The media have reflexively blamed talk of the ‘China virus’ and the lab-leak theory — but the answer is more complicated.
In urban population centers such as New York and San Francisco, the pandemic has wrought not only the first-order effects of the disease itself, but also broader symptoms of social unrest and disrepair. Crime — and violent crime — is on the upswing after a mostly uninterrupted decades-long decline.
More disturbing still has been a notable increase in hate crimes. Between January 1 and May 2, the New York Police Department (NYPD) recorded 180 reported hate crimes; that compares most unfavorably with the 104 reported at this point last year. Much of this surge is attributable to a significant rise in the number of crimes committed against Asian Americans in particular. They were targets of 80 such crimes between the start of the year and April 4. In 2020, there were were only 16 reported in that same timeframe.
It is difficult to disentangle the coronavirus pandemic from this troubling trend. The virus’s original emergence in the Chinese city of Wuhan has as a matter of course led to the proliferation of some unjustifiable and vile anti-Asian sentiments. It has also resulted in warranted scrutiny of the Chinese Communist Party, which lied about the virus to the international community, continues to resist efforts to investigate its origin, and is persisting in prosecuting what is at this point a longstanding campaign of genocide against its Uyghur Muslim minority.
Many observers have been quick to pin much of the blame for this spate of violence on former President Donald Trump, who controversially deemed the disease the “Kung Flu.” More perpetual critics have also hit the former president for calling it the “Wuhan” and “China Virus.” These crass comments, they have said, explain much of the spike.
Discussion of the lab-leak virus origin theory first floated by Trump and Senator Tom Cotton has also been blamed for the spike, even as it gains momentum in the scientific community and political realm. Consider New York Times coronavirus reporter Apoorva Mandavilli’s prediction last month that “someday we will stop talking about the lab leak theory and maybe even admit its racist roots.” Around the same time, a Washington Post piece admitting that the theory deserved a harder look than it had been given last year nevertheless castigated Trump for “publicly rais[ing] the idea that the virus could have leaked from a lab,” all but stating that his theorizing resulted in a subsequent “rise in anti-Asian hate crime.”
Also writing in the Washington Post earlier this month, former Planned Parenthood president Leana Wen worried that “unproven speculation could increase racist attacks against Chinese people and further fuel anti-Asian hate.”
Wen goes on to cite three incidents in which the perpetrator explicitly blamed Chinese people for the virus, but then implies that similar motivations played a role in the 6,600 anti-Asian hate crimes reported by the non-profit Stop Asian American and Pacific Islander Hate from March 2020 to March 2021.
A closer look at some of the more heinous crimes reported as part of the surge suggest that the reasons for it are many — it cannot be entirely explained by calloused rhetoric from the former president or the discussion of a plausible scientific theory. Many of the most disturbing incidents — not the 80+ percent that are characterized as “verbal harassment” or “shunning” by the activist group Stop AAPI Hate — would seem not to fit cleanly into the prevailing media narratives about the surge.
Take, for example, the vicious murder of 84 year-old Thai retiree Vicha Ratanapakdee in San Francisco this January. In the New York Times, it was portrayed as a kind of culmination of anti-Asian hate, with the Times putting the tragedy in the context of “President Donald J. Trump repeatedly referring to the coronavirus as the ‘Chinese virus.'” which it touted as being linked to crimes such as that which was committed against Ratanapakdee.
And yet, the facts do not at all conform to this narrative. The perpetrator, 19-year-old Antoine Watson, was vandalizing a car when Ratanpakdee spotted him and began walking in the opposite direction. That caused Watson — who allegedly yelled, “Why ya looking at me?” before barreling into Ratanapakdee — to knock the elderly man over, resulting in the brain hemorrhage that would kill him. The motivation seems to have had nothing to do with race, then, as Watson comes from a biracial family that includes Asians, and Ratanapakdee’s race was likely indiscernible thanks to his being covered up head-to-toe for the winter weather.
His death was likely the product not of racial animus stoked for political reasons, but of minor criminality turned major in a moment of panic and uncontrolled rage; Watson had been cited by police already on the day of the attack for reckless driving after a dispute with his family.
