Tommy Lau, a Chinese-American bus driver from New York City, was walking last month during his lunch break in Brooklyn when he noticed a man harassing an older Asian couple.
Mr. Lau, 63, stopped in front of the man to ask what he was doing. The man, Donovan Lawson, spat on Lau and punched him in the face, calling him anti-Chinese slander, prosecutors said. Mr. Lawson, who is black, was arrested and charged with a hate crime.
It was Lawson’s 33rd prison, 26, who is homeless and has mental problems, officials said. Four times, police officers were called in to help him because he appeared to be suffering from a mental breakdown and was being monitored for treatment in a mental health program administered by the Police Department.
It is not unique. Many of the people recently accused of anti-Asian attacks in New York City have also had a history of mental health episodes, multiple arrests and homelessness, which complicates the city’s search for an effective response.
The pattern revealed gaps in the criminal justice system’s ability to respond effectively when racial prejudice overlaps mental illness, even though the city has stepped up enforcement efforts against these crimes.
For example, Mr. Lawson was one of at least seven people arrested after attacks on residents of Asian cities in the last two weeks of March, ending with a terrible attack on a Filipino-American woman, who was kicked several times in broad daylight. day in Manhattan by a man the police say is homeless and on parole after serving a prison sentence for killing his mother.
Of the seven people arrested, five had previous meetings with the police during which they were considered “emotionally disturbed”, police language for someone thought to be in need of psychiatric help. The researchers believed that the remaining two also showed signs of mental illness.
Authorities say prisoners are part of a population of mentally unstable people who enter and leave prison because of small charges and often do not receive the psychiatric attention they need. Many also struggle with drug addiction.
Dermot F. Shea, the New York police commissioner, said in a television interview on Friday that “there were always arrests before these tragic and tragic incidents, and we need to resolve this article on mental illness.”
So far, the police have received reports of at least 35 anti-Asian hate crimes in New York this year, already exceeding the 28 recorded in the past year, and much more than the three recorded in 2019, the police said.
Attacks against Asian Americans began to rise across the country last year, as the pandemic spread and former President Donald J. Trump called the disease “Chinese virus” and “Kung flu” in an effort to blame China. by the catastrophe.
Law enforcement officials said Trump’s rhetoric provided ammunition for people who became scapegoats for Asian Americans for spreading the virus, exacerbating racial tensions and encouraging unprovoked attacks and harassment.
At the same time, the pandemic has affected the criminal justice system that has long struggled to provide treatment to people with mental illnesses who break the law. Social services reduce face-to-face meetings. Unemployment soared. The number of single homeless adults has reached record levels.
“People’s fuses were much shorter,” said Karen Friedman Agnifilo, a former high-ranking official in the Manhattan district attorney’s office. “If you were an angry and hateful person, it doesn’t seem like it took you long to annoy you.”
Hate crime incidents in New York generally tend to increase after news that causes divisions, experts in such lawsuits said, and most stem from unexpected clashes. After the September 11, 2001 terrorist attacks, for example, American Muslims were the target. After the white nationalist rally in Charlottesville, Va., In 2017, anti-Semitic attacks increased.
State prison officials said that, because of privacy laws, they were unable to disclose information about the health history of Brandon Elliot, the man arrested in connection with the brutal March 29 attack on the Filipino woman in Manhattan.
But the police were called in to help Elliot with a mental health episode in 2002, just a few months before he stabbed his mother to death in front of his 5-year-old sister, according to a law enforcement official.
Questions were raised about whether Elliot, who is black, was properly supervised after being released on parole. Elliot, 38, was living in a hotel in downtown Manhattan that works as a shelter for homeless people, police said. Other residents said their behavior was sometimes erratic.
Mayor Bill de Blasio said last week that Elliot’s case highlighted a widespread problem. The state frees people from prison for the city “without a plan, without housing, without a job, without mental health support,” he said.
In a statement, the New York State Penitentiary Department said that each person released from prison has an individual treatment and rehabilitation plan and the mayor “was clearly not informed”. The Legal Aid Society, which is representing Mr. Elliot, urged the public to “reserve the trial until all the facts are presented in court”.
In the short term, the city responded to the increase in anti-Asian attacks with more scrutiny. The Police Department sent plainclothes officers in plain clothes to neighborhoods with a large Asian population and encouraged more victims to report.
