1The precipitous rise in hate and bias crimes against Asian & Pacific Islander (API) populations during and after the Covid-19 pandemic was quickly recognized as a legitimate “social problem” in the United States, worthy of political action and of the public’s attention (Hilgartner and Bosk 55). Notwithstanding the underreporting that plagues such data, the Federal Bureau of Investigation recorded 746 anti-Asian hate crimes in 2021, representing a increase of 342%.1 In the cities with the largest API populations, the increase in incidents reached 361% in New York City and 567% in San Francisco (Yam; Martin and Chan).2 Indeed, the virus’ origin in China led to stigmatization and an attribution of responsibility for the outbreak to the entire API population, caused by racial stereotypes about Asian-Americans’ perceived cultural foreignness, as well as fear of contracting the virus and biased media coverage (Cho et al. 105-106). Tragically, the issue contained the necessary “drama” to remain on the public agenda (Hilgartner and Bosk 61); the violence tended to target women more often than men, including the most highly mediatized attacks—the murders of eight women (of whom six of Asian origin) in a massage parlor in Atlanta in March 2021, and the death of an elderly Cantonese woman pushed in front of a subway train in New York City in January 2022.
2A national reckoning with anti-Asian racism thus occurred within a particular context, during the aftermath of the death of George Floyd and the nationwide Black Lives Matter (BLM) protests that followed. Unlike the calls of protestors to abolish or defund the police, the issue of hate crimes against Asian populations remained consensual among political elites. On the federal level, the bipartisan COVID-19 Hate Crimes Act was passed with overwhelming majorities in Congress in May 2021. It facilitated the reporting of hate crimes to state and local authorities, and moved to expedite the review of those that could be linked to Covid-19.3 Furthermore, the law offered grants to law enforcement agencies for “crime reduction programs” targeting hate crimes, including specialized investigative units, community relations programs, educational forums, and hate crime trainings for personnel.4 Police departments and state governments rushed to create hotlines to report hate and bias crimes in multiple languages. It became apparent to many local governments, and particularly to police bureaus, that outreach into API communities would be necessary in order to assemble a policy response.
- 5 “Racial Equity Goals and Strategies.” Office of Equity and Human Rights Resources, 2015. portland.g (...)
3In Portland, Oregon, concern about anti-Asian hate crimes is coherent with the political orientation of the highly educated and socially progressive population that has been a core component of the city’s citizenry since the 1960s, and the impetus for the adoption of an array of progressive policies (Abbot 80-82). For example, scholars have long considered the city a model in urban planning for its transportation system, environmental regulations, and its practice of transparent governance (Ozawa). Putnam et al. single out Portland for praise for its high level of civic engagement (241-268). Although the city is still among the least racially diverse in the United States, inclusivity of growing minority communities, including Asian populations that represent 8,6% of the city’s total population, has become a priority for municipal authorities (US Census). Since 2015, the use of a racial equity lens in all areas of government, including the delivery of services, has been binding city policy.5
- 6 “Portland Police Bureau: Oversight and Accountability.” League of Women Voters of Portland Educatio (...)
- 7 “Community Engagement and Inclusion.” PPB Strategic Insights Report, Coraggio Group, 2019. communit (...)
- 8 “Adopted Budget Revenues: 5-Year Lookback.” City Budget Office, 2023. portland.gov/cbo/2023-2024-bu (...)
4In a notable exception, the Portland Police Bureau (PPB), however, has not been the object of popular or academic acclaim for its organizational culture or practices. Rather, it has followed national trends in militarization and increasing use of lethal force (Lawson 177), and has been criticized by civic groups for the lack of accountability in cases of abuses committed by officers.6 By 2019, relationships with the community were particularly degraded; a report based on hundreds of surveys and interviews with residents, commissioned by the PPB itself, found that 71% of community members only trusted the police somewhat, a little or not at all, with higher levels of mistrust among minority populations (African-Americans, 85%; Asians, 88%).7 Among the Asian population, 34% reported not trusting the police at all, compared to 19% among the total population. Among other faults, residents cited insufficient community engagement (specifically through foot patrols) and widespread tolerance for bias and racism. Perceptions of the PPB did not improve during the daily Black Lives Matter demonstrations that began in May 2020, which featured confrontations between officers and citizens protesting police brutality on the national and local scale. Human rights organizations decried the PPB’s excessive use of tear gas and rubber bullets as crowd control measures, and documented dozens of cases of injuries sustained by unarmed protestors (Mohsini et al. 15-16). As a result, and given the declining support for law enforcement among the general population, the City of Portland responded to protesters’ demands for reduced police funding and the reallocation of resources to social services (Cobbina-Dungy et al. 164). Along with an estimated 35% of cities in which BLM protests occurred (Hoang and Benjamin 398), the City Council enacted a modest 3,6% reduction in the police bureau’s budget for fiscal year 2020-2021.8
5In this political and social context, the City of Portland and in particular, the Portland Police Bureau, had a strong incentive to successfully address the issue of anti-Asian hate crimes the following year. In the face of criticisms of racial bias and poor communication with residents, a proactive effort to protect a vulnerable minority population could potentially improve the bureau’s tarnished reputation. In Hilgartner and Bosk’s model of competition for the “selection” of social problems within “institutional arenas” like local governments, the issue also had the advantage of benefitting political elites by reinforcing rather than questioning the legitimacy of policing as a public service (56, 61). Indeed, “social problems exist in relation to other social problems” (55).
- 9 This diversity of opinion can be partly attributed to the remarkable and overlooked degree of cultu (...)
