Title Reference

Heng Lim was a 37 year old Cambodian American man who died on June 17 after being struck in the head with a stick near 9th and Tasker streets in South Philadelphia. A suspect is currently awaiting trial in the case. The title of this report was inspired by a documentary film about the murder of a Chinese American man in Detroit in 1982. The film -who Killed Vincent Chin? was produced and directed by Christine Choy and Renee Tajima and has been broadcast on Public Television. Coincidentally, Heng Lim himself watched the film last year.

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PREFACE

This is an inquiry into some of the more troublesome aspects of neighborhood relations in Philadelphia. But we would do well to remember that there are many Southeast Asian residents who enjoy good relations with their non-Asian neighbors. Credit is perhaps not given in these pages to the fact that the city is full of people of goodwill - they are in every neighborhood, on ever block - and many of these individuals have amply demonstrated this goodwill toward their new Southeast Asian neighbors.

Research for this study was conducted in Philadelphia between January and September, 1990. The primary material out of which this document arose was a series of twenty-seven formal interviews and dozens of informal conversations with neighborhood residents, human relations professionals, police officers, School District employees, community leaders, and others both Asian and non-Asian. I sought to immerse myself in situations - such as social interactions and visits to neighborhoods and public schools - that would that would help to provide me not only with an intellectual understanding but with some firsthand knowledge and a feeling for the subject of study. A review of the literature was conducted with the help of the computer search facilities at the Free Library of Philadelphia. Much has been written about Southeast Asian refugees, I found, but little of it has concerned itself with problems of inter-group conflict.

My perspective on the problems here in Philadelphia has, I think, benefited from the twelve years I have lived in Asia, including five years (1983 to 1988) working with the International Rescue Committee (IRC) in camps for Southeast Asian refugees in Thailand. Two of these years (1986 to 1988) were spent under IRC contract to the U.S. Indochinese Refugee Resettlement Program interviewing Cambodian, Laotian, and Vietnamese refugees seeking admission to the U.S. My first real introduction to the circumstances of Southeast Asians in this country came between July, 1988 and March, 1989 when I served as Assistant Director of the Southeast Asian Mutual Assistance Associations Coalition (SEAMAAC) in Philadelphia.

This document is submitted in partial fulfillment of the master's degree requirements of the Program in Intercultural Management at the School for

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International Training in Brattleboro, Vermont. As a graduate student I had the option of writing strictly for academic purposes, but for me this became more than a master's thesis. I hope that people in Philadelphia and elsewhere who are struggling to understand the problems described find this document useful in some way.

Unless otherwise noted, all quotations are excerpted from conversations and interviews conducted by me in Philadelphia between January and September, 1990. Due to time limitations and other practical restraints, many individuals who would have provided great insight (including some of the most knowledgeable about the problems described) were not interviewed. Finally, readers who are familiar with Philadelphia's Southeast Asian community may wish to skip Part One and go directly from the Introduction to Part Two.

R. Thayer

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TABLE OF CONTENTS

                                                       

Preface		v
Introduction		1
PART ONE: BACKGROUND
I.	The Southeast Asians	7
II.	The Resettlement Experience	17
III.	Misperceptions	21
PART TWO: THE HOSTILITIES
I.	Extent of the Hostilities	25
II.	The Problem with the Statistics	31
III.	Under-Reporting	35
IV.	Why the Hostilities?	43
V.	Who are the Perpetrators?	49
VI.	The Case of Heng Lim	53
VII.	Southeast Asian Responses	59
PART THREE: PARTIES OF RESPONSIBILITY
I.	The School District	67
II.	The Police Department	75
III.	The Commission on Human Relations	85
IV.	The Media	91
V.	Asian Organizations	95
PART FOUR: THE FUTURE
I.	A Circle of Violence	101
II.	Trends	103
III.	Concluding Notes: Thoughts About Solutions	107
Notes		115
Selected Bibliography		119

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INTRODUCTION

This is an important story - important because of the impact of harassment and violence upon the lives of Southeast Asians here in Philadelphia, and important because it is a reflection on all of us and the ways in which we relate to each other. It's a reflection upon the city as a whole, even those who imagine their lives to be far removed from the tensions described here.

Southeast Asians certainly haven't been the first incoming group to be preyed upon by longtime residents. The city has, during its history, witnessed ethnic intimidation and violence directed toward virtually every group represented here. Philadelphia, the “city of neighborhoods”, is still a city of largely segregated neighborhoods. Even now, in 1990, every city resident - brown, white, or black - knows of areas which are virtually off-limits to members of his or her race

so this is an old story, with a new cast of characters. A new group arrives, with a different culture, a different appearance, sometimes a different language. Settling first in the poorest neighborhoods, where things are already difficult, resentment and jealousies are aroused among those longtime residents who themselves are still struggling. These resentments translate, too frequently, into harassment and violence toward the new arrivals.

But this is not just a story of victims and perpetrators, good guys and bad guys. It's never that simple, as events are showing us. Traditionally, the pattern has been that years will pass, the newcomers get their feet on the ground, gain the strength of numbers and, reacting to the humiliations they have endured, some of them take a kind of revenge by inflicting upon others what they themselves have suffered. And thus the vicious circle of intolerance, hostility, and violence is perpetuated. Today's victims, we are learning, may become tomorrow's tormenters. Ironic it is that some white and black Philadelphians are now inflicting upon incoming Asians precisely the kinds of things which they and their forebears suffered in past years.