But confronting the role of mental illness in such crimes is also critical, criminologists say, and the city lacks a robust safety net for individuals who frequently come into contact with police and mental health professionals.
“The system is so broken that someone can be handcuffed and taken to the hospital and be back on the street in a matter of hours,” said Kevin Nadal, a professor at the John Jay College of Criminal Justice.
Mr. de Blasio said that only a small number of people with mental illnesses commit violence and that the city aggressively accompanies those who have a documented history of both.
Research has shown that the mentally ill are no more likely to commit crimes than other people and are more vulnerable to becoming victims, said Katherine L. Bajuk, a mental health specialist attorney at the New York County Defense Service .
Increased anti-Asian attacks
A torrent of hatred and violence against people of Asian descent in the United States began last spring, in the early days of the coronavirus pandemic.
-
- Background: Community leaders say the prejudice was fueled by President Donald J. Trump, who often used racist language like “Chinese virus” to refer to the coronavirus.
- Data: The New York Times, using media reports from across the country to capture a sense of the rising tide of anti-Asian prejudice, found more than 110 episodes since March 2020 in which there was clear evidence of race-based hatred.
- Underreported Hate crimes: The count may be just a slice of the violence and harassment, given the general underestimation of hate crimes, but the extensive survey captures episodes of violence across the country that have increased in number amid Trump’s comments.
- In New York: A wave of xenophobia and violence was exacerbated by the economic consequences of the pandemic, which dealt a severe blow to New York’s Asian-American communities. Many community leaders say that racist attacks are being ignored by the authorities.
- What happened in Atlanta: Eight people, including six women of Asian descent, were killed in shootings in massage parlors in Atlanta on March 16. The motives of the suspect, who was charged with murder, are under investigation, but Asian communities in the United States are on alert because of an increase in attacks against Asian Americans last year.
The fact that some of the people arrested in recent anti-Asian incidents have a history of instability has brought little comfort to the victims.
Lau, the Brooklyn bus driver, said in an interview that he believed that the punch he received from Lawson was rooted in a “breakdown in mental health problems”.
Still, he said, the slander Lawson used fits a pattern of racism he has experienced since childhood, when his elementary school teacher called him Tommy instead of his given name, Kok Wah, to keep his classmates from mocking him. .
“It is like that when you are Asian, always being harassed by others,” said Lau. “The pandemic has made everything worse.”
Regina Lawson, Lawson’s sister, said he showed signs of mental illness at a young age and received therapy until he was older and his mother could no longer force him to go. The brothers are now separated.
“There could definitely be a better way to deal with someone than to wait until they commit a crime or really hurt someone to get support,” said Lawson.
The problem of mental illness among homeless people like Lawson was exacerbated during the pandemic, when the city moved thousands of people from shelters to hotel rooms to slow the spread of the coronavirus, shelter providers said. The move isolated some people with mental illnesses, leaving them with less supervision.
A homeless man accused of a recent anti-Asian hate crime, Eric Deoliveira, 27, has received 13 previous calls for emotional disturbances and at least a dozen arrests, police said.
On March 21, police said, Deoliveira, who is Hispanic, punched a Chinese-American mother in Manhattan and broke the plaque she was carrying after a demonstration to protest anti-Asian violence.
On Saturday night, Deoliveira, who had been released after the assault charge, was arrested again in Queens and accused of breaking the windshield of a police vehicle, prosecutors said. A lawyer for Deoliveira did not respond to a request for comment.
Mental fitness has already become a legal issue in some cases. Last month, a judge ordered a mental health assessment for Ruddy Rodriguez, 26, who was arrested and charged with hitting the back of the head of an Asian man in Manhattan while saying an anti-Chinese expletive.
Prosecutors said Rodriguez, who is black and Hispanic, told investigators after his arrest: “I hit him. I don’t like Asians. I get into disputes with them ”. He also told a police officer, “I’m going to kill all Asians when I get out of here.”
During Mr. Rodriguez’s indictment, he frequently interrupted proceedings and denied the accusations, according to a court transcript. Prosecutors said he was arrested in January after he broke the glass door of a Manhattan homeless shelter and threatened to kill the site coordinator.
Rodriguez’s lawyer did not respond to a request for comment.
Michael Gold contributed reporting. Sheelagh McNeill and Kitty Bennett contributed to the research.