6However, in this process of selecting and elevating issues to the political agenda, the definition of the problem to be solved is fundamental to the way policy proposals are crafted. In the present case, “competing definitions” of anti-Asian hate and bias crimes exist in the public sphere, notably among the API population itself (Hilgartner and Bosk 57-58). Although API individuals share a heightened awareness of the risk of victimization since the onset of the pandemic, perspectives vary as to how best to address it, and of the role of the police in both the problem and in possible solutions (Noe-Bustamente et al.).9 This article aims to show that there are significant divergences in the way that anti-Asian hate and bias crimes are perceived, or “defined,” by members of API communities, and that these definitions determine the relevant strategies used to combat the problem. In a case study of Portland, Oregon, this paper will first present the city’s API populations and the emergence of anti-Asian hate and bias as an issue locally, before examining the two dominant framings of the problem among API communities. Finally, it will address the manner in which local government and the Portland Police Bureau have attempted to engage API populations and to navigate significant ideological differences, while offering a coherent policy response, in collaboration with an increasingly vocal and well-organized community.
7The analysis is based on semi-structured interviews undertaken from March to May 2023 with nine stakeholders in the API community, of which eight are cited in the present study. Respondents do not constitute a representative sample of a demographic group, but rather a selection of community leaders who have participated in policy debates with local government. Although respondents are engaged in a range of professions unrelated to the study, they all have active roles in leadership within organizations that provide social services to API populations and/or promote API cultural heritage, or in advisory councils for programs directly involving these populations. Interviews varied in duration from one to two hours, and were held in public spaces within the neighborhood. They focused on the rise of anti-Asian hate and bias crimes, interactions with local government and the PPB, community organizing, and ideological differences between organizations representing API populations in Portland. In order to protect the anonymity of informants, names have been changed, and professional titles are intentionally vague when possible. The interviews are complemented by a review of PPB Annual Reports, APIA Advisory Council meeting minutes, and reports by civic organizations based in Portland.
8Asian immigrant and Asian-American populations in Portland have mainly developed around two groups: the city’s historic Chinese community, present since the mid-nineteenth century, and the Southeast Asian refugees who arrived in the 1970s and 1980s. Initially, the Chinese population formed a unique “ethnic urban non-clave” in downtown Portland, free of strict racial zoning laws (Wong 267). They later survived a failed popular attempt at expulsion, followed by a large influx of refugees from Seattle and Tacoma, Washington, where the Chinese were banished in 1885 and 1886 (Bussel and Tichenor 467). In the twentieth century, the diminishing Chinese community dispersed throughout the city and state, leaving Chinatown as a center for commerce, social gatherings, and cultural events among the diaspora. East Portland, over four miles east of downtown Portland and the Willamette River, later emerged as a new center of Asian immigrant settlement and commercial activity. Portland’s Immigrant and Refugee Community Organization (IRCO), was established in the neighborhood in 1976 to assist a wave of Vietnamese, Cambodian and Laotian refugee populations, among others, arriving in Oregon.10 The presence of this resettlement agency and other social service providers, as well as low rents and opportunities to purchase homes in this low-density peripheral area, encouraged immigrants to settle permanently and contributed to the creation of long-term social networks (Goodling et al.; Hardwick and Meacham 553). As voluntary migration from rural China and Hong Kong increased and followed existing patterns of settlement, the area became the city’s “New Chinatown.” In 2020, East Portland contained the highest proportion of residents identifying as Asian in Oregon, forming 36,3% of the population in the neighborhood known as the Jade District (Sanders 697).11 While the area caters to the needs of recent arrivals and working-class immigrants, upwardly mobile Asian households generally settle in suburban communities such as Beaverton, in the hills west of downtown Portland.
- 12 Bias Crimes (2021) Report. Oregon Criminal Justice Commission, 2022, p. 19.
9In Oregon, the increase in anti-Asian hate and bias crimes following the Covid-19 pandemic was consistent with national trends. In fact, data about these incidents were more readily available in the state than elsewhere, as the Oregon State Legislature had recently updated its hate crime laws. In 2019, the Department of Justice created a Bias Response Hotline, allowing victims to report to state authorities any instances of verbal or physical assault motivated by race, origin, gender, sexual orientation, religion, or disability. In 2021, although hate and bias crimes against African-Americans continued to represent the majority of reported incidents, the rise in attacks against the API population over the previous year was over 300%, reaching 192 reports.12
- 13 “Asian Oregonians and the Impact of Race-Based Incidents.” Oregon Values and Beliefs Center, 4 May (...)
10However, studies suggest that these numbers vastly underestimate the actual prevalence of hate and bias crimes committed against the API community. A survey conducted by the Oregon Values and Beliefs Center in 2022, administered in English as well as Cantonese, Mandarin, Korean, and Vietnamese, found that almost half (49%) of API individuals in the state had heard racist insults directed towards themselves or a member of their family, and almost a fifth (19%) had faced a threat to their person or property because of their race.13 Nonetheless, the overwhelming majority (84%) had not reported the incident, and among those who did, only 21% had done so to the police.
11In Portland, local authorities were swift and proactive in their response to the increase in anti-Asian violence. Members of Mayor Ted Wheeler’s administration displayed their solidarity by attending events held by community-based organizations in order to honor victims and raise awareness about anti-Asian hate. Even early in the pandemic, the Jade District was the first neighborhood to receive municipal funds in the midst of a downturn in economic activity during which Asian-owned businesses were particularly avoided by consumers and increasingly became the target of vandalism. The city’s support of API communities was consistent with municipal and state policies to provide a safe haven to marginalized groups such as undocumented immigrants and the LGBTQ+ community, but it also speaks to the salient role that the Black Lives Matter protests played in Portland. The city received extensive national and international attention for the duration and intensity of the demonstrations. In the wake of these events, there was a clear desire on the part of municipal authorities to express its support of a racial minority facing discrimination and violence.
