Will Prop 36’s tough approach to crime improve safety for AAPI employees?

At a Sept. 12 event outside the Grand Century Mall in San Jose, Mayor Matt Mahan stood alongside prominent Vietnamese-American businessmen, banh mi vendors and politicians to advocate for Proposition 36, which Californians will vote on next month Voting will lead to success making the Vietnamese community safer.

“Our Vietnamese are the most entrepreneurial people I have ever met,” he said, and immigrant business owners like those at this mall told him that California needs to incarcerate more people.

Mahan is one of several prominent Democratic politicians, including San Francisco Mayor London Breed, who has pushed for Prop 36 in the run-up to Election Day, a type of “three strikes” measure that would allow prosecutors to pursue lower-level prosecutions Pursuing Improvement Crimes such as theft and drug possession range from misdemeanors to third-offense crimes. Mahan’s appeal to Vietnamese American voters is part of a larger trend: In recent years, groups like Dear Community and the Chinese American Democratic Club have turned their influence in San Francisco’s Asian American and Pacific Islander community into support for tough-on-crime policies Politicians and concerns.

Prop 36 activists have worked hard to convince AAPI voters, a key voting bloc in California, that their safety will be guaranteed by increased penalties for minor crimes. But this narrative not only ignores the reality of so many AAPI people who have been and will be victims of mass incarceration: it will also eliminate programs that actively support crime survivors and make AAPI communities safer.

While then-President Donald Trump referred to COVID as the “China virus” during the pandemic, high-profile cases of violent crime between Blacks and Asians sparked fear and terror in many Asian American neighborhoods. The 2021 killing of 84-year-old Vicha Ratanapakdee in San Francisco, caught on a surveillance camera, spurred activists and celebrities to speak out about anti-Asian hate and fueled the successful campaign to recall San Francisco’s progressive district attorney. At a recent technology and policy conference, venture capitalist Garry Tan called Ratanapakdee’s case the one that “radicalized” him and led him to pour money into unseating progressive politicians in San Francisco.

Over the past few years, my social media and news feeds have been filled with videos of violent attacks on Asian Americans, building the narrative of Black attackers and Asian victims that continues to shape public debates about community safety, especially in the upcoming effort to do so to do Remember another progressive prosecutor in Alameda County who was too “soft” on crime. Several social media and mainstream media brands have attracted large followings by amplifying these incidents.

When I spoke to Sydney Fang, political director of the progressive organization AAPI FORCE, they expressed concern about how AAPI voters were being manipulated. They cited a recent survey in which over a third of AAPI voters said they rely on unverified online platforms for their news.

“Misinformation and disinformation are particularly damaging here because they use emotionally charged content to spread false information about the measure and have the ability to go viral,” they said. But despite this information gap, Fang and other sources say Prop 36 supporters have stumbled in their outreach to AAPI voters, who make up 17.3% of California’s electorate. Within that gap, there is an opportunity for others who could prey on the community’s fears, Fang said.

The appeal of Prop 36 is its simplicity – it promises to fight crime by punishing repeat offenders and forcing drug users into addiction treatment (or giving them three years in state prison). But several people I spoke to, including Thanh Tran, a political consultant and formerly incarcerated Vietnamese American, told me that the reality is not that simple.

Tran, who served time at San Quentin State Prison, is a firsthand witness to what he calls the “rinse-repeat cycle” of mass incarceration. People incarcerated for drug offenses are often more addicted than before, he said. “Drugs are everywhere.” Overdose deaths, particularly from fentanyl, have increased among California’s prison population even as the number of incarcerated people has declined. In some cases, inmates found ways to smuggle them in; in others, employees were responsible.

According to Tinisch Hollins, executive director of Crime Survivors for Safety and Justice, a leading opponent of Prop 36, an increased focus on punishing individuals is also not what many crime victims want.

“It’s really a conversation about what people need to feel safe,” she said, such as victim services, housing and accessible drug addiction or mental health treatment. Recent polls may show broad support for Prop 36, but AAPI advocates point out that more targeted polls with multilingual content tell the real story of how AAPI voters would decline – especially if they are made aware of what’s at stake the proposal is actually about and what it is about and is funded (or not).

The more than $800 million in state money generated by not incarcerating low-level offenders has funded vital resources for community safety, and Prop 36 will be disastrous to those efforts, Hollins warned. “Our vulnerabilities are being exploited because of a political agenda that doesn’t even benefit us.”

Instead of addressing a system that has repeatedly failed to keep people, including AAPI Californians, safe and healthy, Prop 36 will compromise the few resources we have in favor of a performative gesture that will only exacerbate this failure becomes.

Reach Soleil Ho (she/her): [email protected]; X: @hooleil