Did Violence Against Asian-Americans Rise in 2020? Evidence from a Novel Approach to Measuring Potentially Racially-Motivated Attacks

Did anti-Asian violence rise after the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic? Efforts to answer this question are compromised by the inherent difficulty of measuring racially-motivated crimes as well as concerns that reporting of racially-motivated hate crimes may have changed due to their increased salience during the pandemic. We pursue an alternative approach to studying whether anti-Asian violence rose after March 2020 that addresses each of these concerns. Using data from the FBI’s National Incident-Based Reporting System, we study inter-race violence occurring in public spaces. While public violence declined among all Americans after March 2020, the share of public violence directed at Asian-Americans by people who were previously unknown to them – or were acquaintances – rose more than it did for other Americans. While this relationship did not hold among an auxiliary sample of large US cities, the national evidence is consistent with a modest increase in racially- motivated violence directed towards Asian-Americans.