12In this context, the city of Portland’s immediate response was to create an advisory board with the mission of improving communication between the Portland Police Bureau (PPB) and API communities. In May 2021, the Asian and Pacific Islander American (APIA) Advisory Council joined a coalition of five other advisory groups, representing African-Americans, Latinos, Muslims, Slavic populations, and the LGBTQ community of Portland (Portland Police Bureau, 2022 15). The aim of these consultative bodies is to facilitate outreach to minority populations, thereby partially compensating for their under-representation within law enforcement, and to make suggestions about the communications, patrolling, and crime-prevention strategies. In the case of the APIA, influential members of Asian communities were approached by PPB in the spring of 2021, when police data began to confirm reports of an increase in attacks on Asian communities. They were asked to gather testimony from their social networks, in order to offer police officers a more nuanced account of the situation.
13One of the most explicit and vocal demands made by API communities in Portland to improve public safety and prevent anti-Asian violence has been an increase in police patrols in affected neighborhoods. This sentiment is widely shared among business owners who were victims of gratuitous acts of property damage such as graffiti of racist slurs, broken storefront windows, and robberies. Community leaders frame these attacks as the logical result of disregard and negligence on the part of the Portland Police Bureau and municipal government generally. In this sense, the problem of anti-Asian hate and bias crimes is defined as the consequence of institutional neglect of a historically marginalized community, calling for a policy response of greater police protection.
14The assumptions that greater visibility of the police in public space would reduce attacks on API individuals and their property, and that non-White neighborhoods are underserved by law enforcement, are supported by the literature in criminology. In a review of forty-nine relevant studies, Dau et al. concluded that police presence, measured by “where and when they police, how many officers are present, how long they are present,” significantly reduces motor vehicle theft, violent crimes and property crime (192, 207). Furthermore, police protection in the United States has been found to be increasingly concentrated in the whitest and most advantaged communities, giving credence to accusations of racial bias and suggesting that “public policing is more of a market commodity than policing scholars commonly recognize, in that wealthy households can in fact buy their way into well-policed neighborhoods” (Thacher 293).
15Support for the police, as an ideological position, can be tied to specific circumstances among different parts of the API community. For the Chinese community (both Cantonese and Mandarin), attitudes towards the police are influenced by the long-standing problems of insecurity that have plagued the city’s historic Chinatown. Formerly the Chinese community’s primary business district, the area had declined precipitously by the 1980s, when it no longer served as a residential neighborhood for incoming Asian immigrants. High rents and difficult parking for customers prevented business owners from investing or even remaining in the area, but many in the community blamed the location of the social service agencies that the municipal government established in proximity to Chinatown. To this day, individuals seeking assistance with housing, benefits, and drug use regularly transit through the neighborhood, or wait there outside the agencies’ hours of operation. As expressed by Mary, a prominent member of the Chinese community:
I'm really angry at the city of Portland because it must have been planned. I mean Chinatown, now, is like a donut hole, with all these social services around it, so it can never, in my opinion, never be revitalized. It's all just social services built all around it. So it had to be a plan by the city council for Portland because it just doesn't just happen by chance. […] And that attracts a certain population of people who use social services, the whole list, you know. So it’s hard to bring people in because nobody wants to go down there.
16As Chinatown’s reputation declined, a new center of Asian settlement and commerce emerged in East Portland in the 1990s, in an area named the Jade District. For the director of Portland’s chapter of the historic Chinese Consolidated Benevolent Association (CCBA), whose headquarters are still present in Chinatown, the move to East Portland was a new iteration of injustice and forced removal faced by the community:
The Jade District is fine. It's where everybody moved to because it got really tough here. […] It was a necessary move. Basically, it was like we were in Southport along the Waterfront, and we got pushed over here. And now we’re getting pushed over there. […] Back then, we had to stay together to protect ourselves and to prosper. Today, we don’t have that restriction on us, so we can go anywhere. The community likes to stay together, and we couldn’t really survive over here. There are so many dynamics here, it makes it difficult. We’ve got the homeless, organized crime, the entertainment district just down the street. It’s crazy, in the middle of the night, it’s like daytime here, there are so many people. All the trash comes through here, when the night ends: drunk people, I don’t know what else. So all of that has made it difficult for businesses to thrive here. (Sean)
17The interpretation is debatable; the move from the Waterfront to Chinatown’s current location in the 1940s was also a response to the opportunity of Japantown being vacated during Japanese internment, and the rise of the Jade District was related to the location of organizations serving Southeast Asian refugees arriving from the 1970s onward. In addition, municipal authorities actively attempted to revitalize Chinatown since 1980s, installing a Chinese gateway and street signs in Chinese to mark the neighborhood’s cultural heritage. Nevertheless, the discourse expresses a sense that Chinatown has been neglected by city government, historically and in the present. Even well-endowed cultural institutions, such as the Lan Su Chinese Garden, opened in 2000, and the Portland Chinatown Museum, opened in 2018, have struggled to attract the general public since 2020.