Given that every racial and ethnic group has its share of victims, one hesitates to look at the plight of any one group in isolation from the rest. Perpetrators of acts of hostility toward Asians, for example, do not normally distinguish between one Asian group and another when they commit these acts. But we have reason to want to take a special look at what's been happening to Southeast Asians, whose numbers have grown from just a few hundred to more than 20,000 in ten years. Southeast Asians were the city's fastest growing minority during the 1980s.

In proportion to their population, moreover, they have experienced an extraordinarily high incidence of harassment and violence. We know this both from available statistics (which reflect just a small fraction of actual incidents) and through conversations with police, humans relations professionals, School District staff, and Asian and non-Asian residents. The abuse has ranged from verbal taunts (beginning as early as first grade) to vandalism and physical assault. Conversations with Southeast Asians in the city indicate that a very large number, probably a majority, have personally experienced one form or another of racially-motivated harassment or violence. (See Part Two, “Extent of the Hostilities”.)

What's been happening in Philadelphia is part of a national trend in areas with large concentrations of Asians which began in the early 1980s, when refugees first began arriving in large numbers. According to U.S. Justice Department figures, the number of “hate acts” against Asians around the country more than doubled between 1980 and 1985.

In Philadelphia, a series of brutal attacks against Asians in 1983 and 1984 helped prompt the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights to launch a nationwide investigation of anti-Asian activity focusing on Philadelphia and seven other sites

The more one listens to people in the city - Asians and non-Asians - the more evident it becomes that in the area of human relations, things are always deeper, more complex, more subtle, than they first appear. Beneath every incident reported by the media, there is nearly always a “story-behind-the-story”. There is always a history, a context, another side, without which we can know little. This report seeks to go a little deeper than we normally do in examining this issue, to get at that story behind the headlines.

As this report arises primarily out of interviews and conversations with residents and professionals in Philadelphia about the current tensions here, its concern is with present conditions and it may ignore some of the history. This will bother some people - especially those who, quite rightly, see the connections between the problems in Philadelphia and national trends, and those who are conscious of the history of anti-Asian discrimination and

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violence. In the 19th century an exclusion act restricted immigration of Chinese, and these restrictions were extended to other Asian groups as they began to arrive in the following decades. Asian immigration was strictly curbed until 1965, and other laws - such as those denying citizenship -were designed to exclude Asians from the mainstream of American life. “The effect of these laws was to relegate Asians to the periphery”. says Tsiwen Law, a Chinese American attorney who heads the Mayor's Commission on Asian American Affairs. “It's taken time to recover. Only in the last five or six years have you begun to see significant numbers of Asian Americans in public office… So when the Southeast Asians came in, because of the history, there was no one to look out for their interests.” Asian leaders say also that the heightened rhetoric of the national anti-Japanese import campaign, which exploits economic anxieties, is translating into more attacks against Asians locally.

This report is, in many ways, the work of all those individuals who consented to be interviewed and shared their time and their thoughts with me. The themes presented here were generated by these interviews, and through conversations and contact with people in the city who are close to and have an understanding of the problems described. The real experts -those with the deepest knowledge of the subject of our investigation - are the subjects themselves, Southeast Asian residents of the city and their neighbors.

1. BACKGROUND

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1. I. THE SOUTHEAST ASIANS

More than a million refugees from Laos, Cambodia, and Vietnam have resettled in the United States since 1975. Leaving aside California, which is home to nearly half of this population, Philadelphia has the eighth largest concentration of Southeast Asians in the country, with an estimated 22,000.

In addition to ethnic Lao, Cambodian, and Vietnamese refugees, there are several ethnic minorities from these countries which have also been represented in the refugee influx. The largest of these are the ethnic Chinese - Chinese originally from the mainland whose ancestors migrated to Southeast Asian- and the Hmong, a hilltribe from Laos best known by Americans for their role as anti-communist guerillas allied with the U.S.government during the war.

These countries - Laos, Cambodia, and Vietnam- share a common history as former French colonies and as nations which simultaneously underwent civil war in the 1960s and early 1970s. During this period U.S.-supported regimes battled communist insurgencies. In the span of just a few weeks -during March and April of 1975 - all three governments fell to revolutionary forces, ending American influence in the region. Although more than 100,000 Vietnamese were evacuated to the U.S. with the departing American forces, Southeast Asian refugees did not begin to flee in large numbers until after 1978.

Each group needs to be understood individually, but some generalizations can be made about the people who fled. Those who left in 1975 (primarily Vietnamese) were nearly all associated with the American war effort. This group included large numbers of military officers, government officials, U.S. Embassy employees, interpreters, and others. They tended to bring with them skills, a relatively high level of education, English language proficiency, and an ability to adapt fairly readily to life in America. After just four years here, this 1975 group had a median income which exceeded that of the average American family.

The success of this group, in fact, has led many Americans to presume that later Southeast Asian arrivals would be just as

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adaptable and successful, and is partly responsible for the emergence of a popular stereotype of “the successful Asian”.

What few Americans realize is that most of the later arrivals (those who came after 1978) are from a different strata of Southeast Asian society and thus came far less equipped to cope with American life. The majority of post-78 arrivals - and this is particularly true for Laotians and Cambodians - have been either of rural, peasant origin, served in low level military or civil service positions with the pre-1975 regimes, or come from otherwise lower class backgrounds with relatively little formal education and few transferable skills.

The Laotians

Philadelphia's Lao community, which numbers about 3,000, is concentrated in enclaves in South, West, and North Philadelphia, particularly in the South 7th St. area (along the so-called “Asian corridor” sandwiched between predominately black and Italian neighborhoods); between 43rd and 48th St. in the area of Chestnut to Locust in West Philadelphia; and in the Logan section of North Philadelphia.

