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Comment by AnimalMuppet | Hacker News Reader

Honest question: Do you think the current deplorable spate of attacks against Asians is being driven by wokeness?

Honestly: I believe that the spate of attacks against Asians is being spurred by the news coverage of it. The media created a narrative of Asian American hate crimes, which did exist, but the “trend” they created increased the intensity of it. Just like school shootings or celebrity suicides, the news coverage fuels more of the same.

What do the FBI stats say compared to other groups. I imagine we have stats that will tell us what’s happening. Who’s commuting what and where.

NYC has stats on these crimes. NYC is also progressive and yet has a lot of this kind of crime.

Does the FBI publish stats on whether the attacker was left or right?

You can be progressive in one place while not solving the big systemic issue in another.

Stats are just numbers. If you police one area much more strongly, you will get higher numbers. Same when people in that area are poor, you would get more property crime.

The fact that the numbers stay high point to a failure of policing as the correct approach. More of a failed approach apparently does not fix it.

These are crimes reported by victims so I think it’s not the same as buying weed or knocking a bodega and getting caught.

Indeed, but even responsiveness to reporting depends on kind of policing, and the kind of victim. You get very different responses, that even not including the social bias for reporting certain crimes by specific people, and whether vigilantism is seen as the answer, or silence - with reporting seen as waste of time.

Jewish people are the highest in 2019, like 63% when I looked. From that, I came to the conclusion that the stats are mostly driven by those who are more active in identification and reporting of potentially racist behavior.

I don’t necessarily think it speaks to the amount of hate crime fully.

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