18For many members of the Chinese community invested in the preservation and promotion of Chinatown, improving security through collaboration with the police is an intuitive solution to at least one of the neighborhood’s problems. For example, in an expression of spontaneous solidarity with the Portland Police Bureau, at the height of the Black Lives Matter protests, the director of the CCBA and a consortium of Chinese-owned restaurants delivered food to officers who were trapped in the PPB headquarters downtown. The description of the protests and the confusion around their cause are revealing of the perspective on these events from Chinatown:
The CCBA, we were supportive [of the police], as a matter of fact, when they were holed up at their headquarters, we actually […] fed them dinner. […] At the time they basically blockaded around the police station because of, I don't remember what it was, whether it was Black Lives Matter, or something else, but there were constant […] demonstrations, every night, basically, people attacking the police, trying to antagonize them to respond. So there was confrontation every night all through the summer. […] All through downtown Portland, broken glass could be seen and there was a wave that went through Old Town and Chinatown. So, a lot of windows, including windows here, got broken and boarded up. There was a lot of crime. I would say, a lot of organized crime. (Sean)
19Seen essentially as a source of disorder and lawlessness, rather than the expression of an ideological or political position, the BLM protests were significant to this portion of the Chinese community only to the extent that they heightened Chinatown’s structural challenges. Indeed, according to hearsay circulating within Chinatown, the BLM protests even served to offer a coherent way to connect the multiplication of encampments in public space to criminal activity:
I heard that down by the Chinese Gardens, there was a row of tents for homeless people, but actually they were for organized crime. They were actually storing weapons there. So people from out of state, they come into town, they drop by to pick up their weapons, they go downtown to protest against the police over there. And when they were done, they come back and they store the weapons back and take off. That's what I heard. (Sean)
Such rumors speak to the existence of relative indifference among a portion of the Chinese community towards the demands for social justice that underpinned the BLM protests, particularly among foreign-born Asian-American populations (Yellow Horse et al. 15).
20According to several respondents, such sentiments are shared by portions of the Southeast Asian populations living in Portland, for whom attitudes towards the police are linked to the political context of immigrants’ countries of origin and the conditions of their departure. Much of the older generation in these communities arrived in the United States as refugees, often fleeing as political dissidents from Communist regimes. Their hostility towards Communism as a political philosophy thus influences their perception of the Left in the U.S. context and leads them to adopt conservative positions. This disposition is familiar to Prak, the director of Portland’s Immigrant and Refugee Community Organization (IRCO). He mentioned that it is relatively easy for right-wing politicians to use “dog-whistles” to activate anti-Communist sentiments among this community and generate support for policies such as punitive sentencing laws and increased budgets for law enforcement. These generational differences speak to the complexities of representing of ethnic communities, and is indicative of the inaccuracy of presenting them as monoliths:
One of the nuances I think of working with a refugee community […] like the Cuban community in Florida, or for example Southeast Asian community here, is that it’s very different from […] what mainstream America thinks is the outreach to these communities. […] There is an idea that all communities of color are united in some sort of a message or are together somehow, but there are so many nuances and complications. (Prak)
21At the opposite end of the political spectrum, a portion of the API population in Portland, as well as nationally, espouses a more skeptical view of the efficacy of law enforcement in addressing anti-Asian hate and bias crimes. Indeed, in a survey conducted among the API population in 2022 by the Pew Research Center, only 14% of respondents indicated support for increased police presence (Noe-Bustamente et al.). For many community leaders in Portland, the problem to be solved is clearly insidious anti-Asian racism and its expression through violence, rather than a lack of police officers in their neighborhoods. From this perspective, law enforcement often contributes to the harms suffered by API populations, because of the racial bias suspected to exist within its ranks. The problem thus defined, a consideration of the root causes of anti-Asian violence logically follows.
- 14 The vast majority of APANO’s staff and activities, including community organizing, cultural work, a (...)
22In Portland, the most audible voice representing this position is the Asian Pacific American Network of Oregon (APANO), a socially progressive non-profit organization founded in 1996 and dedicated to community organizing among low-income Asian immigrants facing language and cultural barriers, as well as to political advocacy on their behalf. APANO’s leadership had originally been part of the Immigrant and Refugee Community Organization (IRCO), a traditional nonprofit, but the establishment of a structure with distinct by-laws, called a 501(c)(4) social welfare organization, allowed for its founders to engage in partisan political advocacy.14 As such, APANO can endorse candidates, lobby for and against legislation, distribute voter guides, and assist in voter registration, among other political activities. It is the only organization representing API communities in Portland to do so.
23Although APANO is to some extent a community-based structure that aims to represent the interests of the API community in the Jade District particularly and in Oregon generally, it is also guided by a core set of priorities that include the promotion of racial and environmental justice, and support for investments in public transportation and affordable housing. In line with its political outlook, and despite calls for greater presence of law enforcement by community members, the organization’s leadership and staff have remained skeptical that increased policing is an appropriate response to the rise in anti-Asian hate crimes. Accordingly, it has not engaged with the APIA Advisory committee created by the Portland Police Bureau. Instead of searching for solutions to improve public safety within law enforcement, it supported the expansion of a pilot program run by the Fire Department to assist people experiencing mental health issues in public space, Portland Street Response. The vast majority of calls to this service, which primarily involves the city’s unhoused population, do not lead to arrests, and allow for the referral of individuals to relevant social services.15
24APANO’s opposition to policing as a solution to anti-Asian hate crimes is closely related to the organization’s position of solidarity with the Black Lives Matter movement, as well as its embrace of a BIPOC identity that encompasses API communities but prioritizes the experience of Black and Indigenous populations. This outlook is characteristic of highly educated Asian Americans familiar with the extensive scholarship documenting the use of the Model Minority myth to maintain the United States’ racial hierarchy and prevent the formation of multi-ethnic coalitions (J. Kim 118-121; Matriano et al. 297-298). As a result, APANO’s leadership and staff are cognizant of the history of racial bias within law enforcement and the effects of over-policing on racialized communities. They are keenly aware of the risk that strategies to combat anti-Asian hate could bolster the carceral State and ultimately harm other communities of color (Kuo and Bui 3-4). As described by one of the organization’s directors, APANO thus finds itself in a representational bind:
[S]ome community members say we’ve just got to get more police out here and then other community members say no, because they are overpoliced. You know, black and brown communities. So I think there's that tension. […] We just don't feel like having more police is actually going to solve anything, right? The policing conversation is wrapped up in so much more, […] like what racial justice means. There’s all this data showing that most of the traffic stops in Portland are stopping black people, for example. So, what does it mean to have everyone feel safe? Because, for a lot of people, having more police doesn't make them feel safer, but for a lot of people, having more police does make them feel safer. I don't think we've gotten to an answer. I think that's been one of the wedge issues for us. (Jeffrey)
Indeed, some research has shown that increased police presence in a given neighborhood leads to greater feelings of insecurity, even when criminality decreases (Hinkle and Weisburd 509).