Of the five main Southeast Asian groups, the Lao and the Cambodians are having perhaps the toughest time adapting to life here in Philadelphia. Unlike the Cambodians, however, who have among them a small but influential educated and professional element, the Lao have few such people to represent and advocate for their community. While other Southeast Asian groups have gained at least a token presence in vital city agencies, like the school system and the police department, for example, there are few Laotians in such positions. The Lao population in Philadelphia consists largely of former laborers and lower level civil servants such as soldiers and policemen. Few of the parental generation have more than an elementary level education.

In Philadelphia the most common employment for Laotians is in the service industries (hotels and restaraunts) and in manufacturing. An estimated 15 to 25% of Lao in the city receive public assistance, a figure thought to be much lower than that for Cambodians.

Like the Cambodians, and unlike the Vietnamese, the Lao have tended to

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cluster together in areas with large Southeast Asian concentrations rather than integrate into non-Asian areas. There has been some movement of Laotian families out of West Philadelphia, where housing costs have been pushed up by the presence of the University of Pennsylvania, to North Philadelphia, where houses can still be purchased fairly cheaply. The Lao Mutual Assistance Association (MAA) reports that about ten Lao families have moved to Upper Darby. In South Philadelphia Lao families, nearly all of whom are renters, are staying put for the most part, with some new arrivals in the 7th St. area and some movement westward from 7th St. over as far as 18th and 19th St.

The Cambodians

The Cambodians are perhaps the largest of Philadelphia's Southeast Asian communities, totalling about 8,000. (The Vietnamese are estimated to have about the same number.) Like the Laotians, the biggest Cambodian concentrations are in the South 7th St. area of South Philadelphia, around Logan in the North, and in the University City region of West Philadelphia. More numerous and economically more diverse than the Lao, Cambodians are spread out over a wider area of the city. While the majority are clustered in the Southeast Asian enclaves, pockets of Cambodian families can also be found in such places as Olney and Southwest Philadelphia.

A very large portion of the Cambodian community, perhaps 80% or more, are of rural, peasant origin, which helps explain the fact that, of all the Southeast Asian groups in the city, the Cambodians have the greatest problems with welfare dependency, school drop-outs, limited English ability, and other difficulties in cultural adjustment. At the same time, however, among the Cambodians there are a significant number of educated professionals - teachers, engineers, health specialists, and social workers. Though the numbers are small - perhaps 5 to 10% of the total - and many of them are ethnic Chinese, the result is that Cambodians have something more of a public presence in the city than do the Lao; they have at least a handful of representatives in key professions who can be of service to the community. For example, Cambodians can be found in positions at Community Legal Services, the Philadelphia Commission on Human Relations, the Department of Public Welfare, and in a few public schools (though not nearly enough to provide for the bilingual needs of the city's estimated 1900 Cambodian students).

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A number of Cambodian businesses operate in the city - most of them small grocery stores in the Southeast Asian enclaves - but these are almost all actually owned by ethnic Chinese Cambodians. The primary occupations for Cambodians in the city are in manufacturing (including clothing piecework performed in the home) and in the service sector, the same occupations engaged in by the less skilled segments of other Southeast Asian groups. Hundreds of Cambodians, including many with other full-time occupations, work in seasonal agriculture, mainly picking blueberries in southern New Jersey. Though the hours are long and the season is short, this work is particularly attractive to people on public assistance who, by working off the books, have an opportunity to clear an average of $50 a day or more without losing their welfare eligibility.

Cambodians in Philadelphia are fortunate to have their own Buddhist Temple, established on the site of an old Presbyterian church in the Pennsport section in 1987. The Temple, which now has five monks in residence, plays important religious and cultural roles and provides a certain amount of stability and cohesion for Cambodians in the city by serving as a community center.

The Vietnamese

The Vietnamese stand apart in many ways from the other Southeast Asian groups. They arrived earlier (in large numbers as early as 1975), they have a much larger proportion of skilled and educated people among them, and they are much more likely to live among non-Asians than in clusters with Laotian and Cambodian families. The Vietnamese community also has a very strong ethic of independence and self-reliance, which is sometimes perceived as aloofness by other Southeast Asians.

The rapid assimilation and financial success of the 1975 wave of Vietnamese created a vital support network for later arrivals which other Southeast Asian groups lacked. Most post-1978 Vietnamese arrivals benefited in some way from the assistance of relatives or friends in “learning the ropes” of the new culture, finding housing and employment, and so forth. In contrast to the Lao and Cambodian communities, which are overwhelmingly composed of low-income families, the proportion of low-income Vietnamese is estimated to be just 20 to 40 percent.

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Ironically, while the Vietnamese are perhaps the most successful of the Southeast Asian groups in Philadelphia overall, their numbers also include the most significant “hard core” element of disaffected young men. While Cambodians and Laotians drop-out of school at a far greater rate, those involved in serious criminal activity are more likely to be Vietnamese. One reason given for this is the fact that the later waves of Vietnamese refugees included large numbers of single young men, who arrived without the stabilizing influence of family. Also a problem in terms of delinquency are the Amerasian youth - children of American servicemen - many of whom spent years learning the ways of the streets in Saigon before being resettled here.

Apart from this disaffected element, the traditonally strong Vietnamese family structure appears to have remained largely intact compared to the breakdowns that have been occurring among Laotians and Cambodians. Much of this has to do with class distinctions. Families with educated, English-speaking parents and adequate income who live in a stable neighborhood environment are much less susceptible to the kinds of stresses currently being felt by lower income Cambodian and Laotian families.

