Are Black Offenders Disproportionately Victimizing Asian Americans During the COVID-19 Pandemic? Comparison to Expected Racial Distributions and the Pre-Pandemic Period

ABSTRACT

During the COVID-19 pandemic, reports of violence against Asian Americans surged in traditional and social media, often depicting an Asian victim attacked by a Black assailant and suggesting heightened Black animosity toward Asian Americans. Scholars have challenged this Black-Asian conflict narrative by highlighting that White perpetrators commit over 75% of anti-Asian hate crimes. However, the large share of White offenders in anti-Asian hate crime may simply reflect American racial demographics, and Black offenders could be disproportionately victimizing Asian Americans relative to the size of the Black population or offender pool. The current study examined the share of Black offenders in violence against Asian victims relative to the racial composition of local populations or offender pools. Analysis using 2020 NIBRS and Census data indicated overrepresentation of Black offenders in violence against Asian victims relative to the weighted average of the Black population proportion of the 351 cities in which such incidents occurred. However, Black offenders’ share of violence against Asian victims closely matched the proportion Black in the average local potential offender pool. Comparison of 2019 and 2020 data indicated an increase in Black offenders’ share of violence against Asian victims, but this difference in the distributions was not statistically significant.

KEYWORDS:

• Asian Americans
• interracial crime
• racial composition
• National Incident-Based Reporting System (NIBRS)
• COVID-19 pandemic

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1. The paper by Zhang et al. (2022) was published online in January 2021.

2. See Pezzella et al. (2019) for more details on law enforcement hurdles in classifying incidents as hate crimes.

3. For a sensitivity analysis, we repeated the main analysis with a sample of anti-Asian hate crimes from 2020–2021 UCR’s Hate Crime Statistics. The results were very similar to those of the main analyses: Black offenders were overrepresented in anti-Asian hate crimes compared to the average local population, but not compared to the average local potential offender pool.

4. For example, if an interracial crime incident contained both aggravated assault and rape, we excluded it from the sample, as a sexual motivation for the rape element cannot be ruled out.

5. Of the 2,315 offenders appearing in our final data, about 21% were involved in multiple victim incidents. Also, even though Pacific Islanders have a distinct cultural heritage, we included those victims as “Asian victims” since they are likely perceived as Asian by stranger perpetrators. About 20% of offenders were involved in incidents with Pacific Islander victims.

6. NIBRS yielded 2,540 offenders who committed stranger interracial violence against Asian victims, but 225 (8.9%) offenders were dropped because their race was unknown or missing. Note that if the racial distribution of these unknown-race offenders was very different from the observed distribution, that could affect the comparisons that we discuss here. We do not have any particular reason to suspect that this is so, and with only 8.9% missing, any meaningful impact would require a substantially different distribution of these cases, but we mention this as a possibility.

7. We demonstrate this calculation with a hypothetical example of two cities and their populations. Suppose City A’s population is 80% Black and there were 100 offenders in that city involved in anti-Asian crime incidents. City B has a 20% Black population and only one offender of interest. If we take the simple average of the Black population percentage in the two cities, it will be 50%; this is clearly a misrepresentation of the local conditions where those anti-Asian crimes occurred, because the vast majority of offenders against Asians were in City A. The correct calculation is to average over the total offenders for a weighted average of the cities’ Black populations. This approach gives (100 offenders × 80% + 1 offender × 20%)/101 total offenders = 79.4%. Because almost all of the offenders were located in City A, it is sensible that this weighted average is almost equal to City A’s Black population percentage, and this better represents the typical population of the areas in which these hypothetical anti-Asian crimes took place.