In November 2022, a gunman killed five people and injured dozens more at an LGBTQIA+ nightclub in Colorado Springs, Colorado. Soon after, many community members turned to the police and were frustrated by their slow response in charging the shooter with hate crimes. The previous year, another mass shooting targeted Asian-run massage parlors and spas in the Atlanta area, bringing national attention to the violence Asians in the U.S. face. But instead of responding to the tragedy by making real investments in public health and safety, such as providing housing, health care, education, jobs, and community services, the legislative response quickly became carceral. Later that year, President Joe Biden signed the national COVID-19 Hate Crimes Act, which among other items gave grants to law enforcement agencies to investigate “bias-motivated crimes.” Separately, the NYPD funded an “Asian Hate Crime Task Force” against the wishes of the community.
But trying to police away “hate” is a fool’s errand. As it stands, the nation’s current carceral form of “hate-crime” policing legitimizes a criminal legal system incapable of even stomping out the hate in their own agencies—especially when police officers themselves often commit acts of racism on-duty with impunity. Police departments across the nation are rooted in the same state-sponsored hate that is currently introducing anti-trans legislation throughout the U.S., and the Los Angeles Police Department, for example, receives hundreds of complaints of racial profiling every year against its officers but has for years upheld zero of the allegations. The LAPD’s violence is not an anomaly in policing; policing is violence.
In response to law enforcement’s consistent failure to report and document violence, some nonprofit groups have sprung up around the country in recent years to track hate incidents independently, including the nonprofits Stop AAPI Hate and Asian Americans Advancing…
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