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 <i>potentially</i> 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.