Did the proportion of Asian-related crime out of all crime increase after Covid-19? Medias and news continuously report increasing Asian hate crime in New York City. However, do we know if Asian are increasingly becoming a victim target or numbers of crime in general is increasing. Read to find out!

As Covid-19 proliferated across the United States, we have constantly heard on the news that Asians are becoming the new target for criminal attacks. The Federal Bureau of Investigation even warned that a surge in anti-Asian crime was expected at the start of the Covid outbreak in the US (BBC, 2021). Multiple sources indicate that recent violent attacks on Asian Americans are related to Asians being blamed for the spread of Covid-19. However, the act of “Covid Crime” has pointed out a notion that “anti-Asian hate isn't’ new”, but something being exacerbated (Laura, 2021). Pandemic-related health crises have always been stigmatized by the othering of people; individual and institutional-level racism and xenophobia have operated throughout history. For example, since the late 1700s, Asian Americans have experienced a certain level of racial bias and verbal or physical attacks (Angela, Shannon & Lynn, 2020). To know whether the Covid outbreak in the US has changed the state of the crime scene, we focus on crime data in New York and set days before March 2020 as pre-pandemic crime data and days after as post-pandemic crime data. This research aims to clarify if the Covid-19 event changed the anti-Asian crime rate in New York throughout the period. To achieve this, we categorize the NYPD reported crime dataset into Asian and non-Asian subtypes and conduct exploratory data analysis, correlation analysis, time series, and Bayesian Structural Time Series (BSTS) to forecast the anti-Asian crime rate. Victims of the Asian / Pacific Asian race are all grouped into the anti-Asian crime dataset. From the scatter plot and correlation analysis, we see a positive relationship between the Asian and Non-Asian crime groups. The number of anti-Asian crimes shares a linear relationship with the number of crimes of all as well. We use BSTS to forecast a predictive 2-year anti-Asian crime rate based on pre-pandemic anti-Asian crime data. Based on the two-sample t-test, it's statistical significance to state a difference between the predicted anti-Asian crime rate and the actual anti-Asian crime rate. That is, Covid-19 did impact the state of crime scenes.