As anti-Asian assaults and harassment continue to surge across the country, community leaders are trying to redirect the unprecedented political and legislative attention on hate crimes against Asian Americans toward policies aimed at addressing the underlying racism fueling these attacks.

The shift in focus is critical, they say, in part because the bar for prosecuting hate crimes is too high to be a widespread deterrent.

“We can’t prosecute a crime before it happens,” said Paul Jhin, a Santa Clara County prosecutor and co-founder of the National Asian Pacific Islander Prosecutors Association. “It has to start at the community level. We need to stand up for ourselves and stand up for each other.”

Last month, President Joe Biden signed the COVID-19 Hate Crimes Act, while California is considering legislation to create an independent hate-crimes review body, and now has a new racial-justice bureau formed in early May by California’s new Filipino American attorney general. But while the pandemic brought violence against Asian Americans into sharp focus, it’s a shift that experts say needs to more directly take on the underlying causes of the hate rather than just cracking down on the transgressions that make it to the surface.

“Only a small percentage of hate incidents we’re receiving are hate crimes for which racial motivation can be discerned,” said Russell Jeung, chair of Asian American studies at San Francisco State University and co-founder of the Stop AAPI Hate project, the preeminent tracker of anti-Asian violence and animus in the United States. “We need to promote ethnic education. Getting at the roots of racism can address both the hate incidents and hate crimes.”

That need is highlighted by a report from the nonprofit Leading Asian Americans to Unite for Change which found 42% of the nearly 2,800 Americans surveyed could not name a prominent Asian American. Among those who could, the two leading responses were martial-arts actor Jackie Chan, a non-American, and Bruce Lee, another martial-arts icon who has been dead for a half-century.

Nearly a quarter of White respondents did not believe anti-Asian racism is a problem in the country, the report found.

“That shows how invisible we are, how we’re not thought of,” Jhin said. “That’s why education is the thing. Asian Americans are seen as perpetual foreigners, as Asian first, American second. We have to show people we belong here and that we’re as American as everyone else. It’s sad to say that in 2021, but it is what it is.”

Jeung believes that could be changing with the current level of heightened attention to Asian American issues.

“It’s now viewed as a national issue, not just an Asian American problem,” he said. “The combination of this mass movement and the few Asian Americans in political office has helped acknowledge this historic issue that is still plaguing us.”

Still, the increased attention has not yet translated into less fear: A statewide poll released in May found that 73% of Asian American respondents are afraid of being physically attacked by strangers because of their race, outpacing Black and Latino residents by double-digit percentages.

Leanna Louie is a San Francisco native who co-founded the United Peace Collaborative last year as the pandemic began gripping the world, and began organizing volunteer citizen patrols in the city’s Chinatown to deter the anti-Chinese and anti-Asian sentiment that ensued. The volunteer-patrol model Louie helped create has been replicated in cities including Oakland, San Jose and Los Angeles.

“It’s a step to success,” Louie said of the policy actions in response to anti-Asian violence. “It tells people it’s legally wrong to do this. Does that mean we can just stop patrolling? We don’t think so. Just because there’s legislation proposed and implemented, it doesn’t mean all the racism is going to stop and the hate is going to stop.”

Limits of the numbers, and law

There isn’t a tidy way to quantify anti-Asian hate in the U.S., in part because of the huge chasm between available hate-crime data and numbers that suggest a much larger problem, experts say.

A report from the Center for the Study of Hate and Extremism at Cal State San Bernardino found that in the first three months of 2021, hate crimes reported to law enforcement are up 194% in the country’s largest cities and metropolitan areas compared to the same time in 2020. The report charts a 262% increase in New York City, an 80% rise in Los Angeles and a 140% surge in San Francisco. But the raw numbers are still small: New York’s hate crime count went from 13 to 47, Los Angeles from five to nine, and San Francisco from five to 12.

The center also found that between 2019 and 2020, police reported that hate crimes dropped in a lot of major cities. San Jose was an anomaly, charting a spike from 34 to 89, that experts and authorities have attributed to some combination of increased incidents and more reporting.

But the data collected by Jeung and his co-founders reveal how much the numbers are just a sliver of the problem. Stop AAPI Hate has gotten reports of more than 6,600 instances of anti-Asian assaults and harassment in the United States between March 2020 and March 2021 — numbers that experts say present a much more comprehensive picture.

Of the incidents reported, 40% were generated in California, the most by far, with New York charting the second most with 15.1%. About 65% of the incidents involved verbal harassment, and 13% involved physical assault.

A glaring limitation of hate-crime laws — and a big reason to question whether they deter perpetrators — is the heavy legal burden they set for prosecutors: An explicit hateful intent must be proven, which has typically limited charges to people who leave evidence like graffiti or were clearly yelling racial slurs while committing a crime. In several high-profile anti-Asian attacks in the Bay Area this year that resulted in hate crime charges, mental illness is believed to have affected the majority of defendants.

Then there’s the widely acknowledged underreporting of these crimes, brought into focus by the more-inclusive Stop AAPI Hate data. To that end, NAPIPA has been organizing workshops for local community groups with the aim of “demystifying” the criminal-justice process to encourage more reporting of anti-Asian harassment and buck a historical tendency to stay silent out of fear of repercussions from authorities.

In Santa Clara County, the district attorney’s office filed 17 hate crimes charges in 2020 and nine through April of this year. The motives behind those crimes run the gamut from race to religion to sexual orientation. Four of the 26 victims are believed to have been targeted because they were Asian. Most of the charges entailed verbal harassment, sometimes combined with a minor assault or spitting. One involved a violent attack at Diridon Station in San Jose where a man thrashed and sexually assaulted a Filipina woman, yelling profanities about Asians before bystanders intervened.

San Francisco reported nine hate crime cases filed in 2020 and at least six in 2021. Though race was a suspected motive in 11 of the cases, information provided by the DA’s office did not state why a victim was targeted.

Brian Levin, director of the Center for the Study of Hate and Extremism, hopes the newly signed federal hate-crimes law and state racial-justice bureau will institute more uniform and comprehensive tracking of hate crimes, an effort he said was “abdicated” during the Trump administration.

The COVID-19 Hate Crimes Act specifically assigns an officer in the Justice Department to rapidly review hate-crimes reports, and orders the agency to issue guidance to law enforcement for establishing online reporting processes and expanding education campaigns. The new law also frees up federal grant dollars for state-operated hotlines and crime-reduction programs, and it authorizes courts to compel anyone put on supervised release for a hate-crime conviction to take part in education and community service.

“We need a whole-society approach because you’re not going to enforce your way out of this,” Levin said.