Security camera footage tweeted by Yuh-Line Niou shows a man assaulting an Asian woman on a sidewalk in New York City. Hide screenshot of NPR caption
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Screenshot from NPR
Security camera footage tweeted by Yuh-Line Niou shows a man assaulting an Asian woman on a sidewalk in New York City.
Screenshot from NPR
A man has been arrested after an unprovoked attack on an Asian woman in New York’s Chinatown on Monday.
The incident was highlighted on Twitter from Yuh-Line Niou, the New York State Assembly member of the New York State Assembly who represents some of Lower Manhattan’s neighborhoods, including Chinatown. The disturbing imagery is contained in the tweet.
This was just sent to me by my constituent. That just happened in my Chinatown district. He was arrested and our precinct was determined. pic.twitter.com/sxNfCbrlza
– Yuh-Line Niou (@yuhline) May 31, 2021
Monday night’s video from a surveillance camera showed people walking on a sidewalk next to outdoor seating in a restaurant. A woman comes in from the right, while a man from the opposite direction swings his left arm wide and hits her in the face. The force of the hit tears her hat off. She becomes unbalanced, collapses and sits motionless. The man apparently raises his arm, says something, and then stands nearby while a crowd comes to the woman’s aid.
The 55-year-old victim was taken to hospital in stable condition, said a New York police spokesman.
Police said a 48-year-old man from Manhattan was arrested near the attack. A police spokesman said he had been charged with assault as a hate crime, assault and criminal possession of a controlled substance. According to police, he was taken to Bellevue Hospital for an examination.
Congregation member Niou says the woman is doing “OK” now.
“But we all know how much trauma it will cause and how much trauma our community will have,” she says. “It breaks my heart to see how many of these incidents keep happening … we are human too.”
While hate crimes against people of Asian or Pacific islanders were reported in multiple cities in 2020, the sharpest increase was in New York City, where three incidents reported in 2019 were reported to 28 in 2020 and extremism at California State University , San Bernardino reported the numbers in New York City rose again in the first quarter of 2021: from 13 in the first three months of 2020 to 42 in the first three months of 2021.
The numbers could be outnumbered as authorities say many incidents go unreported.
