The New York Police Department (NYPD) has arrested a teenage girl accused of attacking two Asian women on the subway last week.
The 16-year-old is accused of verbally harassing an Asian family on the subway and then assaulting another passenger on the evening of Aug. 3. It happened on an F train at West Fourth Street-Washington Square station.
A video of the incident taken by another passenger, Joanna Lin, shows a group of three young women shouting across the subway carriage at an Asian family with two young children. Lin reportedly helped the family file a police report. It is not clear from the video how the confrontation began.
Screen capture from video shot by Joanna Lin
According to an NYPD tweet, which identified the victim as a 51-year-old woman, the teen made an anti-ethnic remark, pulled her by the hair & punched her.” The victim has since identified herself as Sue Young—a 51-year-old from Reno, Nevada who was visiting New York on vacation with her family.
Young told NBC that she does not believe the people who verbally harassed her and her family members were motivated by racial hatred and warned about the limited effectiveness of a carceral response.
“These are very young girls,” Ms Young told NBC News. “Somebody or something or some circumstance has made a big impression on them—whether it’s historical pressure, societal pressure, social pressure. Using law enforcement to curtail this, I’m not sure if that’s going to fix the problem. It just seems like it’s a more underlying issue that we, as a society and as a community, need to hold everybody accountable, not just law enforcement.”