Crimes against AAPIs are relatively low, but county cites underreporting as a “serious” factor
Last week, the Los Angeles County Human Relations Commission (LACCHR) released its Annual Report on Hate Crime, a yearly analysis of all the hate crimes reported in 2017.
Hate crimes are categorized as crimes with “evidence that bias, hatred, or prejudice based on a victim’s real or perceived race/ethnicity, religion, ancestry, national origin, disability, gender or sexual orientation is a substantial factor in the commission of the offense,” according to California state law.
The report found that there were 508 hate crimes in Los Angeles County, a 5 percent increase from the previous year. For perspective, there has been a collective 32 percent rise in hate crimes since 2013.
About half of all the reports were racially-motivated hate crimes, which increased 9 percent from the previous year. Anti-black crimes and anti-Latinx crimes rose 15 percent and 16 percent, respectively.
Notably, reported crimes against transgender individuals rose to the highest it’s ever been at 33 in 2017, and 94 percent of them were violent crimes.
Crimes against the Asian and Pacific Islander (API) community rose slightly from 16 total crimes in 2016 to 18 in 2017. The API community comprises 15 percent of all LA County residents but only account for 5 percent of racially-charged hate crimes.
Anti-Chinese, anti-Japanese, anti-Korean and anti-Filipino slurs were used in seven of these crimes, but many of these crimes were generalized as anti-Asian slander.
But it should be noted that these only include crimes that were reported to authorities. Reasons for not reporting a racially-charged hate incident could be because the incident bared not enough importance to involve police, reporting the event could bring more harm to the victim, and a whole host of reasons that the commission acknowledged.
“We believe that under-reporting of hate crimes is a serious problem in the Asian community because of the linguistic and cultural barriers, immigration status, unfamiliarity with the criminal justice system and fear that reporting hate crimes could bring retaliation or unwanted publicity,” the commission wrote.
The county’s findings reflect and confirm the national studies that found that hate crimes in America have been steadily increasing over the last few years, especially in the country’s largest cities.
In May of this year, the Center for the Study of Hate and Extremism at the California State University at San Bernardino reported at 12 percent increase in hate crimes in the 10 largest American cities, the highest level in more than a decade.
“Hate crime rates in the country’s largest cities have increased for the past four years; all against the backdrop of an overall crime rate that has been declining since the early 1990s,” Abigail Hauslohner wrote in the Washington Post in May.
The LACCHR wrote in the report that the rise in hate crimes could be due to the uprising of white nationalism in the last couple years, national headlines reporting hate crimes and increased media coverage on non-criminal acts of hate.
Non-criminal acts of hatred, in particular, have been surging for the past year. Many a video have gone viral of individuals — usually white — taunting people of color, immigrants, and other minorities.
Over the summer of 2018, there were many incidents of white people calling the police on black people for various reasons that weren’t illegal: having a barbeque in the park, selling water, using a coupon at CVS. A video of a white woman explicitly telling a Mexican family that “all Mexicans are criminals and rapists” because “the president [Trump] said so,” referencing Trump’s infamous campaign announcement in 2015.
The Asian Journal has been reporting on non-criminal acts of hatred towards Filipinos over the last year. A woman in a Daly City grocery store was filmed taunting a Filipino-American family with anti-immigrant remarks. A white couple in Eagle Rock Plaza in Los Angeles verbally and physically harassed a Filipina nurse in her car.
“Putting an end to hate crimes is a top priority for the County of Los Angeles,” said Board of Supervisors Chair Sheila Kuehl. “We live in one of the most culturally diverse places in the
world with more than 200 languages and cultures enriching the region. Hate violence, white nationalism, misogyny, and all forms of intolerance are not welcome here.”