A large percentage of refugees from Vietnam are actually ethnic Chinese, an important distinction given that both the ethnic Vietnamese and ethnic Chinese communities perceive themselves to be quite distinct from each other. Estimates vary, but perhaps more than 40% of post-1978 refugees from Vietnam are of Chinese origin. This group has largely maintained it's Chinese language (including Cantonese and Teochio dialects) and cultural identity. In Philadelphia, the separate identities of these groups is highlighted by the fact that there is one Mutual Assistance Association (MAA) serving the ethnic Vietnamese community, and another one serving ethnic Chinese from Vietnam, Cambodia, and Laos.

The largest Vietnamese populations here in the city are in the Logan area and in West Philadelphia. There is a small but very visible Vietnamese presence in South Philadelphia, primarily due to the large number of Vietnamese businesses there, particularly in the Italian market area. A few Vietnamese families can be found in the Cambodian and Laotian enclave on South 7th St. Because the Vietnamese seem much less inclined to cluster together in predominantly Asian areas, a scattering of Vietnamese families

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can be found in such places as Kensington, and in the Northeast and Northwest. There has also been a trend among the Vietnamese toward relocation in Southwest Philadelphia, where as many as 50 Vietnamese families have moved, attracted by the availability of houses which can be purchased for as little as $15-20,000 and then renovated. As is the case with all the Southeast Asian groups, those Vietnamese families who can afford to generally move to the suburbs.

The Vietnamese community tends to be much more politicized than other Southeast Asian groups, in terms of its attunement to the politics of Southeast Asia, and in terms of its ability to mobilize its members for political ends here. A major reason for this is that, in 1975, a good portion of the South Vietnamese political and military hierarchy was transplanted to this country, where they have retained their strong anti-communist sympathies. A national network of highly organized and mission-driven patriotic organizations has had a presence in Philadelphia and other American cities since 1975. Also, the higher educational level of the Vietnamese community may result in a greater tendency to seek political participation. The largely rural Cambodian population, in contrast, has been conditioned to regard political assertion as presumptuous, at the least, and often very dangerous as well.

The Chinese

As many as a quarter of the 22,000 Southeast Asian refugees in Philadelphia are ethnic Chinese - that is, Chinese whose forebears emigrated to Laos, Cambodia, and Vietnam. But for outsiders this is an enigmatic group, hard to gain an understanding of, because most of them are not only between two cultures - Asian and American - but their Asian identities lie somewhere between Chinese and Vietnamese, or Chinese and Cambodian. (There are very few Laotian Chinese.)

The numbers are nearly impossible to determine accurately, because some Chinese assimilated while in Vietnam and Cambodia, intermarrying with ethnic Vietnamese and Cambodians, adopting the local language and customs, and taking on Vietnamese and Cambodian surnames. The majority of ethnic Chinese Southeast Asians, however, have retained their Chinese language and culture, at least to some degree. Like immigrants everywhere, first and second generation ethnic Chinese in Southeast Asia tended to retain

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their original cultural identities while their offspring, as a result of attending local schools and so forth, have tended to take on elements of the new culture. Among ethnic Chinese Cambodians and Vietnamese, generally speaking, the higher the class background and level of education, the greater their success in retaining their Chinese identities.

Johnny Kuo, a mainland-born Taiwanese American who runs the Greater Philadelphia Overseas Chinese Association - the Mutual Assistance Association which serves ethnic Chinese from Southeast Asia - says there are about 4,500 such refugees in Greater Philadelphia, of whom 70% are Vietnamese and the rest nearly all Cambodian. This figure may be high, but it is not too far off of the estimates of others familiar with the Southeast Asian community.

Vietnamese and Cambodian residents of the city say their ethnic Chinese counterparts tend not to associate much with them, considering themselves Chinese before their adopted nationalities of Vietnam and Cambodia. On the other hand, neither have these ethnic Chinese refugees merged with the American-born Chinese American community, which is based in Chinatown. Debbie Wei, a Chinese American high school teacher and activist President of Asian-Americans United, describes a kind of social hierarchy in the Chinese community with American-born Chinese at the top (the Chinatown establishment), followed by later immigrants from Hong Kong, then mainland Chinese immigrants, and Southeast Asian Chinese refugees at the bottom.

The distance between the more established Chinese residents and the newcomers is reflected in their housing patterns, though these are more a reflection of the income gap between them than social distance. Concentrations of Cambodian and Vietnamese Chinese are to be found in the Olney and Logan sections of North Philadelphia (especially around the Korean section); in the Italian Market area of South Philadelphia; in Upper Darby, where about 70 of the better-off families now live; and in West Philadelphia.

West Philadelphia was the original base for the newly arriving Chinese from Cambodia and Vietnam in the early 1980s, but by 1986 or so, the majority had moved out to escape high levels of crime and racial hostility, much as the Hmong had done earlier.

The most common occupations for Southeast Asian Chinese refugees are in small, family-owned businesses, especially small grocery stores, fast food

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and take-out places, and street vending operations. Some are in light manufacturing, especially clothing piecework done in homes. The trend among Chinese youth is different, however. The high priority attached to education among the Chinese seems to be producing good performance in the school system, and a large number of Chinese Cambodians and Chinese Vietnamese are entering college. Members of the Chinese community report that many of these educated youth are opting for professional positions with mainstream American companies instead of their family's businesses.