San Francisco saw another attack on an Asian-American resident when a female police officer approached 33 year-old homeless man Gerardo Contreras and asked him to comply with a pat-down on Memorial Day. Suddenly in the middle of the interaction, Contreras attacked the officer, overpowering and choking her before the intervention of bystanders and other officers prevented the worst. Contreras’s history of mental-health struggles and prior arrests strongly suggest that it was circumstance, not the recently revived lab-leak theory that motivated the attack.
In fact, homelessness and recidivism have both proven to be recurring themes in many of these assaults. That same day on the opposite coast, 48- year-old Alexander Wright walked up to and punched an Asian woman in New York City’s Chinatown. Wright was living on the streets and had already accumulated 40 prior arrests at the time of the attack, including a number of them for violent crimes like assault. Video of his arrest shows Wright shouting “he hit me!,” and synthetic marijuana was found on his person.
Other attacks show similar fact patterns. Earlier that month, 37-year-old homeless woman Ebony Jackson wielded a hammer against two Asian women after they refused to shed their face coverings on the sidewalk in New York at Jackson’s request. No evidence has yet emerged that the troubled attacker was motivated by race, much less the lab-leak theory. Similarly, in San Francisco, Patrick Thompson, a 54-year-old man with mental-health issues arrested for assault with a deadly weapon in 2017, approached and stabbed two elderly Asian women from behind in February.
Another February stabbing of an Asian victim, this one by 19-year-old Salman Muflihi was ruled not to have been motivated by anti-Asian bias. Muflihi, who had previously been arrested for assaulting his own brother, ran up to a nearby security guard after committing the act, telling him, “I just stabbed someone” before asking, “Where are the police at?”
Other cases are more complicated. In March, 38-year-old Brandon Elliot, another denizen of New York City’s streets, attacked and repeatedly stomped on an Asian woman near Times Square, reportedly uttering anti-Asian slurs and telling her, “You don’t belong here.” This appalling violence came less than 20 years after Eliot was convicted of murdering his own mother in 2002, thus combining some of the specific challenges faced by Asian Americans at this time with more general concerns about rising crime rates and the failures of progressive criminal-justice policy.
What to make of all of this, then?
Certainly, it would strain credulity to suggest that the virus has nothing to do with the increasing number of hate crimes targeting Asian-Americans. And while it’s difficult to determine the extent to which Trump’s rhetoric played into preexisting biases, its safe to assume that if nothing else it has done little to help. However, a fair number of the more serious incidents appear to have nothing to do with race or the virus, and instead seem to call into question some public policy orthodoxies. The political judgment made by many in the media that Trump’s rhetoric has been, if not the only cause, a major one, has not only misinformed the public, it’s headed off important conversations about those orthodoxies.
Brandon Elliot did what he did out of hatred. But is there any doubt that even if he didn’t harbor such bigotry, he was a ticking time bomb? Or that he had no business being paroled less than two decades after committing matricide? Over 60 percent of violent criminals in the United States end up becoming repeat offenders, with the most common second charge being assault. Not only do they tend to recidivate, but they do violently. As right and left-leaning lawmakers converge on something approaching a consensus on the need for criminal-justice and sentencing reform, it might be worth remembering that the cracks in the system go both ways.
These attacks are a part of a larger breakdown in the social order. The de facto decriminalization of offenses such as shoplifting in California, along with the demonization of law-enforcement agencies, combines to embolden criminals, giving them a false sense of invincibility. The aforementioned Patrick Thompson? He was released into the general public after his arrest and failed to show up for his original arraignment date.
The burgeoning homelessness crisis in American cities too is proving to be far more than an aesthetic displeasure; it’s a public-safety concern. As a number of these incidents would seem to show, more troubled people living on the streets means more trouble on the streets.
Meanwhile, New York City in 2020 recorded more murders and non-negligent manslaughters than any year since 2011. And through the first five months of 2021, there’s been a 17 percent increase in the murder rate from that already upsetting benchmark.
Needless to say, none of this is to minimize the pain and suffering being inflicted on the Asian-American community in particular over the last year or so — their targeting is despicable and worthy of the attention it’s received. The concern is that, while the relentless, dogmatic focus on Trump and the lab-leak theory as causes have served the political purposes for which they’re repeated, they’ve also obscured more easily addressed issues — and their solutions — than the human tendencies toward bigotry and blame-assignment.