Measuring Changes in Bias-Motivated Attacks: Evidence from Anti-Asian Violence During the COVID-19 Pandemic

Hate crimes are notoriously difficult to measure. We propose a way to measure changes in group-specific exposure to violence using data on crimes that are potentially bias-motivated. We use this approach to study whether anti-Asian violence rose in the United States during the earliest phase of the COVID-19 pandemic. Using data from the FBI's National Incident-Based Reporting System on inter-race public violence, we find that while public violence declined among all Americans after March 2020, the share of public violence directed at Asian-Americans by people who were previously unknown to them-or were acquaintances-rose more than it did for other Americans. While this relationship did not hold among an auxiliary sample of large US cities, the national evidence is consistent with a modest increase in bias-motivated violence directed towards Asian-Americans. Beyond these specific results, our research offers an approach to studying potentially bias-motivated crimes that relies less urgently on hate crimes data.