Coronavirus: FBI director warns of potential for spike in hate crimes as anti-Asian incidents surge

Christopher Wray alerts law enforcement around the country to the 'potential' for an uptick in hate crimes against Asian-Americans amid the coronavirus pandemic

The FBI has taken note of the recent surge in anti-Asian sentiment in the US — both online and in reported incidents — since the outbreak of coronavirus here in January, and has alerted local law enforcement entities around the country to be mindful and responsive to such reports.

In a letter to law enforcement officials around the country earlier this week, FBI Director Christopher Wray warned of "the potential for hate crimes by individuals and groups targeting minority populations in the United States who they believe are responsible for the spread of the virus," according to a copy obtained by CNN.

Mr Wray's letter follows ample public reporting that Asian-Americans have increasingly become the targets of verbal — and, in some cases, physical — abuse stemming from health officials' determination that the virus whose spread has caused a nationwide economic shutdown originated in humans in Wuhan, China.

The FBI warned of a likely surge in anti-Asian hate crimes in March, ABC News reported after obtaining an agency intelligence report.

"The FBI makes this assessment based on the assumption that a portion of the US public will associate COVID-19 with China and Asian American populations," that March report states.

Those warnings of an increase in abuse directed towards Asian-Americans were borne out anecdotally at first, with multiple high-profile instances of racial abuse making national headlines, such as when four teenage girls in New York were charged earlier this month for calling a 51-year-old Asian-American woman a racial slur and striking her in the head with an umbrella on a city bus.

Statistical studies and incident report databases have since started to trickle out, confirming the rise in anti-Asian incidents.

The Asian Pacific Policy and Planning Council fielded 1,135 self-reported incidents of abuse towards Asian-Americans in just the first two weeks after it launched its new "STOP AAPI HATE reporting centre" on 19 March.

Asian-American women were twice as likely to be the target of abuse as Asian-American men, according to the data.

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Those numbers are particularly disturbing when you consider that many Americans were supposed to be following shelter-in-place orders intended to limit social contact writ large, Manjusha Kulkarni, executive director of the Asian Pacific Policy and Planning Council, said in a press release.

Conspiracy theories abound online that China manipulated the coronavirus and released it as a bioweapon, the Network Contagion Research Institute found in a report released earlier this month. People on the anonymous online message board website 4chan are using the term "chink" more frequently, and in relation to the word "virus," the institute found in its new study.

While stereotypes of Asian-Americans have been around for years, the minority group has not traditionally borne a disproportionate target of hate crimes.

According to the FBI's most recent hate crime statistics from 2018, Asian-Americans represented just 3.4 per cent of the 5,155 victims of "race/ethnicity/ancestry motivated" hate crimes. Only 26 people, or 0.5 per cent of the total number of victims, were targeted for their Native Hawaiian or Pacific Island ancestry.

Both groups' percentages are less than or equal to their per cent share of the overall US population.

US lawmakers had previously sounded alarms that federal agencies were not doing enough to prevent incidents of racial abuse and hate crimes.

Democratic Senators Kamala Harris, Tammy Duckworth, Mazie Hirono, Elizabeth Warren and others wrote a letter earlier this month to the US Commission on Civil Rights urging it to issue guidance to federal agencies on preventing and addressing anti-Asian racism and xenophobia related to the coronavirus pandemic.

"There has not been a concerted effort from federal agencies to prevent and address anti-Asian sentiment related to the COVID-19 pandemic," the senators wrote in the letter dated 10 April.

"In order to reduce the dangerous and hateful spread of anti-Asian sentiment that is on the rise during this pandemic, we respectfully request that USCCR issue such guidance without delay, and that it take into account language accessibility for Asian Americans with limited English proficiency," the senators wrote.

Each November, the FBI releases hate crime statistics from the previous year, meaning the public may not have an official indication about the rise in anti-Asian hate crimes until November 2021 unless the FBI shares data with Congress or some other entity that makes it public.