The Hmong

The Hmong are by far the smallest of Philadelphia's Southeast Asian ethnic groups. Although the Hmong population here was over 3,000 during the early 1980s, a series of violent racial attacks and pervasive crime in their neighborhoods led most of them to pack up and leave the city by 1984. Just 450 or so out of the original 3,000 remain, nearly all of them in North Philadelphia. A few families remain in West Philadelphia, the Hmong community's base before the 1984 exodus.

Descriptions of the Hmong often lump them together with the Lao, as most Hmong are also from Laos, but culturally the two peoples are very distinct. The Hmong population in Laos lived almost entirely in isolated mountain areas of two provinces, farming and hunting primarily. During the war years in Laos, from the early 1960s until 1975, the Hmong were heavily committed to a partnership with the American Special Forces and the CIA in a war of resistance to the growing communist Pathet Lao insurgency. Such was the committment of the Hmong to the American-backed “secret war” in Laos that virtually every Hmong male who is now thirty or older can be assumed to have served in the resistance. The price they paid was high. Forced into flight from their mountain villages by the communist government which assumed power in 1975, many Hmong were literally on the run for years before eventually fleeing to camps in Thailand.

Hmong society is based on clan affiliation. Traditionally, the authority of clan leaders is considered paramount. While clan-based authority has broken down in many parts of the country where Hmong have suffered severe cultural stresses, Philadelphia's small community remains very tightly knit. Unlike places like California and Minnesota, where welfare dependence is astronomical for Hmong families (over 90% in some areas),

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only four or five of the more than sixty Hmong families in Philadelphia currently receive public assistance. Another indication of the health of this community is the apparently low drop-out rate for Hmong youth.

The Hmong community here appears insular to outsiders. They have a reputation among other Southeast Asians for keeping to themselves, but this tendency appears to serve them well in preserving the Hmong family structure and protecting the community from some of the cultural disintegration that has hit the Hmong so hard in other parts of the country.

Perhaps the best explanation for the relative strength of Philadelphia's Hmong community was offered by Heather Peters, an anthropologist who produced a highly regarded study of Philadelphia's Southeast Asian youth in 1988. When most Hmong left the city in 1983 and 1984, Peters suggests, it was the hardiest, most adaptable lot - those who were doing relatively well - who stayed on.

Thus Philadelphia's Hmong community is an especially cohesive and resilient group, not representative of the status of the Hmong in the U.S. as a whole.

For all their successes, conversations with Hmong residents indicate that they are still plagued by crime and racial intimidation, particularly in the Logan area, where they are now concentrated. Some are seeking to move out of Logan, particularly further north to upper 5th St. in the area of Roosevelt Boulevard. A few Hmong families have managed to move out of the city.

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2. II. THE RESETTLEMENT EXPERIENCE

For most Southeast Asians (hereafter sometimes referred to as SEA), getting here wasn't easy. Most of them endured long and difficult waits in refugee camps - mainly in Thailand, but also in Malaysia, the Philippines, and other “countries of first asylum”. Many risked their lives to flee. Quite a number lost family members en route. The hundreds of thousands of Vietnamese and Vietnamese-Chinese who left Vietnam by boat experienced severe hardships at sea including brutal pirate attacks in the Gulf of Thailand and, on occasion, push-backs and rammings by unreceptive authorities in first asylum countries. As many as a third of those who left by boat are thought to have been lost at sea. Many refugees attempted several times to flee before succeeding.

The six months of English language training and “cultural orientation” refugees receive in processing centers in Asia before taking the flight to the U.S. do little to prepare them for what awaits them here. It's harder to imagine a more drastic transition between cultures than that experienced by the Cambodian rice farmer or Vietnamese fisherman who suddenly finds himself on the streets of North Philadelphia. Why, then, resettle refugees in these inner city neighborhoods, where things are tough enough for long-time residents let alone for people unfamiliar with the culture? The basic answer is: because of the availibility of affordable housing.

The actual resettlement of refugees is carried out by private voluntary agencies under contract to the Federal government's Office of Refugee Resettlement (ORR). These voluntary agencies, or “volags”. receive a payment (currently $525 per refugee) in return for which they agree to take responsibility for lining up a sponsorship (usually a church or family), locating housing, and assisting the refugees in getting their feet on the ground in various ways.

Interviews with refugees, neighborhood residents, and others familiar with the process elicited a chorus of complaints about the manner in which resettlement was carried out here in Philadelphia. The complaints include

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lack of proper planning and coordination, lack of prior consultation with neighborhoods, “dumping” of refugees in sub-standard housing with little follow-up, and putting especially heavy burdens on certain neighborhoods by clustering large numbers of refugees in them. Few Asians were involved in the planning and coordination of the resettlement effort. “The absence of Asians in city government and in the volags was a big problem in the resettlement process”. according to Tsiwen Law, the Commission on Asian American Affairs head. “The whole resettlement process was controlled by non-Asians.”

Criticisms of lack of planning and coordination are well-founded. The system works like this: The national offices of the 13 largest voluntary agencies (who form an umbrella organization known as the American Council of Voluntary Agencies) meet annually in Washington with the Office of Refugee Resettlement. There, the expected refugee influx is discussed and examined, and decisions are made regarding which agency is going to resettle how many refugees from what countries. The pie is divided up, so to speak. Once these numbers are determined, all further responsibility for carrying out the actual resettlement of these refugees lies with the individual agenciesThere is no coordination of these resettlement efforts either at the state or local levelsEach individual volag determines where to place its quota, taking into consideration such factors as location of relatives and sponsors, availability of housing and employment, and so on. In Philadelphia, for example, there is no mechanism to ensure that city officials are even informed of impending refugee arrivals, or what neighborhoods they will be resettled in. In interviews for this report, both a representative of the State Refugee Resettlement Office in Harrisburg and the resettlement coordinator of one of the three largest volags here said they were unaware of any city official or city agency that would normally be consulted about impending resettlement of refugees in city neighborhoods.

