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The New York Police Department (NYPD) is searching for an individual who is accused of verbally harassing an Asian family on the subway and then assaulting another passenger.
According to the police department, the assault took place at around 8 o’clock in the evening on August 3 on an F train at West Fourth Street-Washington Square station.
A video of the incident taken by another passenger, Joanna Lin, shows a group of three young women shouting across the subway carraige at an Asian family with two young children. It is not clear from the video how the confrontation began.
From there, however, things allegedly escalated. The video shows one of the women who had allegedly been hurling abuse at the Asian family run towards the camera, at which point it cuts out. In one of the captions for the video, Ms Lin wrote that “This ferocious one runs over to hit me. I put down my phone to cover my head and took the blow (ow).”
According to an NYPD tweet, which identified the victim in the case only as a 51-year-old woman, the assailant “made an anti-ethnic remark, pulled her by the hair & punched her.” The victim has since identified herself as Sue Young — a 51-year-old from Reno, Nevada who was visting New York on vacation with her family.
The altercation continued as the subway sped towards its next stop, where the passengers got off the train and Ms Lin reportedly helped the family file a police report.
Video of the attack, which quickly went viral, sparked outrage in New York. The attack comes more than three years after the outbreak of the Covid-19 pandemic led to a spike in anti-Asian hate crimes in the city and around the country that left some AAPI community members fearful for their safety in public.
The NYPD formed an Asian Hate Crime Task Force in 2020, though it’s unclear whether that task force is involved directly in any way in the investigation into the attack.
Ms Young, for her part, told NBC that she does not believe the people who verbally harrassed her and her family members were motivated by racial hatred and warned about the limited effectiveness of a carceral response.
“These are very young girls,” Ms Young told NBC News. “Somebody or something or some circumstance has made a big impression on them — whether it’s historical pressure, societal pressure, social pressure. Using law enforcement to curtail this, I’m not sure if that’s going to fix the problem. It just seems like it’s a more underlying issue that we, as a society and as a community, need to hold everybody accountable, not just law enforcement.”