets, banks, beauty salons, and other 

11 businesses. We recommend that legislation amending 

12 the definition expressly include retail stores and 

13 other places where professional services are provided.

14 Number three, codify the language access 

15 coordinator at the U.S. Department of Justice. As 

16 many earlier speakers, have indicated, many in our 

17 community are unable to access the laws and benefits 

18 that come from our federal and state governments 

19 because of lack of language access. 

20 Enshrining a coordinator in federal law 

21 eliminates -- or sorry, elevates its importance and 

22 protects it from changes within administration. For 

23 millions of Asian Americans and Pacific Islanders, 

24 access to justice and the important federal programs 

25 and benefits should not depend on a ability to speak 
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1 English. 

2 Number four, fund state and local 

3 government efforts in partnership with community 

4 groups to address discrimination and other hate 

5 incidents. Federal funding when it is not a hate 

6 crime is uneven. 

7 For example, the Department of Justice 

8 provides a number of federal grants to support state, 

9 local, and tribal enforcement of -- four victims of 

10 crimes. But there's no such program to address hate 

11 incidents that are not crimes or specifically 

12 supporting state and local civil rights enforcement. 

13 Additional resources are needed if we want 

14 to truly address hate and prevent anti-Asian hate 

15 incidents. These and other recommendations are

16 included in Stop AAPI Hate Civil Rights Report and a 

17 law journal article to be published in the Asian 

18 Pacific American Legal Journal, both to be released in 

19 May. 

20 As a former civil rights attorney whose 

21 career began at the Southern Poverty Law Center and 

22 the Mexican American Legal Defense and Education Fund, 

23 I can tell you that truly combating anti-Asian hate 

24 requires a comprehensive approach and not simply one 

25 that primarily relies upon criminal law enforcement. 
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1 Rather, it must include civil rights 

2 enforcement, community safety measures, and education 

3 equity. Only then will the American promise of civil 

4 rights become a reality for Asian Americans. 

5 Thank you very much. 

6 COMMISSIONER KIRSANOW: Thanks to all the 

7 panelists. I just want to state for the record that 

8 Commissioner Mondaire Jones is trying to call in by 

9 phone so that it's noted for the record. 

10 Thank you all for your testimony, I'm 

11 going to leave it open for questions from our 

12 commissioners. 

13 COMMISSIONER ADAMS: Mr. Chairman, thank 

14 you so much for allowing me to speak. Let me thank 

15 all of you for being here today. The information has 

16 been extraordinarily helpful to our case. 

17 I want to just ask a quick question to the 

18 entire panel. President Biden recently issued an 

19 executive order furthering the advancement of racial 

20 and equity support through the federal government. 

21 Do you think that those efforts would help 

22 some of the issues that you're sharing with us here 

23 today? Any of you can give me a response on that. 

24 MS. KULKARNI: I can start. I think those 

25 measures are integral to having true equity in our 
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1 federal government and I think will only enhance some 

2 of the recommendations that I have made, which is to 

3 include a language access coordinator, to ensure that 

4 civil rights violations are included and that data is 

5 collected on a regular basis. And the federal grant 

6 program to look at ways in which we can provide 

7 support to communities. 

8 Jo-Ann described very succinctly how 

9 communities need that support, how community-based 

10 organizations like hers can benefit from it, even when 

11 there are not crimes. 

12 So we absolutely applaud those measure and 

13 appreciate the fact that Asian Americans are being 

14 brought into the context of what it means to have true 

15 equity in the -- in the United States. 

16 MS. WU: So from the perspective of the 

17 victims, I think that it's a good start. But I think 

18 it needs to address a holistic community that is 

19 better. 

20 So the father of Michelle Go, Justin Go, 

21 who lost his daughter to the Times Square subway, he 

22 didn't speak out for a year. But on the one year 

23 anniversary of his death -- her death, he wrote a New 

24 York Times op ed. 

25 And while the op ed focused in part on the 
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1 life that Michelle lived, the solution that he had for 

2 how to stop this was not focused on necessarily the 

3 Asian community. 

4 This is what he wrote: We cannot abandon 

5 people like Michelle's attacker, Martial Simon, to our 

6 subway systems. We cannot assume that emergency 

7 medical workers will be able to handle these neglected 

8 souls or that ordinary individuals will be able to 

9 deal with the threats posed. 

10 Real change comes with meaningful 

11 preventative measures. This requires, among other 

12 things, adequate and continued funding for housing, 

13 treatment, and other programs. We have to take care 

14 of all of our community. It is not simple as saying 

15 that if we direct resources to the Asian community, 

16 that that is enough. 

17 MS. CHOI: I'd like to follow up, if I 

18 may. The fact, the piece that I want to lift up is 

19 that this executive order mandates that key agencies 

20 establish some kind of sustained dialog with impacted 

21 communities. And that's key. 

22 As you can see from this panel, we have a 

23 diverse set of opinions in terms of interpreting the 

24 data, understanding the diverse experiences of our 

25 communities. But it's very important to talk with 
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1 those community-based organizations that are actually 

2 serving those who are impacted. 

3 So for example, we have a visit coming to 

4 San Francisco to learn about the types of investments 

5 that need to be made around victim services. We know 

6 that healing and recovery takes intensive resources 

7 and coordination. 

8 And we have to get to a point where we're 

9 actually preventing incidents of violence. And we can 

10 only do that by working with other communities who are 

11 also affected by crime and by violence as well. And 

12 that's absolutely key. 

13 In California, we made a historic $166 

14 million dollar investment going largely to community15 based organizations doing just that work. And that's 

16 what it's going to take in the long term. 

17 COMMISSIONER KIRSANOW: Commissioner 

18 Magpantay. 

19 COMMISSIONER MAGPANTAY: Thank you all for 

20 your comments. I've heard a lot about -- and I think 

21 on affirmative action we're going to hear from the 

22 Supreme Court very shortly around those issues. So 

23 that might just sort of lay out what the law is for 

24 all of us. 

25 But on the question on language access, 
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1 and I think Mr. Yang had talked about this earlier, is 

2 that President Bush signed this executive order, 

3 13166, and a number of you had talked about the need 

4 to have DAs, police, services that are available in 

5 the myriad languages that Asian Americans speak. 

6 There is a federal standard in -- either 

7 you don't have to do everything in every language 

8 every place, right? There is a standard to do that 

9 that the government has -- could you just talk a

10 little bit about that? 

11 Because I want to make sure that our 

12 services that our agencies provide under federal law, 

13 under Bush's executive order and subsequently signed, 

14 comport with the language minority groups in those 

15 populations when they need those services. 

16 MS. WU: So I mean my -- from my 

17 perspective, there's been no -- it doesn't conform, 

18 right. Language accesses are not provided. But let 

19 me just explain how these cases come in. I'm a patent 

20 lawyer, people don't normally call me about, you know,

21 when someone dies. 

22 But what happens is the first person on 

23 the scene of a crime is almost always a reporter. The 

24 reporter is often the Asian reporter, but they may not 

25 speak the specific dialect. 
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1 The reason I got roped into this is I work 

2 in the community and they would call me and say do you 

3 know someone who speaks this dialect, do you know 

4 someone that'll speak this dialect. I have broad, 

5 diverse friends of Asian, you know, different 

6 dialects, and they would ask me to hook them up with 

7 interpreters. 

8 One of the most important things in 

9 criminal prosecution is the interpreter, because the 

10 interpreter is the voice of the victim. If the voice 

11 of the victim is not being heard in front of the grand 

12 jury, this is really devastating to just the charges 

13 that are being brought. 

14 What you often find with the DA is that 

15 they drop the hate crime charge because it's not 

16 necessary. You have a murder charge, you might as 

17 well just go for the 20 years to life. 

18 What does adding two to three years mean 

19 to you, and what's that additional burden of proof, 

20 particularly if you have a language access issue where 

21 the victim isn't speaking clearly about what was being 

22 said when the attack was happening? 

23 One of the cases that stands out to me was 

24 the witness was speaking Spanish, the victim was 

25 speaking Chinese, and we had two interpreters both 
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1 translating for the grand jury. As some of you may 

2 know, in Asian languages the words “he” and “she” are 

3 the same. Maybe that's progressive in some way, 

4 right. 

5 So if you say, “I think he did it,” that 

6 could sound like “I think she did it.” And this is 

7 important if the interpreter is not a good 

8 interpreter, because they have to know from context 

9 whether that word is he or she. 

10 In that case it was going before a grand 

11 jury for a hate crime charge. The interpreter, we had 

12 worked with the interpreter so they could understand 

13 the context of this. But nevertheless, they got the 

14 word wrong. They said, “I think he did it” when it 

15 should have been “I think she did it,” or “I saw her 

16 coming around the corner” instead of “I saw him.” 

17 And I think that the interpreter was very 

18 upset because they thought that they may jeopardize 

19 the hate crime charge. We were able to talk to the

20 ADA and get that sort of sorted out and the hate crime 

21 charge did go in. 

22 But one of the most stressful things to do 

23 is to be interpreter in one of these cases, because 

24 you think that the case turns on the language you use 

25 and the emotion that you put into it. So if you have 
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1 a man translating for a woman, it's not quite as 

2 effective to be honest with you. 

3 And I, as a native Chinese speaker who 

4 didn't speak English till I was six, I don't always 

5 agree with the interpretation that's happening. 

6 So I think there's nuance to the 

7 interpretation. It's not simply just finding any 

8 interpreter who can sit there. But it's an 

9 interpreter who can sit with the witness through all 

10 of this. 

11 And one of the reasons I think this is so 

12 important is when I started this work, I knew nothing 

13 about civil rights really. And I went to the great 

14 Loretta Lynch, who was a partner of mine at the time, 

15 and she had handled many cases in the Black community.

16 And I said, “Loretta, what do I need to do 

17 to do civil rights work?” And her answer was, “you 

18 need a good interpreter.” And she actually gave me 

19 her personal interpreter from the Eastern District of 

20 New York when she was the U.S. Attorney there. And 

21 that's how I started along this path. 

22 And so for those who want to really do 

23 this work, finding good interpreters who are court24 certified who can actually work with the witnesses and 

25 will often do it at their own dime, because we're 
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1 charging sort of a lower rate to do court certified 

2 work, it's super important. 

3 And then the second thing I just want to 

4 mention is that a lot of community organizations, when 

5 I've asked them to have people become court-certified, 

6 they don't want to. They don't want to do this kind 

7 of work, it's traumatic. You're working with victims, 

8 right. 

9 And so among the people I could lean on 

10 for one Chinese dialect when I was looking, I only had

11 three people. And I paid them double, you know, with 

12 the good fortune of my law firm paying them double to 

13 have them on call. So that any time the DA wanted 

14 this person to come appear and testified or even just 

15 have a witness interviewed, this interpreter was 

16 available. 

17 And that's why private people have stepped 

18 in to provide these services, I think. Because the 

19 criminal justice system either doesn't have enough 

20 funding or doesn't have enough training in order to 

21 really prosecute these crimes to the degree that they 

22 need to be prosecuted. 