25The organization’s misgivings about the desirability of increased police patrols can also be linked to the presence of a significant Southeast Asian population in the Jade District, a group that suffers from higher rates of poverty than the rest of the API population.16 In particular, younger, U.S.-born members of the community can suffer disproportionately from such policies, to the extent that they are racialized in a manner similar to Latinos (Baluran 230-231). In this sense, the specific racial and socio-economic profile of this population constitutes a bridge between APANO’s ideological position on race and its work in community engagement and organizing. Furthermore, the perspectives of young Southeast Asians or community members who stand in solidarity with Black Lives Matter run counter to dominant representations of the API community, as suggested by Ary, an APANO community organizer:
People talk about anti-Asian hate and the racism that Asian Americans felt after the pandemic. Well, I felt it was always there, because I lived it and it just became more public, especially for Asian Americans. You know, we are the model minorities, so when we say people are being racist against Asians, it almost seems surreal, right? Like you guys are doing so well, what are you guys complaining about? But you know, that's just the more established Asian, East Asian groups. For immigrants like the Southeast Asians, we struggle. We've always struggled. We struggled with low high school graduation rates. We struggled with having to find just low paying jobs to support our families. These things weren't really new.
26For Ary, who works directly with the Southeast Asian community, complaints about racial bias on the part of law enforcement are common. Although demands for greater protection also exist within the same community, increased patrols thus carry the risk of multiplying unnecessary arrests:
That's a double edged sword when it comes to how we protect. Because on the one hand we need more protection in those communities because there is obviously more violence that is placed on them. Unfortunately, when you put more police officers in there, they arrest our community members more often. […] I'd hate to use the word “racism,” but it's rooted in our police officers and in our police bureaus. […] I'm not saying every police officer, but it's there. [P]eople will say, but most police officers are good. Well, when most police officers condone what the bad police officers are doing there, are they still good?
27These criticisms of law enforcement led APANO to adopt measured support for the Defund the Police movement that accompanied and followed the Black Lives Matter protests of 2020. According to Jung, another community organizer, the organization joined calls for a redefinition of the role and practice of policing that prioritizes better communication with the public: “we want the police to be defunded as far as putting more police on the streets, but we believe that they should have more resources to do community engagement to connect and to be more involved with the communities.” Despite ideological reservations, a complete disavowal of interaction with the police would be contrary to the mission of a community- and neighborhood-based organization like APANO:
If people are victims, we're in a special spot where you can't tell them to not call police. You have to work within the system and take care of things immediately. But in the ideal world, someday, that we’re working towards, that is not the only option that you would have. We would have less recourse towards the police. The organizing envisioning that we have—but this is like social fiction, right?—it’s that someday you won’t need that, you won’t need to call the police, because everyone’s needs are taken care of. That’s the world that we want to work towards, but also we know that that is not the world that we exist in. (Jeffrey)
28On the level of political advocacy, however, the question becomes one of resource allocation at the regional level. As Defund the Police activists have proposed, divesting money from police departments to other social services could help alleviate some of the challenges facing individuals committing infractions, such as lack of affordable housing and shelters, or lack of mental health services. As Jung pointed out, “we know when people are on the street and have a mental health crisis, sending the police over with a gun is not going to help them. […] So how can we use our public dollars wisely?” For organizations like APANO, strategies to address social and territorial inequalities are more effective in improving public safety. For example, greater investment in walkable sidewalks and public transportation translates to more pedestrians and bus-riders, a benefit for individuals vulnerable to verbal or physical attack in public space.
29This general skepticism of carceral approaches extends to the purported dissuasive effect of more punitive hate crime laws for offenses against victims from the API community. According to one of APANO’s directors,
If you’re going to commit a hate crime, just knowing that you might get sentenced for longer doesn't really stop that. […] Honestly we are pretty sure that if you commit a violent crime, like a violent hate crime and you go to prison, that you're just going to meet other people that think like you and then you get worse. So you being in prison for longer with people that think like you actually means that you’re off the streets for those couple of years. But then you'll be back on the streets and what happens then? So if we're doing nothing to address the disease of hatred, then you know, we're just moving things around. (Jeffrey)
30APANO’s leadership also expressed the view that members of the API community calling for greater police presence, as well as the displacement of encampments, are adopting an overly narrow view of the public interest. For a former director, resistance within the Jade District to the construction of temporary housing is representative of an excessive focus on the protection of one neighborhood to the detriment of issues of inequality at the urban scale:
- 17 Safe Rest Villages are temporary housing camps that comply with special regulatory rules establishe (...)
You want all these elements to not be in the Jade district, so they’re just going to go somewhere else. So what is that solving? We have to just respond to that somewhere else. […] The power of Nimbyism here is just incredible… everyone's says we've got to have more shelters and Safe Rest Villages,17 but not in my neighborhood, so where do you put them? Anywhere where you have an inkling of a Safe Rest Village in Portland, people complain. Anywhere you go, people are going to complain. (Jeffrey)
31Indeed, in the wider perspective adopted by APANO, the questioning of traditional strategies of law enforcement and incarceration are part of a larger debate about the ideal balancing of priorities within a city attempting to enact a politically progressive agenda (Joy et Vogel; Schragger).
