This story was produced in partnership with Oakland Voices, a community journalism program and outlet led by the Maynard Institute for Journalism Education.
It was February 2021, and Oakland Chinatown resident Lily Zhu was frightened.
There had been a brutal attack against an elderly man in broad daylight in her neighborhood, a 91-year-old shoved headfirst onto the pavement. Amid a rise in anti-Asian hate crimes and xenophobic sentiment across the U.S., the incident became a focal point for the burgeoning Stop AAPI Hate movement. Hollywood actors Daniel Dae Kim and Daniel Wu put up a $25,000 reward for information leading to an arrest. “Despite the skyrocketing number of hate crimes against Asian Americans this past year,” Wu wrote on Instagram, “our pleas for help go unheard. The crimes somehow excused.”
Later, it would emerge that the victim of that crime was Latino — not Asian, as earlier reports had it. But Zhu didn’t know that at the time. Nor could she have known that the case would ultimately not be prosecuted as a hate crime. What she did know was that she was scared to walk around her own neighborhood. It wasn’t as if she could’ve stayed inside, either. As the primary caregiver for her disabled husband, Zhu, a senior citizen, still had to leave their home to run errands.
She believed more police would make the area safer. She was not alone in this. Nationwide, a movement to combat anti-Asian violence was coalescing within a hate-crime framework that, regardless of the intentions of groups like Stop AAPI Hate, emphasized the role of police and prosecutors. And many of Zhu’s neighbors in Chinatown agreed with her. Some were victims of attacks and robberies, and whether they were targeted because of their race, elders, in particular, felt anxious about going outside. She believed law enforcement was one of the only ways to prevent crime. In her view, criminals who harmed others needed to be prosecuted to the fullest extent…
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