23 And let's put yourself in the shoes of the 

24 ADA. Why put in a hate crime penalty enhancement if 

25 you don't have to? Why prove something if you don't 
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1 need to? It's only a penalty enhancement, it doesn't 

2 get you the original crime. And to be honest with 

3 you, you know, sometimes it's not worth it. 

4 And I'll just tell one more anecdote just 

5 so you can get a sense of this. In the case in Queens 

6 where there was a delivery worker who was killed on 

7 his scooter, this was famously called the duck sauce 

8 killer case. One of -- the Great Wall restaurant 

9 owner to court to the grand jury to testify that he'd 

10 been threatened, and that's why this delivery worked 

11 had been shot. 

12 And he brought with him what he said was 

13 his interpreter, a family member. It turned out that 

14 this family member, this woman that he said was a 

15 family member, was a member of the Chinese media 

16 newspaper. And she then revealed portions of the 

17 secret grand jury to the Chinese press thereafter. 

18 These kinds of incidents jeopardize the 

19 criminal prosecution. As you could imagine, the 

20 District Attorney was not so happy with that. 

21 And so part of the things that we're doing 

22 in providing a wrap-around services and acting as an 

23 advocate is also safeguarding our criminal justice 

24 system so that the victims can obtain the kind of the 

25 justice that I think that we as Americans have come to 
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1 really expect and really rely on and I honestly think 

2 is one of the great things about our country. 

3 COMMISSIONER KIRSANOW: Thank you. 

4 MS. KULKARNI: May I go next? 

5 COMMISSIONER KIRSANOW: Would you like to 

6 finish up? 

7 MS. KULKARNI: Yes. So I wanted -- I'm 

8 reading from the Federal Register, Title VI of the 

9 Civil Rights Act of 1964 provides that no person shall 

10 be subjected to discrimination on the basis of race, 

11 color, or national origin under any program or 

12 activity that receives federal financial assistance. 

13 The purpose of this policy guidance is to 

14 clarify the responsibilities of providers of health 

15 and social services from the U.S. Department of Health 

16 and Human Services fulfill their responsibilities to 

17 limited English-proficient persons by providing 

18 language access. 

19 And it goes on to say that individuals 

20 providing those services must ensure that limited 

21 English-proficient persons have meaningful access to 

22 programs and services, and the guidance provides 

23 examples and further clarification of these policies 

24 and practices. 

25 So I think it's very important that for 
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1 what we're talking about today, the federal government 

2 has already weighed in and said that it is mandatory 

3 that limited English-proficient individuals get 

4 language access for any services that come from 

5 funding from the federal government. And that applies 

6 to so many different services at state and local 

7 levels. 

8 COMMISSIONER NOURSE: Could I ask -- 

9 COMMISSIONER KIRSANOW: Mr. Cheng? 

10 MR. CHENG: Yeah, so I would strongly 

11 support all the efforts, initiatives to make sure that 

12 there are adequate and even enhanced services 

13 available for victims, including language services. 

14 That said, I keep coming back to I think 

15 the forest and the trees. You know, we're talking 

16 about a lot of trees, different services available for 

17 victims. My hope is that we can focus on trying to 

18 make sure that there are fewer victims. 

19 You know, my hope is that we can take -- 

20 the federal government can take a hard look at a lot 

21 of the efforts right now that decriminalize activities 

22 and actions, that downgrade criminal acts, the -- that 

23 discourage criminals from being arrested. That 

24 discourage criminals from being prosecuted. That 

25 result in early release of felons. That result in 
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1 repeated release of felons. 

2 Those are all contributors to the making 

3 of victims. And my hope is that we have fewer 

4 victims. 

5 COMMISSIONER KIRSANOW: Commissioner 

6 Nourse. 

7 COMMISSIONER NOURSE: Yeah, Ms. Jennifer 

8 Wu, thank you very much for your work. I started out 

9 my legal career at Paul, Weiss, so welcome. 

10 I just want to make clear you've been 

11 dealing with the Manhattan, or the New York DAs. 

12 Because there's a difficulty in criminal law, which I 

13 taught for 15 years, which is that the federal 

14 government has a supervisory responsibility over 

15 certain kinds of crime, right. 

16 And the Supreme Court actually seeks to 

17 enforce increasingly limits on the ability of the 

18 federal government to address crime. 

19 Now, there is a Hate Crimes Act. There 

20 are very few prosecutions, right. But the principle 

21 of responsibility is the state and locality, right? 

22 And so the question would be whether under 

23 current federal law there is some responsibility on 

24 behalf of the money that comes out of the Department 

25 of Justice to be spent on these kinds of things. I 
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1 think that's why Ms. Kulkarni suggested that there 

2 already are federal laws, whether they're implemented 

3 or not is another question. 

4 Do you have any knowledge, that was a long 

5 lead up to do you have any knowledge about needs 

6 inside the DOJ about their hate crimes prosecution? 

7 Because I'd like to hear that from you. 

8 MS. WU: You know, our contact with DOJ is 

9 relatively limited. My understanding is that I don't 

10 think that the resources are devoted to anti-Asian 

11 hate crimes. 

12 That there are kind of, there's a big hate 

13 crime kind of, you know, sort of department, but 

14 similar to the Manhattan DA's office to this kind of 

15 pandemic of anti-Asian hate, you didn't have people 

16 who specialized in anti-Asian hate crimes, and none of 

17 them were Asian. 

18 And that's an important cultural fact. 

19 Asians tend to under-report. One of the things that I 

20 did in my Manhattan DA training was probably I would 

21 do it for DOJ if they wanted to, was when you ask an 

22 anti-Asian hate victim or a witness what do you do for 

23 a living, the answer is almost always a lie. 

24 If they are working, they may not be being 

25 paid above the books, they think, right. So they say 
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1 oh, I don't do anything, I just help friends out, so 

2 that's a lie. 

3 If they aren't working, they're 

4 embarrassed, and so they say I have a job. But they 

5 can't articulate what the job is. They're sort of 

6 unique facets to anti-Asian hate where I think that 

7 the tension you have is the Asian community would like 

8 to have reporting so you can get funding, you can 

9 address these issues. 

10 Individuals on the other hand are 

11 embarrassed. The biggest complaint I hear from my 

12 victim is my face is in the newspaper. That means all 

13 the friends and family of the perpetrator are going to 

14 come get me. 

15 They're afraid for their own safety and 

16 they don't want to report. So they want to do it 

17 anonymously. So all these news cameras, the 

18 Commission, everyone who's coming in their face, the 

19 DA, they're scared. They lock the door, they don't 

20 want to. 

21 And one of the kind of roles that I play 

22 is getting them to open the door, to say I will talk 

23 to the DA, I will talk to the police, and I will talk 

24 to everyone else. And the reason they won't open the 

25 door is the same reason that my own parents didn't let 
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1 me open the door when I was growing up in the 1980s. 

2 My parents, in a very safe household, 

3 every time the doorbell rang, they would have me and 

4 my sister go hide in the closet. Every single time. 

5 Whether it was the post person, the FedEx person, a 

6 car accident person, a neighbor. Girl Scout cookies, 

7 I was a Girl Scout, I would never open the door. 

8 And only when I was a teenager when I went 

9 to a friend's house, they opened the door when the 

10 doorbell rang, I realized that my parents had a fear 

11 of institutions. Of not being perceived as American, 

12 even though they were law-abiding Americans. 

13 They were so American that I'm named 

14 Jennifer after Jennifer Jones, the Western actress. 

15 And my sister was named Mindy after Mork and Mindy. 

16 That's how American they are, right. And even then, 

17 they didn't open the door. 

18 So I think the federal response, whether 

19 it's from the DOJ or from a different agency, needs to 

20 focus on, you know, I appreciate kind of everything

21 everyone said, but focus on getting victims to open 

22 the door. 

23 Because these are people who've lost trust 

24 in American society. Whether it's because of the 

25 pandemic or because of something else or because 
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1 they're immigrants, or over time, and these are the 

2 bonds that bring us together as a community. 

3 And if they're broken, you know, that sort 

4 of is -- they will be no impact to the federal 

5 response if they won't open the door when they -- 

6 people come offering help. 

7 And then this last thing I just want to 

8 say is that I agree with the Commissioner on 

9 affirmative action. I don't think a single one of my 

10 victims would have been saved if affirmative action 

11 was not in effect, right. 

12 And so the issue here is that people are 

13 dying. They aren't taking the resources. It's hard 

14 to help them, and that's why you have private 

15 practitioners like me stepping in to offer not money, 

16 but just help and emotional support. And what they 

17 see in me is the thing that I didn't see in myself. 

18 They see that I'm Asian. 

19 MS. KULKARNI: May I also answer that 

20 question regarding DOJ? I have some statistics. As I 

21 included in my law journal article, of the 66,000 hate 

22 crimes reported to law enforcement between 2010 and 

23 2019, only 1,200 were investigated by U.S. attorneys 

24 in matters involving the violation of federal hate 

25 crime statutes. 
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1 Of that figure, the U.S. Justice 

2 Department only referred 208 for prosecution. So just 

3 to give you an idea of what actually gets prosecuted, 

4 and let me add that the state auditor's report in 

5 California listed three significant reasons for gaps, 

6 and of course those are based on state laws. 

7 But one thing that's applicable across all 

8 50 states is that in up to 50 percent of cases, local 

9 law enforcement officials failed to include the factor 

10 of race in the police report. 

11 So police themselves are unable or 

12 refusing to see race as a factor. And so for that 

13 reason, much of the hate crimes prosecution doesn't 

14 happen. 

15 COMMISSIONER MAGPANTAY: Could you say the 

16 citation? 

17 MS. KULKARNI: That's the state auditor's 

18 report of -- oh, yes, please. It's from 2018. 

19 MS. CHOI: Could I also add one point, 

20 because we often critique the federal government. I 

21 do want to applaud that DOJ hired its first dedicated 

22 language access coordinator. 

23 And that is after decades of advocating 

24 for the need to have some dedicated staff looking at 

25 the issue, what the barriers are for individuals 
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1 reporting, for ensuring that we offer culturally 

2 competent and language-accessible services. 

3 And so I do want to note that for the 

4 record, that that has been an important and 

5 affirmative I would say step that's really important 

6 to our community. 

7 MR. CHENG: I actually would like to ask 

8 both the commissioners and my fellow panelists this 

9 question, because I'm struggling a little bit with 

10 some basic logic, right. 

11 So I've been -- I have mentioned the fact 

12 that I believe that a systemic decrease in crime would 

13 actually decrease hate crimes. I'm completely 

14 supportive of prosecuting hate crimes, making it 

15 easier to prosecute hate crimes. 

16 In effect, basically throwing not just the 

17 book but a heavier book at people who attack and 

18 commit violence against other people based upon race 

19 and ethnicity. 

20 But again, I keep coming back for myself 

21 to, gosh, you know, if crimes were systemically 

22 prosecuted in a competent way, and ideology didn't 

23 enter into decisions to not prosecute criminals and 

24 let criminals out early, wouldn't that actually help 

25 victims of hate crimes as well? 
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1 MS. WU: I think for my victims the answer 

2 is no, because the crime is so overwhelming, they're 

3 in shock, right. They're not thinking systemically. 

