*Note: This article references this Desmos graph
Introduction
On the early morning of January 28th, 2021, an 84-year-old Asian-American man was attacked while on his daily walk around his neighborhood. This attack marks just one of many others done simply because of the fact that their victims were of Asian descent. With the Covid-19 pandemic infecting millions, and former President Donald Trump labeling the virus as the “China Virus”, the number of hate crimes targeting people of Asian descent rose from 32 incidents in 2019 to 72 incidents in 2020. In just the first year of the pandemic, the rate of hate crimes targeting Asian-Americans rose by 125%. And so, I want to pose the question, “ Have the attacks correlated to the severity of the pandemic?” As the pandemic went on, I kept hearing more and more of hate crimes targeting Asian-Americans making top headlines. This made me wonder, are the attacks on Asian-Americans a result of the severity of the pandemic, or are the attacks happening regardless? With this data, we can try to determine trends to help set in place programs to prevent more vulnerable Asian-Americans from being attacked and even killed, as they already have been.
With all of this in mind, I want to share my findings on how the Covid-19 pandemic has affected anti-Asian sentiment and the rate of hate crimes targeting people of Asian descent.
while going on his daily walk
Selection of Data
When gathering data for this model, I didn’t want to use data that could be even slightly biased. I tried, for the most part, to use data from government-issued documents such as items from various states Department’s of Justice and the FBI’s hate crime statistics site. With these sites, they don’t particularly have a bias, they just report the data to the public.
Modeling Method
To model this data, I had a couple of different approaches at the start. At the beginning of the project, I wanted to ask, “When and where did these attacks occur?” But shortly after, I realized that I didn’t know how I could model this. So then I changed the question to “Have the attacks correlated to the severity of the pandemic?” Using this question, the approach is easier to graph, rather than locations, it’s looking at specific numbers. Then came the decision to go by months, or by Covid-19 cases. I decided to graph by Covid-19 cases because of the way that I phrased my question. Then came arguably the hardest part, graphing the points. At first, I tried to look at it and try to find any functions that resembled the points on the graph, but to no avail. Then I remembered that one day in class that we talked about using the number of y? values for the nth degree of the function. Using that method I found that degree 9 was the most optimal number because if I went any higher, the max and mins of the functions would be quite extreme. And anything lower, wouldn’t be quite accurate. Out of all of the functions that I tried the r^2 value of the function of the 9th was the closest to 1, with a value of 0.9977. Although, with this, if you were to interpolate the data, the number would be very inaccurate after about 9.5 million cases. For example, if you set x to 10,300,000, you get ~101 reports. That number doesn’t seem very likely to be a reliable data point, as the average for the entire year is around 7 reports a month.
Problems With the Data
When looking for data for this project, I could only, for the most part, find data from 2020. I’m assuming that is because 2022 has just started and government agencies haven’t released their 2021 data. I also attempted emailing the organization ‘Stop AAPI Hate’ which collects hate crime reports, but unfortunately they don’t share their data. So that left me with only being able to use data from 2020, which doesn’t cover the majority of the pandemic. Due to this, the data isn’t as accurate to now, but it still gets the idea across.
Implications
The data tells us that, when there is a huge outbreak or major media coverage of the virus, the rates of reported hate crimes are in fact higher, but we do have to keep in mind that this is REPORTED hate crimes and not a number of all the hate crimes that do happen. Due to the fact that these numbers can never be fully accurate, we will never know the true extent of how high the numbers rise, but we can get a good idea with the reports that are sent to the police departments and government agencies. Using the model to try to predict trends is not particularly the best though, as, after the last point, the graph takes nearly a vertical dive down to negative infinity.
Limitations of the Model
As I said earlier, the model isn’t very accurate after around 9.5 Million cases. As the cases start to skyrocket, the data makes the model start to hit crazy extremes. For example, if you were to go in between 13.6 million cases, and 20 million cases, the x? values are in the negative extremes. As for improving the model, I don’t know if I could make it any better, the general shape of the points doesn’t make the shape of a function that I recognize. Because of this, I don’t think that I could improve the graph with my current knowledge besides experimenting with more polynomials.
Conclusion
All in all, with the data that we have, we can see that as cases rose, so did the reported hate crimes. For example, when cases started to really pick up in March in the U.S, crimes rose from 4 reports the previous month in February, to 17 cases. A 425% rise in one month. With this, we can try to start programs that work with local law enforcement agencies to help protect the more vulnerable Asian-American populations.
References
Amado, B. (n.d.). Coronavirus in the U.S.: Latest Map and Case Count. The New York Times. Retrieved February 1, 2022, from https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2021/us/covid-cases.html
Anti-Asian Hate Crime Events During the COVID-19 Pandemic – Report – CJSC Publications – California Department of Justice. (n.d.). California Department of Justice. Retrieved January 29, 2022, from https://oag.ca.gov/system/files/media/anti-asian-hc-report.pdf
CDE :: Crime. (n.d.). Crime Data Explorer. Retrieved February 1, 2022, from https://crime-data-explorer.app.cloud.gov/pages/explorer/crime/crime-trend
Chang, J. D. (n.d.). About 1 — Justice for Vicha. Justice for Vicha. Retrieved January 29, 2022, from https://www.justice4vicha.org/about
Federal Bureau of Investigation. (n.d.). 2019 Hate Crime Statistics. FBI — Table 1. Retrieved January 28, 2022, from https://ucr.fbi.gov/hate-crime/2019/topic-pages/tables/table-1.xls
Rogin, A., & Nawaz, A. (2020, June 25). ‘we have been through this before.’ why anti-Asian hate crimes are rising amid coronavirus. PBS. Retrieved February 15, 2022, from https://www.pbs.org/newshour/nation/we-have-been-through-this-before-why-anti-asian-hate-crimes-are-rising-amid-coronavirus
Leave a Reply