Crime and Criminality in the Golden State – Tablet Magazine
On March 9, 2021, a 75-year-old Asian American man named Pak Ho died after he sustained traumatic head injuries. His alleged assailant is a 26-year-old ex-convict named Teaunte Bailey, a derelict with multiple convictions for assault, burglary, and other crimes who had repeatedly assaulted other elderly Asians: easy targets. At the time of the assault, Bailey was on probation. Arrested by the police, he has been charged with a special circumstances murder by the Alameda County district attorney. Prosecutions under special circumstances allow for more severe punishments than are ordinarily permitted.
The American novelist Mark Twain would not have been surprised by the gruesome details of Bailey s assault on Pak. In Roughing It, which was published in 1872, he wrote: News comes that in broad daylight in San Francisco, some boys have stoned an inoffensive Chinaman to death, and that although a large crowd witnessed the shameful deed, no one interfered. Twain lived and worked as a journalist in San Francisco in the 1860s. He exaggerated famously in his 1884 Mississippi River novel in which the narrator, Huck Finn, explains that there was things which he [Twain] stretched but mainly he told the truth. Twain mainly told the truth about the treatment of the Chinese in San Francisco, where he lived in the Occidental Hotel. He described it as heaven on the half shell. More than 150 years after his brief sojourn in oyster heaven, Asians are still being assaulted. While the media stretches some of the facts that s the nature of journalism it hasn t fabricated a disturbing trend, or invented Teaunte Bailey out of whole cloth.
Between late March 2020 and the end of December 2020, there were nearly 3,000 reported accounts of hate crimes against Asian Americans all across the nation. The most high profile was the March 16 Atlanta-area killing spree that left eight people dead, six of them Asian women.
But a significant number of these attacks have taken place in the San Francisco Bay Area, which is often thought of as a bastion of liberal values, tolerance, and respect.
On Monday March 15, 2021, Danilo Yu Chang, 59, an Asian American, was assaulted near the heart of San Francisco. The old San Francisco is gone, he said. It’s not safe anymore.