4 And while I don't doubt the data and that 

5 there might be some logic in there, I think the real 

6 issue is what is our federal response right now. You 

7 know, what are we going to do now when people are 

8 dying and they have died. And how can we prevent the 

9 loss of another life. 

10 Questions about what justice means are 

11 going to vary. The answers will vary to each of you 

12 as they will to me. But the reality is that we're all 

13 human and the loss of a human life in America is a 

14 tragedy. 

15 And that we should take that very 

16 seriously, not just in terms of the numbers, not just 

17 in terms of the data, but because we care about each 

18 other. And that we are community regardless of the 

19 race or the, you know, our gender, our skin. 

20 And having worked with so many of these 

21 victims who've died in New York City, I can tell you 

22 that there is a tidal wave of anti-Asian violence. 

23 I am a patent lawyer. I didn't become a 

24 civil rights lawyer till 2020. This is not an 

25 accident, right, I didn't come out to want to testify 
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1 before this commission. 

2 I wish I did not have any more clients who 

3 were dead. I was not in probate court, that I wasn't 

4 dealing with these issues, I wasn't going to NYPD to 

5 pick up the belongings of people who are deceased. 

6 This is not just about looking at the 

7 data. We see it on the ground here, and we're just 

8 begging the federal government for a response. 

9 COMMISSIONER HERIOT: This is a question 

10 for Jennifer Wu. Have to use your first name in this 

11 panel. I'm struck by your testimony. The previous 

12 panel also had similar testimony about waves, tidal 

13 waves, the violence, the cruelty. 

14 And you talk about a lack of federal 

15 response. And I know we've heard evidence or 

16 statistics about how rare things are to be prosecuted. 

17 But my question is have you talked with the Civil 

18 Rights Division about these cases? Because they have 

19 people who are better trained to open those doors, 

20 right. 

21 Have you talked to the Civil Rights 

22 Division about getting some of these particular 

23 clients or the next victim protected or having federal 

24 -- because they sound like federal civil rights 

25 violations, right. 
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1 MS. WU: Yeah, so we've talked to them, 

2 but the solutions haven't been immediate enough, 

3 right. So for many of our clients, there -- it's the

4 initial stage of grief, right. They've lost a family 

5 member. And the solutions that the federal government 

6 is giving are years away. 

7 And we, as we all know from our criminal 

8 justice system, particularly at the federal level, the 

9 first part of a criminal case is about protection of 

10 the defendant's rights. It's about discovery because 

11 you're presumed innocent, right. 

12 And so what they want is discovery to 

13 show, you know, kind of why that person could be 

14 innocent. It's not victim-centered. So if you're the 

15 victim, particularly if you're from a country that's 

16 not the United States, this is a very foreign concept, 

17 right. Where you might presume guilty versus 

18 innocence. 

19 And so I'm not sure that it's necessarily 

20 about the actual conviction for a lot of the victims. 

21 But it's about does the federal government care, do 

22 they recognize that there's a tidal wave. Do they 

23 know that this is an important issue, and have they 

24 committed funding and resources. 

25 We are constantly encountering lack of 
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1 resources at every level of the criminal prosecution, 

2 including at the federal level. 

3 COMMISSIONER HERIOT: Are you encountering 

4 this at the U.S. Attorney's Office, or are you 

5 encountering this at the Civil Rights Division? 

6 MS. WU: It's the U.S. Attorney's Office I 

7 would say. Yeah. 

8 COMMISSIONER HERIOT: There's a fellow I'd 

9 recommend you talk to, his name is Jim Felte. He's 

10 the head of the Criminal Section in the Civil Rights 

11 Division. Maybe instead of the SDNY or the EDNY, it 

12 might be a good idea to actually talk to the Civil 

13 Rights Division and see if they'll change your 

14 experience. 

15 MS. WU: Right, thank you very much. 

16 COMMISSIONER KIRSANOW: I want to thank 

17 all of the panelists. We're a little bit beyond our 

18 time right now, so thanks very much. And we'll take a 

19 short break for ten minutes at 2:00 -- I'm sorry, 3:45 

20 we'll have our next panel. 

21 (Whereupon, the above-entitled matter went 

22 off the record at 3:32 p.m. and resumed at 3:42 p.m.)

23 PANEL 3: LAW ENFORCEMENT & FORMER FEDERAL OFFICIALS 

24 COMMISSIONER KIRSANOW: All right, welcome 

25 to the final panel of today's briefing on the federal 
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1 response to anti-Asian racism, and our panels are 

2 members of law enforcement and current and former 

3 federal officials. 

4 And I'll repeat what I said before and 

5 that is each panelist gets, well, this time, more time 

6 actually because there's only three of you, so take as 

7 much time as you want. Oh, four of you, okay, but 

8 still. We have two by Zoom, all right. 

9 You'll each have seven minutes in which to 

10 testify, and when the warning lights come on, please, 

11 you know, pay attention to these lights up here as 

12 they give you some guidance as to how much time you've 

13 got left, and then after you've all testified, we'll 

14 ask the Commissioners to ask the panelists any 

15 questions they may have. 

16 The panelists in this panel are Eric 

17 Dreiband, Former Assistant Attorney General for Civil 

18 Rights at the U.S. Department of Justice, and current 

19 partner at a small firm called Jones Day; Devon 

20 Westhill, Former Assistant Secretary of Civil Rights 

21 at the U.S. Department of Agriculture, and current 

22 President and General Counsel of the Center for Equal 

23 Opportunity, say hello to Roger for me; Detective 

24 Orlando Martinez, there we go, Hate Crimes Coordinator 

25 for the LAPD; and we have by Zoom, William Scott, 
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1 Police Chief with San Francisco, and the lovely and 

2 talented Michael Yaki, Former Member of the U.S. 

3 Commission on Civil Rights. Welcome. Mr. Dreiband? 

4 MR. DREIBAND: Thank you. Good afternoon, 

5 Members of the Commission, and thank you for inviting 

6 me to today's briefing. My name is Eric Dreiband and 

7 I'm a partner at the law firm of Jones Day in 

8 Washington, D.C. 

9 I served as the Assistant Attorney General 

10 for the Civil Rights Division at the United States 

11 Department of Justice from 2018 to 2021, and I'm here 

12 today at your invitation to speak about the federal 

13 response to anti-Asian discrimination in the United 

14 States. 

15 While my discussion today will focus in 

16 part on hate crimes, during my tenure at the Justice 

17 Department, we prosecuted other crimes and sought 

18 justice for Asians and Asian American victims. 

19 And for example, in the area of human 

20 trafficking, the Department convicted several 

21 defendants for operating an international sex 

22 trafficking organization that coerced hundreds of Thai 

23 women into engaging in commercial sex acts across the 

24 United States, and I want to focus though today on our 

25 response to the issues that occurred during the 
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1 pandemic. 

2 And in the very early stages of the 

3 pandemic in March of 2020, Attorney General William 

4 Barr and I instructed Justice Department prosecutors 

5 across the United States that the Department would not 

6 tolerate hate-motivated acts of violence, including 

7 any such acts against Asians and Asian Americans. 

8 On April 9, 2020, I announced publicly 

9 that the Department would not tolerate civil rights 

10 violations during the pandemic, and I explained that 

11 the Justice Department's pandemic-related work 

12 includes enforcing disability rights laws, protecting 

13 religious liberty, and prosecuting hate crimes. 

14 I also explained that because the 

15 coronavirus originated in China, some people have 

16 targeted Asian Americans and Asians simply because of 

17 their ethnicity and that this conduct has no place in 

18 America, and I added the Justice Department will 

19 prosecute hate crimes and violations of anti20 discrimination laws against Asian Americans, Asians, 

21 and others to the fullest extent of the law. 

22 Next, on April 27, 2020, Attorney General 

23 Barr directed me and Matthew Schneider, who was then 

24 the United States Attorney for the Eastern District of 

25 Michigan, to oversee and coordinate our efforts to 
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1 monitor state and local policies, and if necessary, 

2 take action to correct them. 

3 Attorney General Barr stated, quote, “the 

4 Constitution is not suspended in times of crisis. We 

5 must therefore be vigilant to ensure its protections 

6 are preserved at the same time that the public is 

7 protected.” 

8 During my remaining time at the Justice 

9 Department, the Civil Rights Division and the United 

10 States Attorney partners across the country led the 

11 Department's efforts to investigate and address civil

12 rights issues related to the pandemic and other 

13 issues, including issues about anti-Asian 

14 discrimination. 

15 In 2020, my last full year at the 

16 Department, the Department charged the highest number 

17 of hate crimes cases in two decades. 

18 We encountered another form of anti-Asian 

19 discrimination during my tenure at the Justice 

20 Department, namely discrimination against Asian 

21 American applicants to Harvard and Yale Colleges. 

22 In the Harvard case, the Department 

23 launched an investigation after Asian American 

24 applicants complained about alleged discrimination by 

25 Harvard. The Department also supported the plaintiffs 
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1 in a private lawsuit brought against Harvard. 

2 When the District Court rules in favor of 

3 Harvard, the plaintiffs appealed. We filed a brief in 

4 support of the plaintiffs in the Court of Appeals. 

5 Our brief asserted that Harvard's race 

6 discrimination and its expansive use of race in

7 admissions was unlawful, that Harvard actively engaged 

8 in unlawful racial balancing, that Harvard's 

9 admissions office consistently and inexplicably scored 

10 Asian American applicants lower than other applicants 

11 on an entirely subjective personal rating, and Asian 

12 American applicants, it was clear in the record, to 

13 Harvard ranked the highest in academic and 

14 extracurricular qualifications. 

15 And given the results of the personal 

16 ratings, Harvard expected us to believe that these 

17 same applicants lacked courage, integrity, confidence, 

18 perseverance, and leadership qualities compared to 

19 other applicants, yet Harvard had no explanation for 

20 the disparities in the personal ratings. 

21 I appeared personally at oral argument on 

22 behalf of the United States before the Court of

23 Appeals and explained that Harvard illegally monitored 

24 the evolving racial composition of the class at every 

25 stage of the process illegally to produce a racially 
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1 balanced class. I emphasized that Harvard pervasively 

2 and illegally used race at every step of its process.

3 The court affirmed the District Court's 

4 decision and the case is pending before the Supreme 

5 Court of the United States with a decision expected 

6 probably at the end of June of this year. 

7 In the Yale case, the Department 

8 investigated allegations that Yale University violated 

9 the Civil Rights Act of 1964 by the widespread acts of 

10 unlawful race and national origin discrimination in 

11 college admissions. 

12 On August 13, 2020, the Department 

13 determined that Yale violated the Civil Rights Act's 

14 prohibitions against race and national origin 

15 discrimination. 

16 The Department also determined that Yale's 

17 multi-decade use of race continues unabated without 

18 any serious effort by Yale to consider an admissions 

19 process that is free of race discrimination. 

