Police Aren’t The Solution To Anti-Asian Hate

Image from a candlelight vigil in Garden Grove, California, March. 17, 2021. [AFP/Apu Gomes]

By Samantha Grasso

It turns out there are a lot of ways to explain mass murder. Mainstream media coverage of Tuesday’s deadly rampage in Atlanta – where a young white man killed eight people, including six Asian women, at three spas – has relied heavily on law enforcement to interpret the murderer’s motives. Online readers have been outraged.

On Wednesday morning, news outlets reported comments from Cherokee County Sheriff's spokesman Capt. Jay Baker that the shooter had an “issue with porn” and was “attempting to take out that temptation” during his shooting spree. Baker went on to say that the shooter was “at the end of his rope” and having “a bad day,” an explanation for murder that was roundly mocked. Outlets also quoted Cherokee County Sheriff Frank Reynolds, who said that the shooter “gave no indicators that this was racially motivated” and that when they asked the shooter that question, “the answer was no.”

These comments from the police became more troubling when The Daily Beast reported that Baker had promoted shirts on Facebook that called COVID-19 an “IMPORTED VIRUS FROM CHY-NA.” When reached for comment, Sheriff Reynolds, who is Facebook friends with Baker, said he wasn’t aware of these photos.

Many found the killer’s motives to be less obscure.

Marie Solis, for example, wrote in The Guardian about how the shooter’s targeting of Asian women working at spas revealed the ways that “racism, sexism and anti-sex-work sentiment work together to produce anti-Asian violence.” “The conflation of massage parlors and sex workers without any nuance is very specific to anti-Asian racism against Asian women,” Esther K., a co-director of Red Canary Song, a grassroots Chinese massage parlor worker coalition, told Solis. The attack comes amid a nationwide rise in anti-Asian hate crimes.

In response to the Atlanta shooting, cities including Philadelphia and Denver announced they would be bolstering patrols around Asian communities and businesses. But relying on police to protect Asian neighborhoods from white supremacists is fraught for reasons that extend beyond yesterday’s comments.

Red Canary Song was founded after the death of parlor worker Yang Song, who fell to her death during a New York police department vice sting in 2017 as police were trying to arrest her for allegedly doing sex work. It was the police who put her life at risk, and law enforcement’s aggressive tactics against sex work played a part in her death. Since then, the organization has fought to decriminalize sex work and highlighted the danger that police often pose to Asian women.

To rely on police and systems of policing, which often target Asian massage parlor workers for arrest, is to rely on white supremacy to police itself. As advocate Elene Lam told The Guardian, “Overpolicing is violence against Asian women, particularly in the sex industry and massage parlors. [This] prevents the workers from protecting themselves.”

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