32What community demands have emerged from these “competing definitions” of anti-Asian hate and bias crimes (Hilgartner and Bosk 57-58)? Although a significant portion of the community discounts the positions espoused by APANO as radical and excessively ideological, and insufficiently representative of the API population’s interests, its critiques of law enforcement and short-term solutions have nonetheless influenced the debate about appropriate policy responses. Even among members of the Chinese business community, there is recognition that APANO has helped raise awareness in API communities that they are legitimate in making demands on local government. As a result, popular mobilization and dialogue with API community leaders have led to moderate reformist proposals, some of which have received support from regional and municipal authorities.
33A particular strategy to improve policing in neighborhoods with significant API populations and better prevent anti-Asian hate and bias crimes that has become popular among many Asian Americans of various national origins is the targeted recruitment of Asian American police officers. Indeed, although the Portland Police Bureau is one of only 18 police departments in the U.S. in which the percentage of Asian American police officers (6,1%) exceeds the proportion of this demographic group nationally (5.9%), the numbers indicate under-representation at the municipal level (Yu 300). Respondents established in both Chinatown and the Jade District complained of the scarcity of Asian American officers who engage in routine neighborhood patrols. This under-representation can be explained in part by the relative lack of family connections to law enforcement within Asian families, excluded historically by citizenship laws or by explicit racial discrimination. Given that these connections are a strong determinant of interest in pursuing a career in law enforcement, the field tends to remain an unfamiliar career path to most Asian American youth (Gibbs et al. 181). The vast majority of police departments, already under-represented by minorities generally, thus lack the language capacity and cultural competency to communicate and maintain trust with Asian immigrant communities.
34The Portland Police Bureau has shown itself to be sensitive to calls for more proportional representation of Asian Americans among officers, and has tried to engage with APANO and other organizations for assistance in outreach to the API community. These attempts at boosting recruitment among minority communities are coherent with the City of Portland’s diversity policy in hiring, intended to increase racial diversity among all municipal agencies through programs such as the participation of diversity recruitment officers at college and career fairs organized by Asian American student groups. From the perspective of civic organizations like the Chinese American Civic Alliance, which holds an annual Asian American Youth Leadership Conference, more proportional representation of Asian Americans in all fields could help change stereotypical representations of a passive, silent community. For Diana, a principal sponsor and organizer, the event helps to “deconstruct myths and break expectations” that reinforce self-segregation into STEM professions and medicine. The networks that are formed encourage younger generations to pursue careers in non-traditional sectors, including the creative sector, public service, and even construction, in the hope of demonstrating to the larger public that Asian Americans are not confined to a narrow set of capabilities.
35For some scholars, the benefits of representative bureaucracy—“a pillar of social equity in public administration”—are undeniable (Yu 304). In the field of policing, the presence of female and African-American officers has been shown to increase the reporting of crimes specific to those communities (Riccucci et al. 512; Schuck 246). It is thus reasonable to predict, as does Helen Yu, that greater representation of Asian Americans in law enforcement would facilitate the reporting of anti-Asian hate crimes. However, attempts to expand recruitment or to increase patrols in specific neighborhoods have been stymied by the wave of departures from the PPB after the BLM protests, and the general decline in the public perception of police departments nationally in the past decade (Copeland et al. 262).
- 18 “City of Portland Police Bureau (PPB) Asian & Pacific Islander American (APIA) Advisory Council Mem (...)
36The context of the Black Lives Matter movement also had the effect of helping the APIA Advisory Council push for reform of the Portland Police Bureau’s community engagement practices with API neighborhoods and populations. In its first meeting in May 2021, the group stated its intention to “emphasize the role of the police is to serve and protect the community and that we need to move toward the community policing model” and to “help guide the PPB to learn how to ‘serve and protect’” in a way that “bring[s] satisfaction to the API community.”18 After initial frustration that anti-Asian hate was not given the same attention as accusations of bias against the African-American community, the Chair of the committee succeeded in placing the issue on the PPB’s agenda, leading to the organization of public meetings between officers and API community members. She was forceful in urging the agency to hear criticisms of the relationship it had established with the API population:
I told them that they needed to listen because the community doesn't feel like they've been listened to for a long time. I've been in Portland long enough to see that over two decades, the community and the PPB has split, and I never remember having this really antagonistic, hostile relationship before. […] So I said, we want Precinct Liaisons to go to the AAPI communities because they need to get back into attending neighborhood meetings and events, to get to know the community. […] That way they can hear all the comments that I had collected from the community, all the way from Defund the Police to “we want more API officers,” the whole spectrum. And like for anybody else it depends on the generation. (Mary)
37The community meetings that were convened in response to the wave of vandalism, robberies, and minor aggressions that continued to affect the Jade District in 2021 allowed the PPB to better understand the perspective of community members on the events unfolding around them. For Roxanne, a prominent member of the Chinese business community in attendance, the police did not necessarily provide useful information about crime prevention, but their facilitation of such forums was nonetheless helpful in that residents and business owners could share strategies amongst themselves. They also led to concrete forms of cooperation in response to community demands the following year, including the organization of workshops for Jade District residents run by API community members in conjunction with PPB officers. These workshops offered guidance on appropriate responses to the presence of an active shooter in a public setting, or ways to de-escalate a verbal altercation that risked becoming violent.
38The creation of the APIA Advisory Council also created opportunities for dialogue between council members and the PPB directly. The Chair, in particular, was able to communicate the message that the agency needed to undergo an internal audit in order to confront racism among officers. Alluding to “deep, systemic issues” within the police force, including the existence of white nationalist ideology, she indicated having explained to the PPB that “they need to clean house” (Mary). Despite assertions that officers and the agency as a whole operated without bias towards the public, she insisted that “they have to realize they have to listen and they have to look internally.” This discussion led to the participation of APIA Advisory Council members, as well as members from other advisory groups, in the training sessions for new PPB officers. Their attendance allowed them to answer questions from future officers about appropriate responses, and to give advice about behaviors to avoid during neighborhood patrols.