The resettlement experience has been rough for both sides - for the arriving Southeast Asians and for established residents. Neither was prepared for the tensions of their mutual encounter. The 1975 wave from Vietnam was assimilated with relative ease for reasons explained in the previous section (they were not clustered, were better educated, more adaptable, etc.). Problems began with the massive inflow which began in 1978. Nationally, Southeast Asian arrivals peaked at 132,000 in 1981, but have continued to average over 40,000 a year since 1984.

In Philadelphia, the Southeast Asian population jumped from just a few hundred to about

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15,000 between 1979 and 1982 alone.

These numbers seem manageable, even insignificant, in a city of more than 1.6 million people. But they are made much more significant by the fact that the arriving refugees have been concentrated heavily in certain areas. For example, there are neighborhoods - a section of South 7th St., the area around 45th and Chestnut in West Philadelphia, and parts of Logan in North Philadelphia, where Southeast Asian came to make up as much as half the population in a matter of just a few years. Key Elementary School, for example, at 8th and Wolf streets in South Philadelphia, is now 64% Asian, nearly all of them Southeast Asians.

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3. III. MISPERCEPTIONS

Southeast Asians often complain that Americans tend to lump them together with other Asians, assuming them to be Chinese or Korean, for example. It's not that Southeast Asians have a dislike for these other Asian groups; it's the carelessness of the comments, the lack of knowledge of their real identities, that is bothersome.

But from a Southeast Asian perspective there is a more troublesome aspect to the tendency to lump Asian groups together. In the 1960s there began to emerge in this country a stereotype of “the successful Asian immigrant”. fueled by highly publicized stories of the economic success and academic achievement of some of the more established Asian groups. It is difficult to convince the public that Southeast Asians need assistance when the public is convinced that they are already doing well. But the fact is that the majority of Southeast Asian refugees have yet to experience economic success or smooth sailing in the schools. A large proportion of Cambodian and Laotian families in Philadelphia, for example, currently receive some form of public assistance.

A Southeast Asian Coalition analysis of School District figures showed that in 1986 (the most recent year for which such breakdowns are available) the drop-out rate for Lao and Cambodian youth was over 43%. Figures from other states are comparable.

Even the better established of the Asian groups, such as Chinese, Japanese, and Koreans, are not necessarily as successful economically as many people have been led to believe. In a recent New York Times article, Professor Ronald Takaki of the University of California at Berkeley writes that the often cited higher family incomes of Asian Americans are deceptive because they are achieved with more hours worked, more workers per family, and after acquiring more education than the average American family.

2. THE HOSTILITIES

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1. I. EXTENT OF THE HOSTILITIES

“I first became aware of these things in second grade…I didn't know it was called racial tension, but I knew that these people hated me…My brothers were often chased home from school.”- Phoua Xiong, former student at Lea Elementary School and Girls High

“The problem of intolerance exists at all levels - in the schools, in the neighborhoods, among parents. It doesn't start with these kids. Every adult around them reflects the intolerance in some way.”

- Debbie Wei, high school teacher and Asian Americans United President

Southeast Asian community leaders and neighboorhood residents interviewed for this study were asked to estimate the percentage of the Southeast Asian population in Philadelphia which has personally experienced incidents of racially-motivated harassment or violence. Most respondents were quick to distinguish between verbal harassment - name calling and so forth - and other incidents such as vandalism and assault. Nearly all the respondents said that the vast majority has experienced verbal harassment; estimates generally ranged from 70% and upward. Several individuals said that “everyone" (Southeast Asians) has experienced verbal abuse. School aged youth, particularly junior and senior high school students in the tougher areas of the city, speak of racial epithets and name-calling as regular occurences, or of “too many times to count”. One former University High School student, a Laotian refugee, said he had experienced “hundreds” of such instances in school. Most Southeast Asian youth can readily recite the epithets most commonly directed at Asians: “Chink…ching chong…fucking Chinese”. etc.

The respondents' estimates of the extent of more serious forms of abuse generally ranged from 15-20% to well over 50% of the Southeast Asian population. These incidents have commonly included assault, rock and bottle throwing, and vandalism to cars and houses. There have also been several

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cases of arson against Southeast Asian families in the city, including one on August 13 at 13th and Bainbridge streets which resulted in the death of a Chinese Vietnamese man. Phoua Xiong is an astute young Hmong woman who grew up in North Philadelphia and now attends Haverford College. She describes the incidence of racial violence against Hmong in the city in the following terms:

“Everyone who can walk, between the ages of 6 and 85, has experienced it in some way…I know old people who have been attacked and little children who have been attacked…The situation is extremely bad. The level of hostility if very high. A lot of Hmong would agree…That's why a lot of Hmong left the city. They started to feel that, if they didn't leave, then one day they could be killed.”

We know that the statistics fall far short of accurately reflecting the extent of incidents of harassment and violence. But the fact that the statistics turn up as many incidents as they do, coupled with our knowledge that the Asian community tends to drastically under-report, is an indication of just how high the actual totals may be. Here's an example: Although Asians make up less than 5% of the city's population, 23% of victims of racially or ethnically motivated incidents reported to the city's Commission on Human Relations during the most recent reporting period were Asian. This was down from 30% during the previous period.

