[Noah Baron looks at whether crime prevention is really as straightforward as the presidential candidates make it out to be]

Earlier this week, Hillary Clinton announced a $4 billion (annually) anti-crime program, with the money going towards putting more than 100,000 more cops on the country’s streets. Especially in light of the recent events around Columbia University, I’m sure many will be especially in favor of this proposal. However, I think we all ought to take a closer look at it.

It’s possible that this program will be effective, and we may be able to lower crime rates by flooding the streets with police. But I’d rather not walk around constantly under the surveillance of a police officer. As a friend put it, it would keep people “pliant, isolated, [and] atomized.”

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I woke up on Monday, April 7^th full of sadness. The previous night, I had learned of Minghui Yu’s death. Mr. Yu was doctoral student at GSAS who was killed within a block of my school. His death was shocking and impossible for me rationalize. Usually, being able to make sense of things comforts me. In this instance, I felt like there was no way for me to reconcile the sheer senselessness of his death, the loss of a talented statistics scholar, or the pain placed on a family that had lost its only son. I had not known him, but it didn’t not keep me from feeling the loss.

As I walked down 121st St and turned the corner there was nothing that made the median between 121st St and 122nd St look any different than it did on any other day I had hurriedly walked past it–nothing to distinguish it except the ardent sense of anger and loss I felt welling up in me.

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I’m not so optimistic about Associate Vice President of Public Safety James McShane’s blockbuster plan to add “an additional patrol vehicle to expand our presence further within Morningside Heights” in response to the mugging and resulting death of Minghui Yu. How about better lighting, neighborhood watch programs, and training programs for student self-defense? But now that we’ve gone so far past the crime itself, we may have lost track of what its motive may have really been.

After a discussion with a South-Bronx-raised Asian Columbia student, I think there may be more than meets the eye. In the Bronx, small Asian businesses are occassionally subject to hate crimes. It may be tempting to disregard it as a symptom of low-income, high-crime areas of the city, but a race-related crime is simply just that. And it would be an injustice to try and wiggle out of an issue the city nor the media has really thought about.

The problem itself is magnified by both sides–the city and the media often neglects further enquiry into an Asian race-related crime. There are a few potential reasons for this. For one, there is no real outspoken advocate for Asian rights. Nor is it culturally “comfortable” for Asians (or really, for any threatened group) to report crimes as well, out of fear of the authorities or further attacks.

Now, I write this not because I believe Minghui Yu’s death was the result of a racially motivated crime. I raise this issue because I believe it should be given due consideration and notice as both a possibility for a motive and as a general need for Asian rights advocates in Morningside Heights and beyond.