20 When we announced the Department's 

21 determination in the Yale case, I said publicly, 

22 quote, “There is no such thing as a nice form of race 

23 discrimination. Unlawfully dividing Americans into 

24 racial and ethnic blocks fosters stereotypes, 

25 bitterness, and division.” 
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1 We were unable to reach a resolution with 

2 Yale, and so on October 8, 2020, the Department sued 

3 Yale. The complaint alleged that Yale illegally 

4 discriminated against applicants to Yale College on 

5 the grounds of race and national origin, and that 

6 Yale's discrimination injured racially disfavored 

7 applicants, including in particular, most Asian 

8 American and White applicants. The complaint also 

9 alleged that Yale injured African American and Asian 

10 American applicants by the use of racial stereotypes 

11 and racial balancing. 

12 When we filed suit against Yale, I 

13 observed that for centuries, people from all over the 

14 world have left their ancestral homes and come to the 

15 United States hoping that they and their families 

16 could enjoy equal opportunity in pursuit of the 

17 American dream. 

18 Countless Americans have pursued their 

19 dreams through higher education and they continue to 

20 do so, and all persons who apply for admission to 

21 colleges and universities should expect and know that 

22 they will be judged by their character, talents, and 

23 achievements, and not the color of their skin. To do 

24 otherwise is to permit our institutions to foster 

25 stereotypes, bitterness, and division. 
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1 After I left the Department of Justice, 

2 the Department moved to dismiss the case against Yale, 

3 and with that, I look forward to your questions. 

4 Thank you. 

5 COMMISSIONER KIRSANOW: Thank you, Mr. 

6 Dreiband. Mr. Westhill? 

7 MR. WESTHILL: Thank you very much. I 

8 really appreciate the opportunity to talk about this 

9 important subject. I'm honored to be here. It's very 

10 important to me. 

11 I am Devon Westhill. I run the Center for 

12 Equal Opportunity, which is an organization that, for 

13 almost 30 years, has advocated for color blind non14 discrimination in America. 

15 My primary concern today is how the 

16 federal government regards the civil rights of Asian 

17 Americans and that of other Americans who, as a result 

18 of their racial or ethnic identity, are treated 

19 differently, contrary to the American guarantee of 

20 equal protection under the law. 

21 In particular, I'm worried about efforts 

22 to promote the concept of equity in many spheres of 

23 American life, but I'll focus my remarks primarily on 

24 the federal government's activities. 

25 First, I will describe and comment on a 
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1 few examples of the Biden Administration equity 

2 agenda, some of which I've already heard about today. 

3 You can find more in my written statement, of course. 

4 Then, I'll describe what the concept of 

5 equity entails, and then I'll explain why I think it's 

6 problematic for the protection of civil rights, 

7 especially for Asian Americans. I'll close by briefly 

8 suggesting a better way forward and what this 

9 distinguished body can do to address the issues I 

10 identify. 

11 So, on January 20, 2021, just hours into 

12 office, President Biden signed an executive order to 

13 establish an ambitious whole-of-government equity 

14 agenda, signaling that in his administration, there 

15 would be a major effort to coordinate efforts to embed 

16 equity principles, policies, and approaches across the 

17 federal government. 

18 Within the same week, the President issued 

19 a memo essentially condemning anti-Asian racism and 

20 admitting that the federal government deserved some 

21 blame for it. However, almost all of the 

22 Administration's actions to further the government's 

23 interests in equity have been at odds with that memo.

24 For example, February 3, 2021, the 

25 Department of Justice dropped its lawsuit filed by the 
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1 Justice Department in the previous administration 

2 against Yale University alleging anti-Asian 

3 discrimination in its admissions. 

4 This was only a few months after the

5 Justice Department claimed based on, quote, voluminous 

6 admissions data they reviewed, that Yale University 

7 violated and is continuing to violate Title VI by 

8 discriminating on the basis of race and national 

9 origin in its undergraduate admissions, that Yale's 

10 discrimination is longstanding, ongoing, and 

11 significantly disfavors Asian Americans. 

12 On June 25, 2021, President Biden signed 

13 another EO to advance diversity, equity, inclusion, 

14 and accessibility to, quote, determine whether and to 

15 what extent agency practices result in inequitable 

16 employment outcomes rather than unequal employment 

17 opportunities. 

18 On December 8, 2021, the Biden Justice 

19 Department urged unsuccessfully the Supreme Court to 

20 decline taking two cases alleging discrimination in 

21 admissions against Asian applicants to Harvard 

22 University and the University of North Carolina, one 

23 of my alma maters. 

24 Later, the Biden Administration urged the 

25 court to rule against the group of Asian American 
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1 petitioners challenging race discrimination in Harvard 

2 University admissions in both briefing materials and 

3 oral argument. 

4 Just last month, and we heard earlier 

5 today in this briefing, President Biden signed yet 

6 another EO on advancing government-wide equity. Vice 

7 President Kamala Harris expressed on her official

8 Twitter account her thoughts behind the motivation for 

9 the directive, quote, “America is the promise of 

10 equity and justice for all. Today, President Biden 

11 signed an executive order that puts our nation one 

12 step closer to achieving that promise,” end quote. 

13 It was a telling admission that the 

14 current administration has perhaps less commitment to 

15 our pledge of allegiance's promise of liberty and 

16 justice for all. 

17 Indeed, Vice President Harris' change in 

18 terminology comports with the Biden Administration 

19 equity fixation. In fact, in the most recent EO, for 

20 example, equity is mentioned 63 times, but liberty

21 gets no mention at all. 

22 It's not just executive actions, 

23 memoranda, and court cases that make up the Biden 

24 equity agenda. The administration has pushed equity 

25 legislative priorities such as granting only farmers 
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1 of color debt relief, federal programs, corporate 

2 board representation, and more aggressive reporting on 

3 and gathering of, quote, equitable data. 

4 The federal government's equity agenda 

5 appears to consist of identifying disparities in 

6 outcomes and attempted to close them by preferential 

7 treatment based on race or other immutable 

8 characteristics such as ancestral lineage. That's 

9 immoral, it's illegal, and it's undeniable that the 

10 federal government has put forward massive efforts to 

11 deliver on it. Equity is not equality. 

12 The currently fashionable term equity is 

13 not contained in our civil rights laws and one might 

14 question to seek to investigate given that equity 

15 initiatives target federally protected classes whether 

16 equity initiatives might frustrate or impede civil 

17 rights protection and enforcement. 

18 Indeed, equity is not synonymous with 

19 equality. We need look no further than top government 

20 officials own pronouncements to learn this. For 

21 example, on November 1, 2020, once again Vice 

22 President tweeted a video from her official government 

23 Twitter page where she acknowledged, quote, “there's a 

24 big difference between equality and equity.” Equality 

25 suggests, quote, “oh, everyone should get the same
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1 amount. Equitable treatment means we all end up in 

2 the same place.” 

3 I say believe them when they say the quiet 

4 part out loud. Contrary to the focus on equity5 engineered outcomes, equality of opportunity seeks to 

6 remove barriers that otherwise close doors to 

7 opportunity. 

8 I have firsthand experience as the leader 

9 of the civil rights program at USDA. There, for 

10 example, we have redesigned and implemented a better 

11 department-wide reasonable accommodation policy for 

12 Americans with disabilities, thereby opening the door 

13 of opportunity to people, putting their talents to 

14 work for the public interest. I have more examples. 

15 The insistence that we must produce equal 

16 outcomes among groups defined by skin color, national 

17 origin, or gender perverts the American understanding 

18 of justice based on individual rights as achievable 

19 only by substituting authoritarian methods that 

20 trample those rights, and there is no good reason to 

21 believe that people or groups of people should even 

22 all end up in the same place as Vice President Kamala 

23 Harris has said. 

24 This brings me to my main point. Asian 

25 Americans are a disfavored group under the equity 
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1 regime because of their success. Equity initiatives, 

2 as discussed, seek to reach proportional outcomes for 

3 groups. 

4 That is especially problematic for Asian 

5 Americans in certain areas of American life within 

6 which they exceed in disproportionate numbers. Many 

7 Asian Americans are culturally dedicated to academic 

8 achievement and family cohesion. 

9 That devotion has led to representation in 

10 fields that outstrip their proportion to the general 

11 population. So, in a system where outcomes must 

12 reflect proportionality, Asian Americans can occupy 

13 only their proportional share, approximately seven 

14 percent. 

15 Achieving equitable outcomes means both 

16 providing preferences to artificially inflate the 

17 proportion of and lowering standards for certain 

18 groups, and also bringing down other over-represented 

19 races like Asian Americans to their proportion of the 

20 population. 

21 These are the two sides of the same equity 

22 coin. Neither side can be satisfied without violating 

23 federal civil rights laws or the constitutional 

24 principle of equal protection under the law since both 

25 require divvying us up by race. 
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1 My invitation to participate in this 

2 briefing requested I address the federal response to 

3 anti-Asian racism in the United States. Sadly, as I 

4 lay out, the federal government is one of the great 

5 purveyors of discrimination against Asian Americans 

6 and other accomplished ethnic groups in this country 

7 via its equity agenda. The question is what this body 

8 will do about it. 

9 In conclusion to this statement, I list a

10 number of actions, I won't list them right now, 

11 they're in my written statement, the Commission can 

12 and should take to address this discriminatory equity 

13 agenda. 

14 However, I'd be remiss if I didn't first 

15 comment on another major problem. The problem is that 

16 these efforts, equity efforts, mask fundamental 

17 reasons and stifle efforts to address why there are a 

18 disproportionate number of certain groups under 

19 performing in certain ways. 

20 An undue focus on an outcome driven 

21 approach can paper over structural issues within 

22 certain demographic populations that contribute to a 

23 failure to meet standards such as in hiring, 

24 contracting, college acceptance, promotions, et 

25 cetera. 
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1 Such obfuscation can in turn lead to these 

2 issues being neglected with minorities perhaps the 

3 most acutely affected. We have seen this problem 

4 exacerbated in the decades of unsuccessful racial 

5 preference experiments in higher education. And with 

6 that, I will report back to Roger Clay. Thank you. 

7 COMMISSIONER KIRSANOW: Thank you, Mr. 

8 Westhill. Detective Martinez? 

9 DET. MARTINEZ: Thank you for having me. 

10 I want to take my time to kind of explain the 

11 perspective from a line officer, a line investigator, 

12 of how these cases get, these anti-Asian cases get 

13 classified or not as hate crimes or bias-motivated 

14 crimes. 

15 Bias-motivated crime is a criminal offense 

16 motivated in whole or in part, this is state, by the 

17 actual or perceived legally protected characteristic 

18 of the victim. These can be race, nationality, 

19 ethnicity, religion, disability, immigration status, 

20 sexual orientation, gender, and gender identity. 

21 In my state, age is not protected. 

22 Political ideology is not protected. Being a police 

23 officer is not a protected characteristic. 

24 A hate crime includes any willful act that 

25 by force or threat of force injures, intimidates, 
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1 interferes with another person's civil right. So, 

2 what does that mean? Most people do not know what our 

3 civil rights are, including line officers. 