Asian Americans United calculates that, based on these figure, an Asian person in Philadelphia is 50 times more likely than a white to be the victim of a racially-motivated incident of harassment or violence.

It is impossible to overstate the effect of these hostilities upon the Southeast Asian community. Already reeling in many cases from the shock of cultural transition - literally from rice farm to city streets in some cases - the fears and tensions associated with the constant threat of verbal and physical attack become dominant aspects of life for many refugees here. Most difficult to measure are the psychological effects of these hostilities - every victim carries with him or her private burdens which are not easily seen or understood by others. But the extent and severity of the intimidation are such that they have produced the following noticable effects, among others:

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1) Migration

Most Southeast Asian families in the city have moved at least once, and quite often a major reason for these moves has been the desire to escape racially-motivated harassment and violence. (Another major reason has been non-racially motivated crime.) Between 1980 and 1985 the Hmong population in Philadelphia dropped from over 3,000 to less than 500. The mass exodus was a direct response to a series of violent attacks on Hmong residents, mainly in West Philadelphia. In the early 1980s West Philadelphia was the base of the city's ethnic Chinese refugee community, but by 1985 or 1986 most of them had left to escape the hostility.

2) Areas of exclusion

Southeast Asians in the city have a very clear sense of where they are welcome and where they are not. A problem arises when city facilities and institutions which are designed for public access cannot be utilized due to the threat of harassment or bodily harm. Renee Yampolsky, Principal of Key Elementary School in South Philadelphia, which is now 64% Asian, describes her frustration with one such case:

“Bok (vocational school at 8th and Mifflin) would be a good place for some of the Asian kids, but there is a general sense that it's not safe for them there…The Principal there is always asking me to send him Asian students….But none of them feel it's safe to go.”

Many people who work with Southeast Asian youth in the city have spoken of the lack of recreational space or gathering places for them. It's not that such places don't exist. The problem is that Asians, who are nearly always a small minority among white and black youth, don't feel that it's worth the harassment and threats of violence that they frequently encounter at these places. For example, YMCA West is at 51st and Chestnut, just a few blocks from one of the city's largest Southeast Asian communities. Yet Asian kids avoid it due to the tensions they often encounter with black youth in the area.

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3) Problems in school

Southeast Asian students in the public schools speak almost universally of the abuse - both verbal and physical - that they encounter there and of the poor responses of school authorities to the problem. Several people interviewed for this report, including former students, school staff, and human relations professionals, went so far as to say that harassment and violence of Asians in the schools is severe enough that it is a factor in the high drop-out rate for Southeast Asian youth. The city's public schools - particularly the high schools - are consistently the scenes of incidents of racial harassment and violence. (The response of the School District to the problem is explored in Part Three.)

A city with a reputation for violence

Among Southeast Asians here and elsewhere in the country, Philadelphia has a reputation for violence, a reputation for being a city where levels of both ordinary crime and racial violence are high. In interviews and conversations for this study, Southeast Asians were asked to describe the reputation of Philadelphia in the Southeast Asian community, and to state how they would describe the city to a friend or relative who wished to move here from another state. In addition to its reputation for neighborhood tensions and violence, other common associations with Philadelphia are that it is an “old" city, where housing is generally old and in poor repair, and a “dirty” city with poor sanitation. It is also perceived to be a place where employment prospects are relatively good, which prompts many to move here despite the problems.

In August, 1988 a Southeast Asian Coalition staff member interviewed representatives of its five Mutual Assistance Associations (serving the five Southeast Asian ethnic groups here) to find out what the major issues facing their communities were.

In every case, neighborhood tensions and the problems of harassment and violence were one of two main concerns. The other big issue identified by these MAA representatives involved the rapid Americanization of Southeast Asian youth, breakdowns of traditional authority, and the inter-generational problems this has produced.

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Nearly every family has been affected

No one really knows, statistically speaking, how extensive incidents of anti-Asian harassment and violence are - in Philadelphia or anywhere else. Nor can we say, with any accuracy, what the extent of incidents toward other ethnic groups is. Most cities don't even keep such statistics. Philadelphia does, but we are quite certain that they represent only a very small proportion of actual incidents. (See “Under-reporting”.)

We get a pretty good sense of the extent of the problem, though, by speaking to Southeast Asians and others who deal with these incidents, by looking at the statistics that do exist, and making some educated guesses. Interviews with Southeast Asians in Philadelphia indicate that racial hostility is something that everyone feels, that everyone has been touched by personally in one way or another. With regard to verbal abuse, Southeast Asians report that nearly everyone who lives in the city for any length of time is going to experience it at one time or another. With regard to more serious offenses such as assault, the extent of these incidents is such that we can reasonably say that the majority of Southeast Asians have been touched in one way or another by them through the experience of a friend or family member.

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2. II. THE PROBLEM WITH THE STATISTICS

“The statistics are meaningless, because they tend to include the most outrageous incidents but overlook the cumulative majority of incidents, so we don't keep them.”

- Judy Kruger, Community Relations Service, U.S. Dept. of Justice

“The statistics represent an insignificant portion of the interactions between groups. Most of these are neutral, some are positive, a few are negative.”

- Lazar Kleit, Philadelphia Commission on Human Relations

One quickly learns that trying to get a handle on the extent of racial harassment and violence by looking at the statistics is virtually impossible. A few good conversations with neighborhood residents are likely to result in far greater insight into the hostilities in a particular area than the statistics can provide.

