Community comes together to respond to anti-Chinese graffiti
By Tim Redmond
SEPTEMBER 11, 2015 – There was, Sup. David Campos said, some very good news coming out of the very bad news of the emergence of racist graffiti in the Portola.
“The fact that you are all here, that we have come together in this way,” is a sign that the community won’t tolerate intolerance, he told a press conference and rally outside the park where some of the anti-Chinese statements were spray-painted.
And indeed, a fairly large and very diverse crowd gathered at Palega Park last night to hear speakers say that the community was outraged. The chair of the Portola Neighborhood Association, who is a white man, said that his “entire family is Chinese – my husband is Chinese, all of our in-laws … this really hit me personally.”
As Ruth Wallace, a longtime resident, told me, “this is not how this neighborhood is, we are a very welcoming area.”
Two important thoughts came out of the rally:
Vincent Pan, director of Chinese for Affirmative Action, noted:
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Hate crimes do not occur in a vacuum. Hate crimes are contagious. Hate crimes are connected.
They are connected to the anti-immigrant rhetoric used by politicians. They are connected to the violence against Black churches. They are connected to the killing of transgender people. And they are connected to the historic and current discrimination faced by Chinese Americans in San Francisco.
I don’t know if the man who was arrested and charged in the graffiti incident is a follower of Donald Trump. But I do know that Trump’s anti-immigrant rhetoric has already spurred some hate crimes in this country; hate-speech is indeed contagious.
The captain of the Bayview District station, Raj Vaswani, said that the alleged perpetrator was caught by Officer Percy Hernandez, who for more than eight years has walked a beat on San Bruno Avenue.
Hernandez came up and spoke and pointed out that over the years, he’s gotten to know merchants and residents all over the area. When he got the crime bulletin with the description of the suspect, he had the help of the community, was able to ID him, and make the arrest.
“Foot patrols work,” Campos said.