4 So, the easiest way to think of it is a 

5 biased-motivated crime occurs when someone commits a 

6 crime with part of the reason being because of their 

7 protected characteristic, a bias against the protected 

8 characteristic. 

9 Federally, if the crime would have 

10 occurred anyways when you remove the bias, it does not 

11 count as a federal hate crime. It does not count 

12 under that statute, but a lot of states have a 

13 difference whether in whole or in part. 

14 Like I said, the average person, patrol 

15 officer, or person who calls 9-1-1, they don't know 

16 what their civil rights are. All they're calling is 

17 the police because they're scared, they're being 

18 attacked, they're worried about their safety. They 

19 don't report being the victims of hate crimes. 

20 When the officers arrive, they have to 

21 meet the elements of whatever statute. So, you may 

22 have the criminal offense against them and additional 

23 either direct or circumstantial evidence to show that 

24 the criminal offense is also bias-motivated. 

25 99.9 percent of our determinations are 
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1 made by the officers in the field, the supervisors in 

2 the field, or the investigators after they get the 

3 case. Folks are not just, in the second-largest 

4 police department in the second-largest city, people 

5 are not calling 9-1-1 saying I am the victim of a hate 

6 crime. 

7 Is it a violation of our civil rights if 

8 someone vandalizes our property, if someone spits on 

9 us, if someone screams on us? Like I said, most 

10 people don't know these things. 

11 Bias motivation is a thought crime. It is 

12 the suspect's intent. We have to prove that through 

13 direct evidence or circumstantial evidence beyond a 

14 reasonable doubt that the suspect committed the crime 

15 because of the bias against the protected 

16 characteristic. 

17 This is extremely difficult when the 

18 underlying crime is a misdemeanor. We have the two 

19 types of crime, a misdemeanor and a felony. Search

20 warrants do not apply to misdemeanor offenses except 

21 for certain exceptions. 

22 So, when us, as officers, are trying to 

23 get that proof to prove the bias, whether it's social 

24 media posts or to look through someone's phone to see 

25 if they had been texting someone to plan it, we cannot 
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1 use that tool on misdemeanors if the hate crime falls 

2 under the misdemeanor rules of evidence. 

3 It is also a specific intent crime. So, 

4 unlike general intent crimes such as if you fire a 

5 weapon into the air, everybody should know that the 

6 bullet's going to come down and hurt somebody, so you 

7 don't need to prove that the person who shot the gun 

8 up into the air wanted to hurt someone. 

9 When it comes to bias-motivated crimes, 

10 you have to prove that that is the intent, and that is 

11 part of the reason why investigating, classifying, and 

12 prosecuting these cases is so difficult. 

13 Without direct or circumstantial evidence, 

14 we must get the suspects to waive their Fifth 

15 Amendment rights and admit to the bias motivation. It 

16 does not matter the victim's perception. We need the 

17 suspect's perception. 

18 We have many cases where a victim was 

19 mistaken for having a protected characteristic when 

20 they don't or belonging to a different protected 

21 characteristic, but it doesn't matter what the victim 

22 thinks. It matters what the suspect thought. 

23 While we do have standalone hate crime 

24 statutes, in California and in a lot of them, they are 

25 low-level misdemeanors, so we cannot charge the low-
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1 level misdemeanor if there's a higher crime because 

2 double jeopardy applies. They can plead out to the 

3 lower one and then we cannot charge the higher one, so 

4 this is also some issues that come up. 

5 The term hate can be misleading. When 

6 used in hate crime law, the word hate does not 

7 necessarily mean rage, anger, or general dislike. It 

8 can mean bias against people or groups with specific 

9 characteristics. 

10 This can be a preexisting negative 

11 attitude such as animosity, resentment, revulsion, 

12 contempt, fear, paranoia, thrill seeking, other 

13 things. It doesn't have to be disgust or hate to meet 

14 the bias motivation. 

15 Now, there have been several folks up here 

16 who have talked about hate incidents. Legally, there 

17 is no such thing as a hate incident. We know about it 

18 because this is what we do. Most people don't know 

19 that. Legally, there is no such thing as a hate 

20 incident and the vast majority of police departments 

21 across the country, over 99 percent, will not complete 

22 a hate incident report. 

23 They show up, tell the victim who has just 

24 been, had one of the worst days of their lives, free 

25 speech, First Amendment, and they drive away. My 
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1 department and others are some of the few that do take 

2 it, but it is not a common thing. The federal 

3 agencies do not take hate incident reports. 

4 My time is up. Just the last thing I'll 

5 talk about is the reason that we take hate incident 

6 reports is because we're trying to focus on the 

7 victim-centered approach. The victim-centered 

8 approach is a way of dealing with victims of crimes. 

9 Instead of the old just the facts, ma'am, 

10 and I'm going to chase after the bad guy, it's slowing 

11 things down and trying to get the victim the 

12 assistance, the help, connection to the advocacy 

13 groups that can assist them best before we run off and 

14 chase the bad guy. 

15 So, I tried to keep it short, so if you 

16 guys have any questions, but I did run out of time, 

17 so. 

18 COMMISSIONER KIRSANOW: Thank you, 

19 Detective Martinez. Next, Chief Scott? Chief, can 

20 you hear me? 

21 CHIEF SCOTT: Thank you. Yes, I can. 

22 Thank you. Can you all hear me okay? 

23 COMMISSIONER KIRSANOW: By the way, before 

24 you begin, I just want to note for the record that 

25 Commissioner Jones has joined by Zoom. Go ahead, 
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1 Chief. 

2 CHIEF SCOTT: Thank you, and good 

3 afternoon, everybody. I'm going to use my time to 

4 talk more of a high level about hate crimes in general 

5 and some of the ways that we believe we can all work 

6 together as a community to address hate crimes and 

7 what comes along with it. 

8 Yeah, the first part of my comments, I'm 

9 going to paraphrase, not quote directly, from our 

10 Attorney General Rob Bonta on what hate crimes 

11 actually are. You know, crimes motivated by hate are 

12 not just attacks on individual people. They are 

13 attacks on our community, our entire community. 

14 On May 11, 2021, our California Attorney 

15 General Bonta declared a state of crisis as heightened 

16 hate crime violence in the Asian American and Pacific 

17 Islander communities reverberated and continue to do 

18 so in some respects across the state. 

19 Meanwhile, in 2020, late 2020, California 

20 reported the highest number of hate crimes of any 

21 state with 1,017 bias-motivated crimes against the 

22 victims' race, ethnicity, ancestry, gender, gender 

23 identity, religion, disability, or sexual orientation.

24 As has been stated by many of the 

25 speakers, hate crimes are criminal acts where victims 
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1 are targeted because of their group identity or 

2 perceived identity such as race, national origin, 

3 religion, or another group of characteristics. 

4 Hate crimes convey a message to both the 

5 victims and their group or perceived group that they 

6 are not welcome and not safe, and as such, these 

7 crimes are an attack on the fundamental rights of our 

8 communities at large. 

9 So, it's vital that law enforcement 

10 agencies, prosecutors, and the community that tries to 

11 combat these types of crimes recognize what hate 

12 crimes are and respond appropriately. 

13 Here in San Francisco, we believe that an 

14 effective response to hate crimes has a multi-faceted, 

15 multi-component response mechanism and I'm going to 

16 start with community engagement. 

17 No effort to address hate crimes and 

18 incidents would be complete without community 

19 engagement and collaboration between both community20 based organizations, government organizations, and, of 

21 course, our prosecutorial agencies, both at the local, 

22 state, and federal level where applicable. 

23 Media plays a big role in communications 

24 on how we address hate crimes and really relaying the 

25 message through the communities at large that these 
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1 crimes are given the utmost seriousness in terms of 

2 the response, in terms of how we see them as a 

3 society, and how we try to combat and prevent them. 

4 When this is done effectively, community 

5 members see the visible signs that our communities and 

6 our governments are working together in order to do 

7 everything necessary to both prevent and combat hate 

8 crimes, intervene on those that perpetrate these types 

9 of acts, and hold those that do perpetrate these types 

10 of acts accountable. 

11 Victims' advocacy and victims' rights are 

12 part of our response here in San Francisco, and as far 

13 as, you know, the San Francisco Police Department, 

14 when we saw a tremendous increase in hate crimes in 

15 2021, which our hate crimes, our reported hate crimes 

16 doubled, one of our responses was to enhance victims' 

17 advocacy and victims' rights by standing up a 

18 community liaison unit specifically for the purpose of 

19 connecting victims and their families to services, to 

20 provide a support network, and to send a clear message 

21 to members of our communities that we are there for 

22 them when these crimes occur. 

23 Because on the back side of that and the 

24 flip side of that, we do know, and I don't think this 

25 is germane to the city of San Francisco or the state 
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1 of California, that many of these crimes go unreported 

2 for a variety of reasons, and without that advocacy, 

3 without that support, we think that situation would be 

4 worse. 

5 There is a component of hate crime 

6 response that really deals with immigration and the 

7 fear of people reporting crimes because of their 

8 immigration status, and in most communities, at least 

9 this community, we make sure that people understand 

10 that immigration status has no value of whether or not 

11 a person can report a crime. 

12 We welcome and encourage every member of 

13 our community, despite immigration status, to engage 

14 with law enforcement, to engage with government to 

15 report what is happening, because without that 

16 accurate reporting, we cannot address this issue 

17 appropriately. 

18 I know our last speaker, Detective 

19 Martinez, spoke a little bit about hate incidents, and 

20 I want to speak a little bit about hate incidents and 

21 how that plays a role in this matter. 

22 You know, as was stated earlier, hate 

23 incidents, if it doesn't amount to a violation of the 

24 California Penal Code, it's not a crime, but we do 

25 encourage the reporting of hate incidents here in San 
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1 Francisco because we believe that that is a precursor 

2 oftentimes to serious, more serious crimes that may 

3 occur by the people that perpetrate hate incidents. 

4 We have stepped up our efforts to 

5 encourage our community members to report hate 

6 incidents, and one of the ways we do that is to make 

7 sure we can communicate with the very diverse 

8 community here in our city. 

9 We have multiple languages that are 

10 accessible by members of our community, and despite 

11 the ability of some people with limited English 

12 proficiency, we encourage them to report hate 

13 incidents as well as hate crimes, and that information 

14 can prove to be valuable down the line in the event 

15 that arrests are made and prosecutions are at play. 

16 Those hate incidents sometimes prove motives. 

17 So, that is something I think that is 

18 really an emerging issue in many jurisdictions of how 

19 we report and how we capture those hate incidents. I 

20 do believe there is work to be done on that front in 

21 terms of having systematic ways to do that, and we can 

22 all learn from each other on how we do that best. 

23 The last thing I want to talk about is our 

24 reporting of hate crimes in general and where we are 

25 on that, and what I believe we can do to improve in 
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1 that area. 

