By Carolyn Bick
NORTHWEST ASIAN WEEKLY
In the video, a man dashes towards Monthanus Ratanapakdee’s father, 84-year-old Vicha Ratanapakdee, and violently shoves the elder Thai-American down onto the pavement of a San Francisco street.
The video then shows the man walking away, at a regular speed, hands in his front pockets, as though nothing has happened.
Vicha Ratanapakdee died two days later of head injuries he sustained in the attack.
That was more than three years ago—and yet, her father’s attacker still sits behind bars in a California jail. The judge in the case still hasn’t set a trial date, despite the promise to do so in February of this year.
“We have a hearing every month,” Monthanus Ratanapakdee, founder of the Justice For Vicha Ratanapakdee Foundation, said, during an Aug. 23 Ethnic Media Services (EMS) meeting that focused on the difficulty of prosecuting hate crimes.
Ratanapakdee is not alone in the uphill battle to get her father’s crime prosecuted as a hate crime, which she and her family continue to allege of the January 2021 attack on her father.
In 2023, EMS Health Editor Sunita Sohrabji told meeting attendees, just five of the 1,978 reported hate crimes in California were prosecuted. In 2021—when the nation was in the midst of a record number of hate crimes, particularly against Asian Americans—just one was prosecuted.
Hate crimes also tend to spike with racist political rhetoric, which was the case throughout 2020 and into that year’s presidential election, Sohrabji said.
“At that time … almost a third [of incidents] involved language and dog whistles that were used by former president Trump, but also other candidates,” she said. “We saw that again in 2022, and it was not simply one party. It was both references to China, again, to COVID, and really race baiting in order to score political points.”
Santa Clara Deputy District Attorney Erin West, who has developed her expertise in prosecuting hate crimes, said that some of the complications lie in the language. A hate crime has to meet very specific parameters.
“When we look to whether we can charge a hate crime, we look to determine whether there was a bias that was displayed and whether or not that bias was a substantial reason for the crime being committed,” West explained.
She spoke to the experience that Kunni—another Thai-American speaker—shared with meeting attendees.
Kunni was attacked just last month. After Kunni told a patron at the bar where she worked that she was closing up for the night, and that the patron couldn’t play pool, the patron started to get aggressive, calling Kunni a “crazy Asian bitch.” The patron then pepper-sprayed Kunni, yelling, “Go back to your country!” after Kunni started to call the police.
The San Francisco District Attorney’s office is not treating this as a hate crime.
“I can imagine a situation where a prosecutor is looking at this and thinks, ‘Okay, there’s more than one reason why this happened,’” West said. “The reason could be this person didn’t like that Kunni said they couldn’t play pool. And it could also be true that the reason why they pepper-sprayed her is because they had … an anti-Asian bias.”
When there is potentially more than one reason at play, West said, prosecutors “need to be able to say that the bias was a substantial factor.”
Kunni was afraid to show her face on camera, because she and her daughter live in the same neighborhood as the woman who attacked her.
West also talked about Marsy’s Law, which ensures that the victims of hate crimes have the same rights as those accused and convicted of hate crimes.
“It requires prosecutors to keep victims updated with what’s happening with their case,” West said. “I can understand that a lot of times it doesn’t feel like you have any rights, and it feels like we are tiptoeing around trying to make sure that the defendant’s rights are not impinged.”
Manjusha Kulkarni, co-founder of Stop AAPI Hate and executive director of the AAPI Equity Alliance, also highlighted that the difficulty in prosecuting hate crimes came down to a few significant patterns, according to a 2018 California State Auditor’s report.
The report, which looked at four different agencies, found that law enforcement not only did not properly identify crimes as hate crimes, they often lacked both the training and the tools to be able to do so.
It also found that a combination of these same law enforcement agencies’ inadequate policies and the United States’ Department of Justice’s own lack of oversight was a major factor, as was the fact that hate crimes are difficult to prosecute.
Kulkarni also said that perception plays a big role.
“Often, the hate that we see is not necessarily universally accepted as hate,” Kulkarni said. “A swastika is viewed as being against the Jewish community and antisemitic. … Even in the Atlanta shooting, where six Asian women were shot and killed by a perpetrator who went out of his way to find Asian salons or … massage parlors, two of the three county [district attorneys] have chosen not to prosecute those as hate crimes, because they don’t think that … there’s evidence of animus.”