The Justice System Is Failing to Keep Asian Americans Safe

On Monday, a 65-year-old Filipino woman, Vilma Kari, was attacked while walking down a street near Times Square in New York City. The viral video of the attack shows a man kicking Kari in the stomach and head and a security guard at a nearby apartment complex closing the front door to the lobby, offering no assistance to Kari as she kneeled on the ground, injured. Police have since charged 38-year-old Brandon Elliot with felony assault as a hate crime, according to The New York Times.

On Twitter, the narrative around Kari’s attack has focused on her suspected assailant, Elliot. In 2002, he was convicted of stabbing and killing his mother, the Times reported, and was on lifetime parole after being released from prison in 2019. In response to this information, some people have questioned why Elliot was even on parole to begin with. But as author Camonghne Felix pointed out, Elliot’s history of incarceration may say something else entirely about the criminal justice system’s ability to rehabilitate people who commit violence. The real question is, if jail is meant to be restorative, why is he still doing violent things to women? Felix wrote on Twitter, “Maybe because jails *don’t make people or their communities any safer.*”

But regardless of the inability of the criminal justice system to keep Asian people safe thus far, NYC and the rest of the country are responding the only way they seem to know how — by increasing the presence of police in Asian neighborhoods and hate crime investigations at the local and federal level, with more frequent tracking of federal hate crime data, and by bringing in the DOJ to assist local law enforcement with investigating “bias crimes.”

As Li Zhou wrote for Vox last month, the conversation about how best to prevent more attacks on Asian people is a complex one. But community organizers have offered alternatives to more policing in Asian communities, such as increasing traffic to these areas and building stronger relationships between business owners and residents. Though organizers and community members continue to grapple with these solutions, we know that American policing is a flawed institution and that our current criminal justice system isn’t working. As such, we can all benefit from thinking outside the box.