2 As we have tracked our hate crimes here in 

3 our city over the last six years, we've seen pretty 

4 much post-2020, post the global pandemic, a sharp rise 

5 in hate crimes in 2021, and then we saw a sharp 

6 decrease in 2022. 

7 What we do know is that the reporting of 

8 hate crimes, as we nationwide change our reporting 

9 system to the National Incident-Based Reporting

10 System, that we hope to have better data on reporting.

11 I do have the opinion that without the 

12 data to be able to really track the patterns of hate 

13 crime, to really be able to track what is fueling hate 

14 crimes and hate-fueled violence, that we're behind the 

15 curve if we don't have basic consistent, robust 

16 reporting systems. 

17 And I am hopeful that with the 

18 implementation of NIBRS across the United States, that 

19 our reporting will be more consistent, our reporting 

20 will be more accurate where we really understand the 

21 data and what's fueling and what the patterns are in 

22 hate crime. 

23 And that's one thing that I believe, at 

24 least in our city, we are building that infrastructure 

25 to do just that, to be NIBRS compliant we hope within 
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1 the next year and a half or so, and we hope that our 

2 data and the data that we share with others is more 

3 robust so we have a way to not only track the data, 

4 but track the indicators and the things that we know 

5 that will help us really try to crack the code, if you 

6 will, on addressing hate crime in a holistic way. 

7 COMMISSIONER KIRSANOW: Thank you, Chief.

8 CHIEF SCOTT: I believe -- thank you. 

9 COMMISSIONER KIRSANOW: Our next witness 

10 is Former Commissioner Michael Yaki, who is the 

11 principal reason why we're having this hearing. 

12 Commissioner, can you hear us? 

13 MR. YAKI: I can indeed, Mr. Chair. 

14 COMMISSIONER KIRSANOW: Proceed. 

15 MR. YAKI: Thank you very much, Mr. Chair 

16 and Members of the Commission. My name is Michael 

17 Yaki and I am the reason that you're sitting there 

18 right now, so you can blame it all on me. 

19 After 17 years, it's very different sort 

20 of being on this side of the panel, but I'll do my 

21 best to just take a few moments and let you have more 

22 questions for the esteemed panelists who are here 

23 today. 

24 I'm not going to try and inundate you with 

25 facts and figures, and everything that you've heard 
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1 today, and I think you've heard a lot, but I will say 

2 this. The reason I wanted to put this forward is not 

3 just because of what we saw during the COVID epidemic, 

4 not just because we saw the President of the United 

5 States referring to this as the Chinese Flu and giving 

6 license essentially to characterize a terrible 

7 affliction spreading across this country that was 

8 killing, you know, hundreds of thousands of people, by 

9 blaming it all on China, but because it goes to 

10 something deeper and very fundamental and personal to 

11 who I am. 

12 My father is a Japanese American. His 

13 family was incarcerated during World War II. His 

14 family possessions were taken from him. His family 

15 farm was sold. This is something that was a defining

16 moment for who my father is, a father who nevertheless 

17 rose up from that to become the highest ranking career 

18 diplomat at that time for an Asian American in the 

19 United States Foreign Service. 

20 But he grew up experiencing racism 

21 firsthand, and this is racism that came from before. 

22 I mean, this is something that started essentially in 

23 the 1800s with exclusion acts, with the 

24 discrimination, the segregation of the Chinese in San 

25 Francisco, with the fact that my mother, who came to 
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1 this country not as an immigrant, but as the daughter 

2 of a Chinese diplomat, marooned essentially in Los 

3 Angeles because of the war in the Pacific occurring 

4 that just started, Pearl Harbor, and they couldn't get 

5 back to where he was being recalled back to China. 

6 And because she was Chinese, and because 

7 her family was Chinese, they tried to deport her 

8 because of the Chinese exclusion act at the time. 

9 Luckily, that didn't occur. Otherwise, I wouldn't be 

10 here today. 

11 But the animus against Asians has been a 

12 part, an unfortunate part of the history of this 

13 country for quite some time, and I have always 

14 believed that it's always just there scratching the 

15 surface. 

16 And it comes up again even today when you 

17 have a member of Congress challenging the loyalty of 

18 Congresswoman Judy Chu to serve and view classified 

19 documents because, quote-unquote, “She has loyalties 

20 to China.” 

21 There is something that has been unique 

22 about our American experience, about the experience of 

23 Asian Americans in this country in which somehow we 

24 are always seen as the other. 

25 We are always seen as having our loyalty 
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1 questioned, where we are sent en masse into the desert 

2 and other hellholes during World War II because, out 

3 of all of the nationalities, out of all of the 

4 ethnicities in this country, many of whom had 

5 relatives, or cousins, or whatever fighting against us 

6 on the other side in the axis, only the ones who 

7 looked or had my kind of surname were put into camps 

8 in this country. Somehow or another, it's our loyalty 

9 that's always been questioned. It's our commitment to 

10 this country that's always been put at doubt. 

11 And what I hope will come out of this, 

12 what I hope all of you will be doing as you work 

13 through this is probably working with and taking 

14 something like the COVID-19 Hate Crimes Act and seeing 

15 that it really does what it's supposed to do, working 

16 with state and local governments to get out public 

17 education campaigns, and really start getting to the 

18 core of this. 

19 Because a lot of people have touched upon 

20 it in different ways, and I agree with some of what 

21 even people who I would vehemently disagree with who 

22 have spoken today, is that it's somehow easier to pick 

23 us out for the purposes of discrimination, and this 

24 Commission, its mission is to combat exactly that. 

25 We've done it before. We can do it again. 
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1 I thank all of you for the work that 

2 you're doing. I commend all of you for it, and for 

3 the people who I served with for 17 or so years who 

4 are still on the Commission, it's a pleasure seeing 

5 all of you again. To the new ones, congratulations. 

6 This is a great body to work with and I wish you all 

7 the best. 

8 But keep in mind that there is, at its 

9 core, a mission about this particular investigation 

10 and that is how do we combat, how do we deal with the 

11 fact that when the critical times come, somehow or 

12 another our loyalty as Americans is always questioned, 

13 and somehow or another it gives license to people to 

14 commit heinous acts of violence against us at a time 

15 when, as all Americans, we should be working together 

16 toward that brighter future, toward that great 

17 unification to the bitter angels of our nature every 

18 single day? So, thank you very much for the time to 

19 appear before you today and good luck in your 

20 continuing mission. 

21 COMMISSIONER KIRSANOW: Thank you, 

22 Commissioner Yaki, and thank you for your long service 

23 and for instituting this very hearing. 

24 Now we'll open it up to questions. I 

25 think I'll take the first one as a privilege of the 
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1 Chair. To Mr. Dreiband, when you were at the Civil 

2 Rights Division, were there colleges other than 

3 Harvard and Yale that were engaged in the kind of 

4 conduct that you just described with respect to 

5 Harvard and Yale? 

6 MR. DREIBAND: Yes. 

7 COMMISSIONER KIRSANOW: And approximately 

8 how many were there, if you know? 

9 MR. DREIBAND: I don't know the number, 

10 but I think the Department of Education was

11 investigating several other colleges and universities, 

12 as well as the Department of Justice. The practices 

13 that I described that were occurring at Harvard and 

14 Yale were not atypical. 

15 They were -- you know, there was a view, I 

16 think, in higher education today that when it comes to 

17 race discrimination, that the colleges and 

18 universities can do whatever they want. That's the 

19 attitude that we saw and I'll give one example just 

20 from the Yale case. 

21 When we notified Yale of our determination 

22 that Yale violated the Civil Rights Act, we made a 

23 proposal to Yale to settle without litigation and we 

24 suggested that for one year, due to what we regarded 

25 and I think correctly as Yale's unlawful and pervasive 
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1 use of race in higher education admissions to Yale 

2 College, that they stop using race for one year, and 

3 if they wanted to use race thereafter, that they make 

4 a narrowly tailored proposal to use race that was 

5 limited in time. 

6 Yale responded to us in writing by saying 

7 one, they don't discriminate on the basis of race, 

8 which is blatantly untrue, and two, they were going to 

9 continue using race, and they insisted they would 

10 continue using it eternally. 

11 There was no indication in anything that I 

12 saw that any of the colleges or universities that we 

13 investigated ever intended to stop using race and 

14 engaging in race discrimination. 

15 COMMISSIONER KIRSANOW: You indicated that 

16 the two cases were dropped by the Biden 

17 Administration. What about the investigations that 

18 you said were pending? Do you know what the status of 

19 those are? 

20 MR. DREIBAND: I don't have access to 

21 either the Justice Department's investigative, you 

22 know, inner workings, or the Education Department's, 

23 which -- so I don't know the answer to that. 

24 COMMISSIONER KIRSANOW: Thank you. 

25 Commissioner Adams? 
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1 COMMISSIONER ADAMS: Chief Scott, I hope 

2 you can hear me. Good. Does the San Francisco Police 

3 Department collect any other precursor event 

4 information or pre-crime data in San Francisco like 

5 police confronting citizens, people confronting 

6 citizens on the street, maybe mental health events 

7 that occur in public, disturbances of the peace or the 

8 public, or anything at all like that? Does the San 

9 Francisco Police Department collect other precursor 

10 data? 

11 CHIEF SCOTT: Well, we do collect, you 

12 know, hate incident data. I mentioned that a bit in 

13 my opening remarks, but those other types of events, 

14 let's say a person in mental crisis and things like 

15 that, is captured in and of itself, but if there's an 

16 element of it, of hate that may not amount to a hate 

17 crime, we do document that information and push that 

18 information forward, and it could be captured in a 

19 number of ways. 

20 So, we capture it all, everything that you 

21 mentioned, but as far as hate itself, we do have 

22 prejudice-based incident reporting that don't amount 

23 to crimes, and then those hate crimes that meet the 

24 statutory elements of a hate crime that are in their 

25 own reporting category. 
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1 COMMISSIONER ADAMS: Right, but I'm asking 

2 for the opposite, the things that are not hate crimes. 

3 Does the San Francisco Police Department collect data 

4 on other public disturbances in a systematic way, 

5 maybe, you know, incidents of vagrancy or other 

6 disturbances of the peace at all? 

7 CHIEF SCOTT: Yes, yes, disturbances of 

8 the peace, that is, those are collected and reported, 

9 and if they don't amount to crimes, we have to rely on 

10 our computer-aided dispatch or our dispatch 

11 information, but if they amount to crimes, then we 

12 will take an incident report, our officers will 

13 complete an incident report. For instance, for 

14 disturbances of the peace, those types of things are 

15 collected and reported in both ways. 

16 COMMISSIONER KIRSANOW: Commissioner Garza 

17 or was it Commissioner Nourse? 

18 COMMISSIONER NOURSE: Nourse. 

19 COMMISSIONER KIRSANOW: Okay. 

20 COMMISSIONER NOURSE: It's nice to see you 

21 all here, gentlemen. I'd like to focus on what 

22 Detective Martinez said about the difficulty of 

23 completing the hate crimes forms, and he indicated 

24 that a large percentage were not completed. Does that 

25 suggest to you -- 
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1 What kind of reform would be needed to get 

2 police to actually fill them out? Is it a backward 

3 flow? If the prosecutor won't take the case, then the 

4 police don't want to write the report or how can one 

5 solve that problem, training? 

