Bellingham Police received these two reports of anti-Asian bias
While much of the rest of the country has battled an increase in hate crime and hate incidents against Asian Americans during the COVID-19 pandemic, Whatcom County law enforcement agencies report they have not seen an increase in reports.
The Bellingham Police Department has received two reports of bias incidents against people of Asian heritage — one each from 2020 and the first three months of 2021 — Lt. Claudia Murphy told The Bellingham Herald in an email.
“There was one report in each year, and it was hateful speech, no threat or assault in either case,” Murphy wrote. “They were tracked as bias incidents but did not rise (to) the level of a criminal charge of hate crime.”
The Whatcom County Sheriff’s Office has not received any reports of hate-based crimes or crimes of violence against Asian Americans, Chief Deputy Kevin Hester told The Herald in an email.
Bellingham Mayor Seth Fleetwood and Bellingham Police Chief Flo Simon posted a video on YouTube against hate crimes and bias incidents affecting the Asian and Pacific Islander communities and others who experience acts of discrimination. They urged that if you have a hate crime or bias incident to report, call 911. Or, you can file a report with the Whatcom Dispute Resolution Center through the Safe Spaces Program online at whatcomdrc.org/safespacesproject.
Crimes against Asian Americans were brought to the forefront after a man allegedly killed eight people in three Atlanta-area spas, including six women of Asian descent. The man has been charged with eight counts of murder, and investigators have not yet ruled out racial bias as a factor in the killings, though the man has said it was based on his sexual addition, according to a New York Times story.
On Friday, prosecutors in King County charged Christopher Hamner, 51, with three counts of malicious harassment after he allegedly screamed profanities and threw things at cars last week in two incidents targeting women and children of Asian heritage, The Seattle Times reported.
Hundreds of protesters took to the streets of Los Angeles and throughout the San Francisco Bay Area last Saturday, the Associated Press reported, the latest in a series of rallies in response to what many said has become a troubling surge of anti-Asian sentiment.
“We can no longer accept the normalization of being treated as perpetual foreigners in this country,” speaker Tammy Kim told a rally in Los Angeles’ Koreatown.
The small number of hate incidents reported to police in Whatcom County also is in contrast to what a number of recent studies have found elsewhere in the United States.
A report released in March by the Center for Study of Hate and Extremism at California State University showed that hate crimes in the 16 largest U.S. cities rose 145% from 2019 to 2020 (from 49 in 2019 to 120 in 2020), even though hate crimes overall dropped 6% in those cities (from 1,877 in 2019 to 1,773 in 2020).
Stop AAPI Hate, a group dedicated to stopping hate and violence against Asian Americans and Pacific Islanders, reported it received reports of 3,795 hate-based incidents — not all of which involved violence — from March 19, 2020, and Feb. 28, 2021.
Of those, 11.1% involved physical assault, Stop AAPI Hate reported. Verbal harassment was involved in 68.1% and shunning or deliberate avoidance made up 20.5%. Additionally, Stop AAPI Hate reported 8.5% of the incidents involved civil rights violations and 6.8% were from online harassment.
“The number of hate incidents reported to our center represents only a fraction of the number of hate incidents that actually occur, but it does show how vulnerable Asian Americans are to discrimination, and the types of discrimination they face,” the report stated.
It also suggests that though Whatcom County law enforcement has not received many reports, bias or hate incidents against Asian Americans in the area likely still exists.
According to 2019 U.S. Census estimates, there are 8,771 people of Asian descent in Whatcom County, which is 3.83% of the county’s total population of 229,247 people. Nearly half (4,223 people of Asian descent) live in Bellingham, where they make up 4.57% of the total population of 92,327.
Those percentages are behind state and national averages, Census data shows. Washington state has 684,967 people of Asian descent (9.00%), while the United States has 18,636,984 (5.68%).
