The media have lit up in recent weeks with stories and cable news segments about a “surge” in anti-Asian American violence across the country. Presumably, we should be looking for a solution, but not a single person on CNN or MSNBC is suggesting the most obvious one: more policing.
But there’s a problem. There’s no federal data on trends in crimes against Asian Americans — these claims come mostly from nonprofit advocacy groups and from city governments such as New York and Oakland, California. And while, again, there isn’t much data on the subject, virtually every incident caught on video shows a black male perpetrator.
And here we run into another problem called “social justice.” Liberals spent all of 2020 on a campaign to keep police out of areas with minority populations, if not to eliminate police departments altogether. The liberal narrative is that police can’t be trusted around black people and that blacks are unfairly targeted and treated by law enforcement as a rule.
All of that has led to brilliant reporting like this in Time magazine: “Hate Crimes Against Asian Americans Are on the Rise. Many Say More Policing Isn’t the Answer.”
In late January, the assault of a 91-year-old man of Asian descent was captured on video in Oakland. The suspect, a man in a hoodie, approached the victim from behind and violently shoved him to the ground. Activists went online to ask for help finding the perpetrator using a $25,000 reward as an incentive to turn him in. The suspect has since been apprehended and identified by police as 28-year-old Yahya Muslim, a black man.
The reward offer, according to the Time article, “underscored another problem with addressing racial injustice in the U.S.: how to tackle anti-Asian violence without relying on law enforcement institutions that have historically targeted Black and brown communities.”
The piece went on to quote social justice activist Kim Tran, who said, “Listen, if you don’t understand why it’s problematic to offer 25k for information about a Black man in Oakland, I need you to stay off all the goddamned panels.”
In other words, “social justice” means that some lives really don’t matter as much as others.
The solution to stopping crime is to police high-crime areas. The job of police is to prevent and deter crime, or at least make sure it has consequences for criminals. Residents of Oakland and New York will have to decide if social justice is more important than public safety.