6 DET. MARTINEZ: I believe that a more 

7 across the board philosophy from the top down will 

8 change the way that the departments and therefore the 

9 officers view these things. Let me give you an

10 example. 

11 If I am driving and someone cuts me off, 

12 and I block them in and start yelling at them, and 

13 then I spit on them, I've committed a battery. Now, 

14 the same exact set of facts, it is an LGBTQ person. I 

15 do exactly the same thing, but before I spit on them, 

16 I start throwing out anti-LGBTQ slurs, or anti-Asian 

17 slurs, or whatever. 

18 Most officers won't even take into 

19 consideration the slurs, the bias that there is 

20 evidence of because it is due to the road rage, but to 

21 have that training and the buy-in from the top down of 

22 this is what we want to do, not in that exact 

23 circumstance, but these type of circumstances, it will 

24 be pushed down, and as line officers, we do what we're 

25 told. We do what our policy is, but if there's not a 
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1 buy-in at the top -- 

2 COMMISSIONER NOURSE: Right, I mean, it is 

3 very difficult to prosecute these cases, but it is 

4 important because it's not simply a crime. It's a 

5 crime that someone feels entitled to commit because of 

6 the lesser humanity of the victim. 

7 And so, it is important to get more 

8 training, it seems to me, in these circumstances, both 

9 at the prosecutorial level, we heard about that from 

10 the last panel, as well as for officers. You 

11 obviously know this quite well. 

12 In truth, there are no thought crimes. 

13 That would be unconstitutional. I'll take that case, 

14 but there are elements such as the context. I mean, 

15 you've used speech, but in fact, it's often the 

16 context. 

17 So, if you're in front of a gay bar, let's 

18 say, you know, that that would matter, but you have to 

19 train officers to look for those kinds of things as I 

20 understand it. 

21 DET. MARTINEZ: Yes. 

22 COMMISSIONER NOURSE: Okay. 

23 DET. MARTINEZ: And, you know -- 

24 COMMISSIONER NOURSE: And finally for the 

25 other panelists, I'll just say I was just over at 
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1 Jones Day debating someone, Professor Hamburger from 

2 Columbia. The Supreme Court's going to rule. The 

3 Supreme Court's going to rule. 

4 And I just want the record to reflect that 

5 there is no Biden Administration person here. You 

6 served the Trump Administration and we will, I'm sure, 

7 abide by the rule of law here at the Commission. 

8 MR. WESTHILL: So, that was – a question? 

9 COMMISSIONER GARZA: I do have a question, 

10 if I may interject, for Detective Martinez. If you 

11 could give us a little bit more background on how your 

12 officers are trained in terms of identifying those 

13 issues of what constitutes a hate crime? 

14 You know, because you mentioned in your 

15 comments about how these statutes are difficult, 

16 right? So, if there a process for training your 

17 officers on how to identify them? You know, are you 

18 tracking that training and the results of that 

19 training? You know, could you give us a little bit 

20 more? 

21 DET. MARTINEZ: Yes, since our department 

22 has fully committed, I conduct all of the trainings 

23 myself, and multiple, from the academy, to the 

24 supervisors, to the detectives, to the training 

25 officers, all of them are trained beyond what the 
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1 peace officer standards for California does. We train 

2 our own in these things. 

3 And recognizing that they're very 

4 difficult to prosecute, that doesn't matter to us. 

5 What matters to us is getting the victim the help that 

6 they can get at that time that the police cannot 

7 provide. We, as police, we don't do therapy. We 

8 don't do -- you know, we barely do proactive policing 

9 very well. 

10 So, getting them in touch with those 

11 agencies or those advocacy groups, some that are here, 

12 that can assist them with the non-criminal things that 

13 we can't, whether it's work related, or visa, 

14 immigration related, getting them in touch with those 

15 people that can help them that we cannot do. 

16 COMMISSIONER GARZA: And we've talked a 

17 lot about language and translation services. Is that 

18 something that you all also employ in your sort of 

19 victim-centered approach? 

20 DET. MARTINEZ: We try. So, the way that 

21 we do it is we have 42 different languages spoken in 

22 our 10,000 officers, so we, wherever in the city, we 

23 try to get a language speaker there no matter where 

24 they're assigned, and if that doesn't work, we have a 

25 contract with AT&T Language Bank. 
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1 We try not to use family members because 

2 of certain cultures and stuff, so we try to use our 

3 contract services, and we'll do either video or over 

4 the phone to speak in the preferred language when we 

5 can. It doesn't always work, but that's our goal. 

6 COMMISSIONER GARZA: Okay, thank you. 

7 COMMISSIONER HERIOT: Detective Martinez, 

8 I was interested in your answer to one of the earlier 

9 questions, and I'm interested in sort of uniformity 

10 of, you know, what gets classified as a hate crime and 

11 what doesn't, and you said that on the road rage

12 hypothetical, which I thought was a very good one, 

13 that most officers would not consider that a hate 

14 crime. Would some? 

15 DET. MARTINEZ: My department will. My 

16 department counts that as a hate crime, but, you know, 

17 maybe if it was the Sheriffs of San Francisco, 

18 depending on how they are trained, they may not. 

19 For us, all we need -- the way that I 

20 train my folks is if there's evidence, whether direct 

21 or circumstantial, of the bias, we are making it a 

22 hate crime. 

23 COMMISSIONER HERIOT: A hate crime, so 

24 you're erring on that side. See, the interesting 

25 thing about the hypothetical is that often people 
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1 don't know the race or sexual orientation of the 

2 person that cuts them off until they get a better look 

3 at them, and therefore, it might be one of those, you 

4 know, it's more likely to be one of those cases where 

5 once people know it, you know, then they act on it 

6 because they want to throw whatever epithet. 

7 Whereas, there are going to be other 

8 crimes where they know right from the beginning, you 

9 know, who the person is. And I'm interested then in, 

10 like you say you conduct the training. Do you have 

11 like written materials? 

12 DET. MARTINEZ: Yes, yes, we have -- 

13 COMMISSIONER HERIOT: Can we get a copy of 

14 those? 

15 DET. MARTINEZ: Oh, yeah, I have our 

16 policy and I can send you my syllabus and all of that 

17 kind of stuff. 

18 COMMISSIONER HERIOT: Great, I would love 

19 to see that. 

20 DET. MARTINEZ: I try to tell my folks it 

21 is not your, it is not the patrol officer's or the 

22 detective's job to determine whether it's enough to 

23 convict. If you have evidence, we're going to make it 

24 a hate crime. We're going to get the victim in touch 

25 with those services. We're going to present it to the 
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1 correct deputy district attorney or city attorney that 

2 has that experience and we're going to let them 

3 decide. 

4 But in the meantime, someone who has had 

5 one of the worst days of their life because of who 

6 they love, or the color of their skin, or where 

7 they're from, they have -- the victim-centered 

8 approach, I'm sure you guys have dealt with that 

9 before. They have been taken care of in a more 

10 thorough way than a regular victim. 

11 COMMISSIONER HERIOT: Yeah, the training 

12 materials would be great. In fact, can I ask, Chief 

13 Scott, do you have training materials of that sort? 

14 Yeah? 

15 CHIEF SCOTT: Yes, yes, ma'am, we do, we 

16 do. 

17 COMMISSIONER HERIOT: Could you send them 

18 to us? 

19 CHIEF SCOTT: Yes. 

20 COMMISSIONER HERIOT: Great. 

21 CHIEF SCOTT: Yes, I can certainly do 

22 that. 

23 COMMISSIONER HERIOT: Great, thank you 

24 very much. 

25 COMMISSIONER KIRSANOW: Mr. Gilchrist? 
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1 COMMISSIONER GILCHRIST: Thank you, Mr. 

2 Chairman. Mr. Dreiband, I wanted to thank you for 

3 your work that you did at the Department of Justice. 

4 I'm a South Carolinian and the situation that occurred 

5 at Mother Emanuel where the nine souls were killed, I 

6 want to thank you for, and the Department of Justice, 

7 for your work there in dealing with the murderer who 

8 killed those people. 

9 My question to you, the House Energy and 

10 Commerce Committee met yesterday with the CEO of 

11 TikTok, and all of the rising tensions that are going 

12 on with China, do you in any way believe that some of 

13 those tensions can, at some point, end up being just 

14 what we were experiencing during COVID as it relates 

15 to Asian hate crimes? 

16 MR. DREIBAND: Well, first of all, thank 

17 you for your kind remarks about my service at the 

18 Department. We did convict Dylann Roof of murdering 

19 people at Mother Emanuel Church and we successfully 

20 defended the conviction on appeal, we being there were 

21 many people involved. I was the head of the Civil 

22 Rights Division during the appeal, but many, many 

23 people worked on that, including people in the Obama 

24 Administration and later in the Trump Administration.

25 With respect to hostilities with China and 
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1 the pandemic, I think it's a very complicated 

2 question. You know, the pandemic did, by all 

3 accounts, start in China, and there were concerns that 

4 we had when I was at the Department of Justice that 

5 because of the origins of it, that we wanted to alert 

6 all of our prosecutors, and the FBI, and law 

7 enforcement to be aware of this concern that there 

8 would be hate crimes committed against Asians and 

9 Asian Americans. 

10 And Attorney General William Barr and I 

11 instructed all federal prosecutors throughout the 

12 United States that we would not tolerate that kind of 

13 conduct, and so we increased significantly the 

14 Criminal Section staffing at the Civil Rights 

15 Division. 

16 That's the section of the Civil Rights 

17 Division that prosecutes hate crimes among other civil 

18 rights crimes, and we expanded in addition, you know, 

19 training and things like that to other law 

20 enforcement. 

21 There are obviously geopolitical tensions 

22 between the United States and China that I think both

23 predate the pandemic and I think are unrelated to 

24 them. I've not -- so it's a complicated question, but 

25 I'm not sure if it's -- 
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1 All of these are kind of somewhat 

2 interrelated in terms of anti-Asian, or particularly 

3 anti-Chinese, or oftentimes anti-Asian hate crimes 

4 where people are perceived to be Chinese even though 

5 they might be Vietnamese or some other national 

6 origin. 

7 COMMISSIONER GILCHRIST: Thank you for 

8 that. 

9 COMMISSIONER MAGPANTAY: Thank you all for 

10 your service and for your testimony today. 

11 Commissioner Yaki, could you just -- or Former 

12 Commissioner Yaki, I mean, I'm new to the Commission 

13 and I have a lot to do and learn. 

14 You know, we look at concept papers and 

15 identify current issues to look at and examine, and 

16 since you had written the concept paper, could you 

17 just help me and the Commission, just help me think 

18 about the original understanding in developing this 

19 concept paper, which I think was really important and 

20 serves us today? 

