News
Gothamist: Asian Man Says NYC Cops Didn't Care He Was Spat On In Coronavirus-Related Incident
Gothamist - As anxiety over the spread of COVID-19 continues to mount in NYC, officials say there has been an alarming uptick in racist and xenophobic attacks on Asian-Americans. . .
Choi, 26, was commuting home to Suffolk County when he stopped in a bathroom at Penn Station around 7 p.m. on Wednesday. . .“Then I heard a sound of spitting,” he said. “Guess what? A glob of spit was on my head. I was shocked more than angry. I asked why? Why would he do that? He said, ‘You Chinese fuck. All of you should die and all of you have the CHINESE virus.’ I asked him why again, because I was shocked and I didn’t really know what to do.”
. . .
“He was absolutely assaulted,” said Stan Mark, a senior staff attorney at the Asian American Legal Defense and Education Fund (AALDEF), who said the assault could be categorized as a violation or misdemeanor. There is precedent for it to warrant an aggravated harassment charge. “This particular man, and any victim of harassment or racial targeting, they need to report it to the police, and force police to report it as a hate crime and get it documented, so we have that data in order to dispel this idea and this false narrative that people believe [coronavirus] is a ‘Chinese virus.’”
https://gothamist.com/news/asian-coronavirus-hate-crime-assault-penn-station