Abstract

There has been a long history of racism and xenophobia against Asian Americans, and, in particular, against Chinese immigrants in the United States. Since the advent of COVID-19 pandemic, there has been a surge in racially motivated hate crime across the United States, which was influenced by preconceived notions about Asian Americans. Building on this result, the present study attempted to examine the nature of anti-Asian hate crime distribution across New York City before the start of COVID-19 pandemic in 2019 and during COVID-19 pandemic in 2020. For this purpose, anti-Asian hate crime data collected for the year 2019 and 2020 from the NYPD’s open portal was mapped using ArcMap Geographic Information System (GIS) software to spatially represent the distribution of anti-Asian hate crime incident patterns across New York City counties. The hypotheses developed were consistent with the results of the study. It confirmed an increase (650%) in the reported number of anti-Asian hate crime in 2020 from 2019 because of the COVID-19 pandemic. It also confirmed that anti-Asian hate crime is most concentrated in and around Manhattan’s Chinatown in New York City, wherein Chinatown acts as a crime attractor for the present study. The increase in hate crimes against Asian Americans during the COVID-19 pandemic highlights how Asians are still viewed as “foreign” which is interwoven with the ideas of xenophobia and racism against Asian Americans.

Keywords