The murders of six Asian women at Atlanta spas and a growing number of racially motivated attacks against people of Asian descent over the past year have sparked debate among Asian activists and leaders over the need for increased policing.
As anxieties coalesce in predominantly Asian neighborhoods, some Asian-Americans want more police around to prevent hate incidents.
“Unless the police step in, there’s very little protection they would be getting,” Anni Chung, executive director of the San Francisco nonprofit Self-Help for the elderly, told Vox. “The merchants feel better and the residents feel better.”
Indeed, police departments have increased patrols in San Francisco, Baltimore and New York, where the NYPD has deployed counterterrorism officers. In a statement on Twitter, the NYPD’s counterterrorism bureau suggested that although there is “no known nexus” of organized anti-Asian terror in the city, they will nevertheless “be deploying assets to our great Asian communities across the city out of an abundance of caution.”
Pushing back against policing
On the other side of the calls for more police, however, are the Asian-Americans and their anti-racist allies who believe that more policing will not solve the problem—and will create other issues of its own.
At the root of the argument that Asian-American and Pacific Islander (AAPI) groups should not call for more policing in response to anti-Asian hate lie concerns about anti-Black police brutality and the historic tensions between Asians and Black people in the United States. In the past few decades, those tensions have mostly laid under the surface, but this complicated issue came to a head in 1992 when a Korean-American shop owner in Los Angeles shot and shot and killed Latasha Harlins, a 15-year-old Black girl, for allegedly shoplifting. Along with Black L.A.’s anger over the acquittal of the officers in the Rodney King police brutality trial, this tragedy is now known as one of the critical moments that led to the infamous riots and burnings that surged through the city’s Koreatown.
Prior to the Atlanta spa murders, which were allegedly carried out by a white man, many of the alleged assailants in the anti-Asian attacks that made headlines around the United States were young Black men. In February, after surveillance footage of a Black man pushing down an elderly man in Oakland’s Chinatown went viral, “Lost” actor Daniel Dae Kim offered a $25,000 reward for information about the assailant or his arrest. Writer and consultant Kim Tran expressed the problematic optics of the actor’s offer on Twitter soon after.
“This looks a lot like a bounty on a Black person funded by Asian American celebrities,” Tran tweeted. “I have major, major doubts.”
Along with concerns about the harm policing is known to do to Black people and communities that have culminated in infamous police killings of countless Black people, anti-racist activists have also worried that the rise in hate crimes could additionally harm more vulnerable Asian people—especially those who engage in or are perceived to be sex workers like Soon Park, Hyun Grant, Suncha Kim, Yong Yue, Daoyou Feng, and Xiaojie Tan, the murdered women employed at the spas in Atlanta.
Leading the calls against increased policing is Red Canary Song, an Asian sex workers’ collective based in New York City that was founded after Yang Song, a massage worker in Flushing, Queens, was killed during a 2017 vice raid, falling four stories to her death. Lawyers for Yang Song’s family allege that she was sexually assaulted by a man claiming to be a police officer, and she told her family that the man who assaulted her then pressured her into becoming an informant. The story behind the group’s founding martyr provides compelling evidence against the concept that police will somehow keep Asians safer.
A growing debate
In spite of calls from groups like Red Canary Song, Stop AAPI Hate and the Atlanta chapter of Asian Americans Advancing Justice to “reject increased police presence or carceral solutions as the answers,” as the chapter noted in a statement, there are those in AAPI communities who support a police response to the uptick in anti-Asian violence.
“It’s a divisive issue when it comes to public safety,” San Francisco-based activist Max Leung told Bloomberg CityLab. “On the one hand, you have a segment of the Asian community who want more police and stricter punishment for crimes, and then you have another segment of the community that wants less policing and supports the defunding movement.”
But to groups like RCS, support for policing equals harm against Asian sex workers, who are disproportionately harmed by the justice system, and in many cases, are deported.
“We are concerned that many of those calling for action in this moment have and will continue to endorse violence towards Asian sex workers, massage workers, and survivors,” RCS said in a statement co-signed by hundreds of other organizations, including three local chapters of the American Civil Liberties Union, NEO Philanthropy, Funders for LGBTQ Issues and CODEPINK.
The statement later acknowledged that although collective members “understand the pain that motivates our Asian and Asian-American community members’ call for increased policing,” they “nevertheless stand against it.”
“Policing has never been an effective response to violence because the police are agents of white supremacy,” the statement continued. “Policing has never kept sex workers or massage workers or immigrants safe. The criminalization and demonization of sex work have hurt and killed countless people—many at the hands of the police, both directly and indirectly.”
Offering alternatives
The anti-policing stance taken by some AAPI groups and their allies goes beyond merely criticizing policing and offers a framework for the kind of community care that could replace it. As noted in CityLab, volunteer patrol groups organized in the Chinatowns of New York, Los Angeles and the San Francisco Bay Area have coalesced to deter, de-escalate or intervene in the case of attacks. Though some organizers say they see themselves as a bridge to law enforcement, these unarmed patrollers nevertheless provide alternatives to police boots on the ground—and ideally, to foster better relationships between Asian-Americans and their non-Asian neighbors of color.
“For the Chinese community to be able to be safe in every sense of the word,” Shaw San Liu, executive director of SF’s Chinese Progressive Association, told CityLab, “we have to be working in partnership with other communities of color across the region.”
Liu acknowledged that policing “is not working,” but that neighborhood patrols may provide terror-stricken Asian communities a greater sense of safety, and that this represents “an opportunity to reimagine what that means.”
