A 39-year-old woman was arrested on suspicion of committing an “anti-Asian hate crime” after she spat on a man and used ethnic slander, officials in Northern California say.
Karen Inman was arrested on March 5 during an attempted robbery of candy at a Smart & Final grocery store, police said in Mountain View, a bay area town about 15 miles west of San Jose. Inman was charged with petty theft, theft and two counts of violating civil rights by force or threat due to two alleged incidents on February 13.
On that date, Inman allegedly stole items from a store and told company employees that she did not need to pay for them because of the team’s Asian ethnicity, according to a statement from the Mountain View Police Department.
The police said they had received another report on the same date saying that a woman with Inman’s description had launched racist language and spat at customers who were having lunch, one of them of Asian descent.
The police interviewed Inman, who is a passenger, on February 13, but released her because the police had not witnessed any of the alleged crimes and because both victims did not “want a lawsuit”.
“However, the MVPD has a policy of proactively investigating any hate crimes, so the police continued the investigation and we took the case to the prosecutor for review,” the statement said.
“Public prosecutors have analyzed our case and established that charges of hate crimes could be brought against Inman.”
In a press release announcing the charges, the Santa Clara public prosecutor’s office said that Inman allegedly told the man she spat on to return to “where you came from” and used racial libel.
“She ended up being arrested on Friday for the theft of sweets,” District Attorney Sheryl Leung told NBC News on Monday. “But what we were charging for was spitting in the middle of a pandemic that targeted someone who was just enjoying their lunch.”
The Santa Clara County district attorney’s office said in the press release that an increase in attacks against the Asian American community in the Pacific Islands was “driven in part by false political rhetoric blaming Asian Americans” for the coronavirus pandemic.