39Given the entrenched suspicion of law enforcement among many communities and the potential for police officers to aggravate certain situations, the APIA Advisory Council also led the Coalition of Advisory Groups in lobbying for the recruitment of more Public Safety Support Specialists (PS3s), a function created in 2019 (Portland Police Bureau, 2020 53). As they are not sworn police officers, PS3s do not carry firearms and cannot make arrests, but they are useful in responding to non-emergency situations, low-priority calls concerning situations such as loitering of a disruptive person near a business, verbal altercations that have not become violent. These municipal employees have distinct uniforms and vehicles, to avoid confusion with police officers that could be detrimental to their reception by community members. Indeed, they are perceived by both the public and potential candidates as serving a function that is closer to social service than law enforcement. Furthermore, the recruitment process is faster and simpler than that of sworn officers, who undergo more extensive vetting and training.
40Many representatives of API communities have also expressed hope that stronger hate crime laws, and better enforcement of them, could be effective in preventing violent attacks. In the Pew Research Center study cited previously, almost half of API individuals surveyed (48%) supported strengthening laws against hate crimes, significantly more than the proportion indicating support for increasing local police presence (Noe-Bustamente et al.). Among the API community in Portland, awareness about the significance of hate crime legislation grew through the Bias Response Hotline, but was more acutely heightened by an attack in July 2022 on a Japanese American visiting the city from California (McCarthy). Mistaken by his aggressor as a Chinese American, he and his family were physically assaulted in a public area by an individual who had already been accused of hate crimes on three separate occasions. One of APANO’s directors described the public outcry that resulted from the perpetrator’s release from custody just hours after his arrest:
The community was really upset that they would arrest them and then let him go […] It's really hard to get accused of a hate and bias crime—you have to like basically be yelling a racial slur while you’re hitting someone. But he was doing that multiple times, and the community was saying, why did you keep releasing him? He was arrested after assaulting that family, and the next day he was back out. […] I think there was a lot of agreement that if you are accused of violent hate crime, you can’t just be let back out, basically. (Jeffrey)
41Even left-leaning APANO supported strengthening the rules established by the Oregon Supreme Court pertaining to the detainment and pretrial release of perpetrators of hate crimes. Lobbying by the organization, along with other groups representing minority communities, prompted the state’s Chief Justice to enact a stricter policy, by which defendants accused of first-degree bias crimes remain in jail at least until arraignment (Iboshi).
42Finally, many API organizations and community members have participated in developing a multitude of cultural and educational approaches to the problem of anti-Asian hate and bias, reflecting skepticism that the phenomenon can be remedied solely through the criminal justice system. There is consensus that the organization of celebratory events that present API cultures to a larger public in a positive light can be instrumental in changing attitudes towards these communities. The annual Chinese New Year celebration held at the city’s Exposition Center, for example, is an apolitical event whose concentration of vendors and entertainers attracts a wide audience of residents who may have little prior knowledge or exposure to Chinese culture. Other community-based initiatives such as the Southeast Asian New Year festival and the Jade District International Night Market, organized in part by APANO, have also drawn public and financial support from authorities at the municipal, regional, and state level. For Roxanne, a member of the Chinese business community active in the organization of several large-scale events, these gatherings are an opportunity to improve the “visibility” of API communities, showing their size and the public interest that they can generate to elected officials and the city’s residents. As such, they can unite API communities that want more explicit support from local officials, notwithstanding internal divergences about the appropriate role of law enforcement.
43Institutional initiatives to educate the larger public about the historical legitimacy of Asian communities as residents and as U.S. citizens also play a role in countering anti-Asian bias. Large exhibits at the Oregon Historical Society’s museum that focus on Chinese immigration before the Exclusion Act and Japanese internment, as well as the Portland Chinatown Museum, established in 2018, contribute to dismantling the representation of Asian Americans as eternal foreigners by documenting their presence in Oregon since the 1850s. The planned construction of a memorial garden at Lone Fir cemetery to honor the unmarked graves of Chinese immigrant workers from the 19th century will also serve to publicly commemorate one of the city’s oldest communities. Although such endeavors can be seen as merely symbolic, evidence suggests that “mediated contacts with outgroup members”, through film or educational materials for example, “appear to increase the understanding of the outgroup members and positive attitudes toward them, thereby reducing the likelihood of stigmatization, more so than direct contacts” (Cho et al. 106).
44These examples also demonstrate the strategic position of Chinese Americans among API communities in addressing the root causes of anti-Asian violence, as the United States’ oldest and largest Asian national origin group, and given their explicit targeting in discourse attributing responsibility for the Covid-19 virus. Focusing on past Chinese immigrants’ contributions to the construction of the nation’s railroads and on current immigrants’ stories of thrift and success thus serves the same purpose. As explained by one of APANO’s directors,
This is something that we do at APANO, we invest in narrative-building. […] All this started because people are blaming Chinese-Americans for the pandemic, for the “China virus” or whatever. And there was Trump with his immigration battles. . . So, the question is, are immigrants rapists and murderers and the cause of the pandemic, or are they good contributing members of our society? So we’re telling the story of people that are helping out, working hard, here to say, and I think that actually does more: pushing back on the harmful narratives. You’re never going to have a police officer in every corner, so if you don’t address the root causes, then what can you accomplish? (Jeffrey)
45As the principal targets of anti-Asian hate, Chinese-Americans have not only more motivation to mobilize to protect their community, but also more leverage to help the larger API community, including its most vulnerable immigrant members.
