Douglas Todd: Do the numbers really tell us Vancouver is the ‘anti-Asian hate crime capital of North America?’ (Part 1)

Analysis: Vancouver hate-crimes officer offers enlightening thoughts on the disturbing claim, including the difficulty of collecting comparable data.

Oct 07, 2021 

Protesters rally outside the Vancouver Art Gallery last March against anti-Asian hate. The total number of anti-East Asian hate incidents collected by the Vancouver Police Department’s special unit for 2020 was 98, up from 12 in 2019.

It’s hardly the reputation Vancouver, or any city, would want.

But in May some of the world’s largest media outlets dubbed Vancouver, which has about 700,000 residents of mixed ethnicities, the “anti-Asian hate crime capital of North America.”

The focus of the articles, which were picked up by Canadian outlets , was on a Vancouver police report that showed anti-East Asian hate crimes had risen a startling 717 per cent in 2020 from the year earlier.

The total number of anti-East Asian hate incidents the Vancouver Police Department’s special unit collected for 2020, the year in which COVID-19 hit, was 98. That compared to 12 the year before.

Global outlets such as Bloomberg , The Guardian and others then compared the Vancouver police numbers to some large Canadian and U.S. cities, and concluded that there had been more incidents in this West Coast city than any of the other cities.

Thus, the media outlets labelled Vancouver: “The anti-Asian hate crime capital of North America.”

In August, British Columbia’s human rights commissioner extended the designation to all of B.C. Kasari Govender launched a public inquiry to uncover why “this province continues to report the most hate-motivated incidents per capita in North America .”

What is the reality?

A Vancouver police hate crimes unit member offered a wide range of thoughts on the disturbing claim, and on the many complexities of collecting comparable hate-crime statistics .

Sgt. Valerie Spicer, a 22-year veteran, has been with the city’s hate crimes unit for four years. Spicer’s email signature identifies her pronouns as “she/her” and acknowledges working on First Nations’ “unceded traditional territories.”

Spicer has long been appalled by hate crimes, of all kinds. And her unit has for years been urging more residents to report incidents to police because they’re concerned many do not.

She points out Vancouver is the only city with a dedicated hate-crimes unit in British Columbia.

Source: Vancouver Police Department

This spring Spicer’s unit released a chart showing anti-East Asian hate crimes suddenly skyrocketed in May of 2020. That was two months after COVID-19 arrived in North America, wiOne is that the 98 incidents referred specifically to East Asians, not “Asians,” which is the broader term the international media used when it argued Vancouver is “the anti-Asian hate crime capital of North America.”

Vancouver police, Spicer said, include ethnic Chinese, Koreans and Japanese under the heading of “East Asian.” They don’t include people with roots in South Asia, such as India.

Protesters rally outside the Vancouver Art Gallery last March. 

the most scientists believing it originated in China.

Anti-East Asian hate crimes jumped from seven in April to 29 in May. They then steadily declined to 21 in June, 11 in July, seven in August,  four in September and three in October.

Many things about the Vancouver Police Department’s troubling chart require context, says Spicer.

In total, the Vancouver unit said, there were 280 hate-related reported incidents last year — targeting people of other ethnicities, genders, sexual orientations and religions.

The 98 reported incidents against East Asians (who make up roughly one-quarter of the city’s population, with ethnic Chinese the largest group) were varied. Some amounted to “hate,” while others were less severe, involving “prejudice or bias.”

Four months ago Postmedia put in a freedom-of-information request to the Vancouver police to get the full details of each complaint. But such a report has not been made available.

Nevertheless, Spicer clarified that, even though the unit’s chart uses the catch-all term “hate crimes” to describe the 98 incidents, 32 of them were “not criminal.” The 66 potentially criminal acts included 22 involving assault or bodily harm and another 21 so-called mischief offences.

The non-criminal incidents included reports of suspicious persons (including those found to be mentally ill) and neighbourhood disputes. Out of all 98 incidents involving East Asians, 14 were referred to Crown Counsel for possible charges.

Spicer emphasized Vancouver police are exceedingly pro-active about using a variety of means to urge residents to report hate incidents. That could be one factor, she suggested, in why the city’s reported hate crimes sometimes seem higher.

Vancouver police Sgt. Valerie Spicer (pictured in 2019): ‘I wouldn’t say we’re shockingly different,’ Spicer says. ‘Anti-East Asian sentiment was being seen across the country. We also heard it in the U.S.

For instance, the department took unique steps last spring to reach the Chinese-speaking population. In May, when the sudden spike occurred, it had just become possible for residents to file online hate-incident complaints on a PDF form in Mandarin and Cantonese.  The option wasThe head of the U.S. centre for the study of hate, Brian Levin, told Postmedia much the same thing: Canada’s hate speech laws are much more broad than any that might exist in the U.S. So any comparisons are fraught.

So what, ultimately, does Spicer think of the headlines claiming Vancouver is “The anti-Asian hate crime capital of North America?”

She paused to consider. “I think we have to go back to the numbers always. We need to take a balanced approach. I don’t believe in a media that further engenders fear.”n’t available in English, or in other foreign languages.

Given that the Vancouver Police Department is one of the few in Canada with a hate crimes unit, and is one that arguably does much more than other jurisdictions to encourage reporting of prejudicial incidents, how do its numbers compare to other Canadian cities?

“I wouldn’t say we’re shockingly different,” Spicer said. “Anti-East Asian sentiment was being seen across the country. We also heard it in the U.S.”

While Spicer did not have figures handy on how Vancouver compares to other Canadian cities, Statistics Canada says police-reported hate incidents involving ethnicity rose after COVID . B.C. had 196 more ethnicity-related hate crimes in potentially criminal categories while Ontario had 321 more. Across Canada hate crimes involving ethnicity rose by 80 per cent last year, while those regarding East Asians and Southeast Asians jumped by 301 per cent.

The value of Statistics Canada’s reports on police-reported hate crimes is they rely on roughly the same methodology, even while the agency adds several caveats, including that data fluctuations “might reflect changes in reporting by the public because of increased community outreach by police or heightened sensitivity after high-profile events.”

It’s a much more difficult challenge to compare Canadian and U.S. statistics on hate crimes. And that’s what the global media zeroed in on to make its argument about Vancouver.

The outlets looked at data from the Center for the Study of Hate and Extremism at California State University, which showed that Vancouver police in 2020 recorded triple the number of “anti-Asian” hate crimes as New York, which logged the most of any U.S. city.

But Spicer, like other specialists, cautions that juxtaposing Canadian hate-crime data to U.S. data is “comparing apples and oranges.”

While the Canadian criminal code has a consistent national definition of hate crime, the U.S. does not. And when some U.S. jurisdictions do try to define the term, they generally do so in a way that is much narrower than in Canada.