Hate Crimes Towards Asians

As you probably know, hate crimes towards Asian Americans has been on a rise since the pandemic. Due to racist ideas and misinformation, unfortunately some people believe that all Asians transmit COVID-19 and are morally "bad." Clearly, this is completely false and nonsense. However, the media has been focusing on the recent hate crimes towards Asian Americans, while completely glancing over the history of Asian American violence, and the trends from the past. This was my exigence, I wanted to see the rates of hate crimes in the past, and whether or not they were steadily increasing, decreasing, or staying the same.

As a result, I wanted to get my hands dirty with the actual data - so I turned to the FBI Hate Crime statistics. They provided details about hate crimes towards all races/genders/religion/ethnicities, and this allowed me to filter through and specifically see the hate crimes towards Asians. I used R Programming and the package ggplot2 to get, filter, and display the data. I will not bore you with the details; however, if you are interested, you can find my code here: https://github.com/aabhaysri/projects/tree/Hate-Crimes-Asians

Model Generated using R Programming and ggplot2

The data genuinely surprised me. I had assumed that hate crimes towards Asian Americans were constantly rising, rather than declining. What surprised me the most was the sheer number of crimes towards Asians in the past, but I am definitely thankful and pleased that the trend took a negative turn. However, something that's interesting is that there was again a positive trend starting around 2016. I doubt that it is completely due to COVID, as news of the pandemic came out in more recent years. I'm curious as to why the trend suddenly reversed, and I wonder if the recently violence towards Asian Americans has been influenced by the trend. The FBI currently has not released the 2020 or 2021 dataset on hate crimes, but when they do, I expect the data to skyrocket. Unfortunately, there have been an unparalleled amount of hate crimes during the pandemic, and it does not seem like the trend is stopping any time soon. Hopefully, in the future, people will understand that Asian Americans are not any different from other people; we are also humans!

Image Source