46The rise in hate and bias crimes targeting Asian populations, including a series of unprovoked, lethal attacks, captured public attention on the national scale in 2021. In Portland, Oregon, home to a significant API population, municipal government swiftly engaged with community leaders to diagnose the problem locally and gather testimony, in view of crafting an appropriate response on the part of law enforcement. Hilgartner and Bosk’s model of the emergence of social problems sheds light on this process and helps to show how the issue was received within the “institutional arena” of local government. In the aftermath of the Black Lives Matter protests, which were particularly massive and confrontational in Portland, local authorities wanted to show responsiveness to accusations of bias against ethnic or racial communities. However, as Hilgartner and Bosk demonstrate, competition exists not only between social problems, but also between definitions of these problems.
47As this analysis has shown, the API community of Portland, Oregon, offers competing visions of the causes of anti-Asian hate and bias crimes. For many members of the population’s business community and those involved in the preservation of the city’s Chinatown, institutional neglect is a decisive factor in the lack of police protection in neighborhoods with significant API populations. This perspective led to calls for increased police patrols and recruitment of Asian American officers. For others, concerns about police brutality and institutional racism raised through the Black Lives Matter movement influenced perceptions of the role of the police in both combatting and perpetuating anti-Asian violence in society. Defining the problem as one of widely-shared racist representations, this portion of the community doubted the efficacy of increased armed police patrols in API neighborhoods and supported more structural reforms in the training and deployment of officers.
- 19 Joy and Vogel define a “progressive city” as “a site where equity is achieved through redistributiv (...)
- 20 “Adopted Budget Revenues: 5-Year Lookback.” City Budget Office, 2023. portland.gov/cbo/2023-2024-bu (...)
48The way that the Portland Police Bureau ultimately navigated these proposals to address the problem of anti-Asian hate and bias crimes offers a glimpse into the process by which community demands are translated into policy decisions at the municipal level. In and of itself, the creation of the APIA Advisory Council at the behest of the PPB showed that law enforcement was receptive to policy proposals and potential criticism from a minority community. This proactive effort to engage with a marginalized group can be viewed as an example of a progressive approach to municipal policy-making, by “enhanc[ing] democratic participation and involvement in decision-making in the community by the city’s diverse resident base,” Joy and Vogel’s third tenant of a progressive city (Joy and Vogel 1377).19 However, the emergent issue of anti-Asian hate and bias crimes, and the demands for police protection they inspired, were also part of a growing backlash against the defund movement that saw police budgets nation-wide grow significantly after the BLM protests (Ebbinghaus et al. 15-16). In Portland, after two years of reduced expenditures, the PPB budget increased in 2022 and 2023, surpassing pre-2020 levels.20 Expanded recruitment once again possible, the PPB hired new personnel in a way that responded to demands for increased police presence, as well as to concern about the use of excessive force. It developed services to address public security without the use of armed police officers, such as Public Safety Support Specialists (PS3) or the Fire Department’s Portland Street Response, were also deployed strategically in API neighborhoods. Joining dozens of similar municipal initiatives, the PPB thus adopted a reformist position, far from the radical demands made during the BLM protests (Tan de Bibiana et al. 10).
- 21 “Portland Police Officers attend a 12-week Advanced Academy subsequent to their 16-week Basic Acade (...)
- 22 “Community Policing Defined.” Community Oriented Policing Services, US Department of Justice, 2014, (...)
49Among its armed officers, the Portland Police Bureau chose to selectively focus its efforts on community engagement, however, rather than the transformation of everyday police practices. In order to build trust and confidence in the police among the public, it gave priority to attempts to improve communication with residents. In late 2023, the Office of Community Engagement was restructured as a full branch of the PPB, giving it more authority to coordinate outreach and manage relations with Advisory Councils and the general population (Portland Police Bureau, 2024 49). APIA Advisory Council members were active in the implementation of new programs giving community members an opportunity for interaction with officers, including a Community Active Shooter Preparedness workshop for residents of at-risk neighborhoods and three daylong Community Police Academies. These latter were intended to “promote candid and constructive conversations about contemporary police-community discourse, mutual learning about police issues and attitudes and use of force” (Portland Police Bureau, 2024 52). However, the Portland Police Bureau engaged in only modest efforts to address racism within the police force, a key demand of the APIA Advisory Council, and a broadly shared concern during and following the Black Lives Matter movement. The subject was integrated into police training curricula in 2023, notably through a four-hour class for new recruits via the bureau’s Advanced Academy, focusing on “the intersectionality of community engagement, customer service and officer wellness disciplines and programs” (Portland Police Bureau, 2024 52).21 These choices speak to the limits of reform and the difficulty of achieving a true community policing model based on collaborative relationships with the public, as demanded by the APIA Advisory Council.22 It has been argued that, although community policing has been a consensual goal within police departments and among the public for decades, it is fundamentally incompatible with the way officers are trained (Stoughton 228). A further exploration of the perspective of police officers in this endeavor merits attention in future research.
50Although the targeted deployment of unarmed officers and the improvement of community relations with the police have been the principal strategies pursued by the Portland Police Bureau to combat anti-Asian hate and bias crimes, this analysis suggests that policies outside the field of policing are at least as popular among API populations, a finding supported by national surveys (Noe-Bustamente et al.). The adoption of more stringent rules pertaining to the detainment of perpetrators of hate crimes, while less visible as a means of action, corresponds closely to broadly shared community demands. Public education, commemorative projects, and events highlighting Asian cultures and history are also popular strategies, offering the means to circulate counter-narratives about the place of API communities in U.S. society. Such initiatives have been facilitated by the elections of Asian-Americans to Metro Council and to the Oregon House of Representatives since the pandemic, part of a younger generation positioned on the progressive wing of the Democratic party. Indeed, in the face of acts of violence that have sharpened a group identity and spurred the mobilization of API communities (Nicholls and Uitermark 882-883), this development points to a growing sense that in order to address the root causes of the problem of anti-Asian hate and bias crimes, political as well as bureaucratic representation is part of the answer.