21 MR. YAKI: Well, thank you very much, Mr. 

22 Commissioner and thank you to the Chair. I think this 

23 paper really came out of the rise in hate crime 

24 incidents against Asian Americans from after the 

25 COVID-19 outbreak. 
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1 This Commission had acted previously and 

2 sent letters and notices to the White House regarding 

3 our concern about the then President's remarks 

4 concerning the virus. And yes, while it originated in 

5 China, that does not make it a Chinese issue. It does 

6 not -- 

7 And again, because of the fact that 

8 historically, our communities have been seen as sort 

9 of all the same, like let's not forget about the 

10 murder of Vincent Chin, who was killed, a Chinese 

11 American who was killed because some people thought 

12 that he was Japanese. It comes down to as simple as 

13 that. 

14 I mean, it's interesting hearing some of 

15 the stuff, testimony that we heard today regarding 

16 affirmative action, which has been pointed out by 

17 others, is going to be decided by the United States 

18 Supreme Court, and as someone -- 

19 If I may speak out of school, you know, I 

20 sort of knew this was going to happen. I had an 

21 inkling that it would because it has been something 

22 that some members of the Commission have been wanting 

23 to do for quite some time. I think it's interesting 

24 because, again, there is a court case going on. It's 

25 going to be resolved one way or the other. 
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1 And I'm just going to say, you know, quite 

2 frankly, I am someone who, throughout my 17 years on 

3 the Commission, supported diversity, did not vote for 

4 similar projects that would have advanced the topic 

5 that some other people on this panel and others have 

6 advanced today regarding alleged discrimination at 

7 schools. 

8 And I would just point out just, you know, 

9 really off the cuff that, you know, we're not talking 

10 about anyone being denied an education. This is not 

11 segregation of the education system, but, and it is a 

12 far different cry from someone whose life, and 

13 property, and family have been severely injured by a 

14 hate crime, and that is the animus and the idea that 

15 it's still there. 

16 And I do worry about the TikTok issue. I 

17 do worry about how that at this time in our nation's 

18 history, we have put forward the fact that now China 

19 is the new number one concern. And certainly in Asia, 

20 but also around the world, we see what's going on with 

21 Russia and their interaction with the Ukraine War, and 

22 how, again, people don't distinguish between someone 

23 who looks like this and someone over there in Beijing 

24 as a cause of some death, or injury, or inconvenience 

25 to people. 
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1 That is still there and that's what I 

2 think -- that's what this report was in my view. 

3 You're different. You can do whatever it is you want 

4 to do with it, but the animus was to go and address 

5 that underlying core, which is the continuing presence 

6 of anti-Asian discrimination and how quickly it lights 

7 up at times like this. 

8 COMMISSIONER KIRSANOW: Mr. Westhill, you 

9 mentioned that in the Biden executive order, there 

10 were 63 mentions of the word equity or thereabouts, 

11 correct? 

12 MR. WESTHILL: Correct. 

13 COMMISSIONER KIRSANOW: Did it have a 

14 definition of equity in the executive order, and if 

15 so, what was it? 

16 MR. WESTHILL: I think there is a 

17 definition in the executive order. I can't quote it 

18 here for you now. 

19 But what I think I've endeavored to do 

20 with my spoken testimony here and certainly in my 

21 written testimony, which I hope the Commission will 

22 review, is to explain what I think is obvious about 

23 what equity is. 

24 Equity is the goal of pushing some people 

25 artificially forward and bringing some others back. I 
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1 suggested that's the two sides of the equity coin. 

2 It's immoral, it's illegal, and I do think it's 

3 something that this Commission could speak out about.

4 I don't remember, again, what exactly the 

5 definition was that was used by the executive order, 

6 but I think the actions of the Biden Administration's 

7 equity agenda and also how it's crept into other areas 

8 of American life as well makes it clear what it 

9 actually is. 

10 It's preferences for some based on their 

11 race, or ethnicity, or other immutable 

12 characteristics, and to hold back others because they 

13 do not fit the criteria for what the outcome needs to 

14 be for proportional representation. 

15 And if I could, just one additional 

16 statement regarding the Supreme Court cases on 

17 affirmative action, I find it peculiar indeed that 

18 anyone would think that just because the Supreme Court 

19 is going to rule on the affirmative cases, that this 

20 is all done. 

21 I don't think, based on actually some 

22 comments of my co-panelist, Mr. Dreiband here, that 

23 schools care very much at all about what the Supreme 

24 Court's going to say. I think, and we've seen some 

25 signs of it already, that they're going to try and 
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1 skirt the law and do as they please to make their 

2 campuses more skin deep diverse, which has been their 

3 goal from, you know, from the beginning. 

4 Moreover, this Commission is worried about 

5 civil rights. If the Supreme Court, as a lot of 

6 commentators have predicted, prohibits the use of race 

7 in making admissions decisions, it's all the more 

8 important for this Commission to be reviewing and 

9 making sure that they're being held to the standard 

10 that Title VI holds them to, that they cannot, that it 

11 prohibits the consideration of race in federally 

12 funded programs. 

13 So, this Commission's job becomes even 

14 more onerous if the Supreme Court does what many 

15 commentators think they're going to do, which is 

16 prohibit race in college admissions. 

17 COMMISSIONER KIRSANOW: Mr. Dreiband, of 

18 the statutes that the Civil Rights Division is charged 

19 with enforcing, say Title VII, 42 U.S.C. 1981, Title 

20 IX, all of the titles with respect to civil rights, is 

21 there a definition of equity to your knowledge in any 

22 of those? 

23 MR. DREIBAND: No. 

24 COMMISSIONER NOURSE: I'd like to make 

25 just an interjection here. If you open up your 
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1 iPhone, you can find the definition of equity, the 

2 quality of being fair and impartial. I understand you 

3 believe it means outcome. There's a difference here, 

4 but that's what my dictionary says and the Supreme 

5 Court likes dictionaries these days. 

6 MR. DREIBAND: But there's no -- the word 

7 equity does not appear in a single statute passed by 

8 the United States Congress about civil rights issues, 

9 at least certainly that is enforced by the Civil 

10 Rights Division at the Justice Department. It's not 

11 part of the United States Code at all and that's why 

12 it's not defined anywhere in the U.S. Code, that I 

13 know of anyway. 

14 COMMISSIONER KIRSANOW: Commissioner 

15 Heriot? 

16 COMMISSIONER HERIOT: I'm going to direct 

17 this to Mr. Westhill because he mentioned it in his 

18 testimony. The Vice President has indeed said what 

19 she believes equity means, hasn't she? What did she 

20 say again? 

21 MR. WESTHILL: She has on a couple of 

22 different occasions. The most recent having to do with 

23 the executive order that was signed just, I believe, 

24 last month, that “America has a promise of equity and 

25 justice for all. Today, the President signed an 
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1 executive order that puts our nation one step closer 

2 to that,” which I think is a change on the pledge of 

3 allegiance's liberty and justice for all. 

4 But the Vice President has commented on 

5 this before as well on her official Twitter account. 

6 She said that “There’s a big difference between 

7 equality and equity. Equality suggests oh, everyone 

8 should get the same amount. Equitable treatment means 

9 we all end up in the same place.” 

10 COMMISSIONER KIRSANOW: Commissioner 

11 Magpantay? 

12 COMMISSIONER MAGPANTAY: Mr. Dreiband, 

13 just a quick question, and thank you for your service 

14 to the Trump Administration. And in the case 

15 involving what you worked on, can you define what is 

16 an Asian? 

17 MR. DREIBAND: I'm sorry, in what case? 

18 COMMISSIONER MAGPANTAY: What is an Asian?

19 MR. DREIBAND: What is an Asian? Asians 

20 typically refer to people whose ancestry or national 

21 origin is from the continent of Asia. 

22 COMMISSIONER MAGPANTAY: The reason why is 

23 that it is a very large and diverse community, which 

24 some segments encounter poverty, limitations on 

25 proficiency, and I'm just curious in the court papers 
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1 if it is recognized the nuance and diversity that we 

2 seek in America, like our schools should be -- you 

3 know, skin color, whatever, but there is a diversity 

4 of experience and insights, isn't there, within the 

5 Asian community? 

6 MR. DREIBAND: Well, of course there is, 

7 and that's why this whole notion of grouping 

8 populations of people together the way many colleges, 

9 and universities, and other institutions today are 

10 doing as, quote, Asians, I think is shameful, 

11 disgraceful, and illegal. 

12 So, yes, there is a huge range of 

13 diversity among people whose ancestry is from Asia, 

14 among people who are from East Asia, or South Asia, or 

15 various part of Asia, and I think it's horrible that 

16 our institutions in this country today treat these 

17 individuals as if they are part of some monolithic 

18 group and then subject them to pervasive 

19 discrimination. 

20 And it's even worse because we're talking 

21 typically about 18-year-old children who are applying 

22 to further their education at colleges and 

23 universities throughout this country, many of whom 

24 come from very poor families, many of whom are first 

25 generation arrivals to this country, and they are 
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1 lumped together and disadvantaged by Ivy League 

2 institutions, by all kinds of institutions in this 

3 country, and it is a total disgrace in my opinion, and 

4 it's illegal, and immoral, and wrong, and should stop.

5 COMMISSIONER MAGPANTAY: And that's in 

6 your papers? 

7 MR. DREIBAND: What? 

8 COMMISSIONER MAGPANTAY: And that's in

9 your papers, your litigation papers, yes? 

10 MR. DREIBAND: Well, yeah, in the cases 

11 that I mentioned, yes, we made those allegations, yes.

12 COMMISSIONER MAGPANTAY: Thank you. 

13 MR. MORALES: I'm going to assert my 

14 authority under 45 CFR 701.11 and I want to remind all 

15 Commissioners that they voted for the concept paper on 

16 hate crimes against Asian Americans on September 16, 

17 transcript page 40, research timeline voted on October 

18 21, transcript page 32. 

19 An amendment to add admissions of Asian 

20 Americans' status to colleges and universities failed 

21 by a vote on September 16. Our conversation and the 

22 point of testimony today is limited to the four 

23 corners contained in the concept paper, so I'm going 

24 to submit the concept paper and the timeline for the 

25 record, so thank you. 
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1 COMMISSIONER MAGPANTAY: I apologize for 

2 my question if it was not germane to the topic. 

3 COMMISSIONER HERIOT: Yes, it was. 

4 COMMISSIONER KIRSANOW: Any other 

5 questions from Commissioners? 

6 CLOSING REMARKS 

7 COMMISSIONER KIRSANOW: Panelists, I 

8 want to thank you. That will conclude this 

9 briefing and we appreciate the testimony of 

10 everyone who has participated in this briefing 

11 today. The record will be open for 30 days in 

12 which you can submit further comments. 

13 Members of the public are invited to do 

14 so also and they may be emailed to, if you want to 

15 take this down, antiasianhatecrimes@usccr.gov. 

16 That is antiasianhatecrimes@usccr.gov. And please 

17 submit your comments by April 24. 

18 ADJOURN MEETING 

19 COMMISSIONER KIRSANOW: And with that, 

20 the briefing is concluded. 

21 (Whereupon, the above-entitled matter 

22 went off the record at 4:51 p.m.) 

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