Everyone agrees, perhaps most importantly, that only a small fraction of actual incidents are ever reported to the police or other authorities. The problem of under-reporting is especially great among Asian Americans, for reasons to be discussed in the next section. The number of reported incidents are often so small as to make speculation about trends impossible. For example, in 1986 the Pennsylvania Inter-Agency Task Force on Civil Tension reported a 58% jump in anti-Asian acts in Pennsylvania over the previous year, but the figures they pointed to included only a total of 25 incidents in Philadelphia!

To Southeast Asian residents this figure looks more like one neighborhood's monthly total.

Pennsylvania, along with Maryland, was one of the first states to keep track of crimes motivated by race or ethnicity. But even here there is no coordinated effort to ensure that the statistics are gathered in a meaningful and consistent manner by the various agencies with an interest in these cases. The statistics kept by the Philadelphia Commission in Human Relations, for example, bear little resemblance to those kept by the police

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Conflict Prevention and Resolution Unit, which in turn have a different meaning than those kept by the courts.

The statistics kept by the Philadelphia Commission on Human Relations (PCHR) perhaps come closest to providing us with some overall sense of the extent of racial and ethnic hostilities here, because they include not only criminal cases and those reported to the police, but also a wide range of interactions with potential for causing inter-group tension, including many which are diffused or otherwise never become full-blown “incidents”. Thus the PCHR statistics provide a somewhat deeper and more useful picture of inter-group tensions than do those of the law enforcement agencies. Yet, and PCHR staff are the first to agree, even these are useful only in a limited way, and cannot be relied on to accurately reflect actual trends.

The PCHR data is gathered largely by Field Representatives who are assigned around the city by geographical area (bilingual staff are also assigned to cover designated ethnic groups). The level of reporting in a particular neighborhood may be influenced by such things as: the degree of trust established by a particular representative; the neighborhood's attitude toward the PCHR (hostile or friendly); the time committment and depth of involvement of the representative (influenced by how big an area he/she has to cover); and the representative's interpretation of events. The following comments by PCHR Supervisors help illustrate the fact that things are often not as the numbers would have them appear:

“To give you an example of the problem with the statistics, South Philadelphia has a very high number of reported incidents, yet it is one of the most stable and predictable areas.”

- Rocko Holloway, PCHR

“It may even be that a high number of reported incidents is a good sign, an indication that there is good communication in an area, that our representatives are well-regarded…When nothing is reported, that can be the sign of a real problem…”

- Lazar Kleit, PCHR

Despite these limitations, most of those involved with monitoring inter-group tensions see a use for statistics. Jack Shepherd, a PCHR Supervisor and senior staff member, agrees that statistics have limited value, but he argues that they are important in engendering public awareness of the problems - sending messages to the public about the kinds

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of things that are happening - and ensuring the kind of support and funding that agencies like PCHR need. “Statistics are important in that they do give us a rough understanding, and they are all we have”, says Berit Lakey, former Executive Director of the Fellowship Commission.

The lack of a systematic means for gathering data on “bias crimes” at the national level recently prompted the U.S. Congress to pass a bill - the so-called “hate crimes act" - that would force the Federal Government to keep such statistics. Some state and local governments, such as ours here, are said to be way ahead of the Feds on this one. But upon close examination of the way our data is collected, one wonders how this could be so. The city agencies which keep track of racial and ethnic incidents here - the PCHR, the police department, and the court system - are essentially looking at different phases in the progression of an “incident”. The PCHR is concerned with prevention and often intervenes before any actual “incident” has occurred. The police normally intervene when there is a suspicion that a crime has been committed. And the courts adjudicate the small proportion of cases that get to them. But it's more complicated than that.

The Conflict Prevention and Resolution Unit (CPR) of the Police Department is said to have a record of all cases involving “ethnic intimidation" - the term for racial and ethnic bias offenses. But some cases which CPR is not involved with, because they may not initially appear to be bias-related, may have ethnic intimidation charges added later on - for example, as a result of new evidence turned up during a detective's investigation. There is no mechanism to inform the CPR Unit of this development, thus bias-related cases of this sort may never make it into CPR's statistics. Furthermore, ethnic intimidation charges are sometimes added or dropped at the trial stage, and this information isn't reflected in the CPR Unit's statistics either. As for the District Attorney's office, they do not keep records of cases by charge, thus they have no record of the number of cases involving ethnic intimidation or their outcomes.

For all these reasons, then - low rates of reporting, the inability of statistics to give a qualitative sense of an incident, the lack of a coordinated data gathering effort - the numbers alone don't tell us much.

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3. III. UNDER-REPORTING

“Asians don't report incidents. Language is one reason. Also, there are long waits for the police…Asians have the sense that the system doesn't do enough, that it doesn't respond quickly.”

- Dan Sengsourysack, Southeast Asian MAA Coalition

“It's hard. Most people in the Cambodian and Lao communities would prefer not to be involved with the police at all.”

- Fred Silberman, Community Relations Officer, 4th Precinct (S. Phila.)

“There is a fear of retaliation. Also, a lot of people don't know who to call or where to report…People don't know their rights… There is a desire to avoid conflict…And there is the expectation that the police won't do anything.”

- Phoua Xiong, former Logan resident now studying at Haverford College

Asians drastically under-report crime, including acts of racially-motivated harassment and violence. There is little disagreement on this basic point among police, human relations professionals, community leaders, and Asian residents themselves. The tendency to not complain or come forward after an incident is particularly widespread among Southeast Asian refugees, who face greater problems with language and have much less an understanding of how the system works than do more established Asian Americans.

The failure to report crimes to the police or other agencies is part of a larger pattern of poor communication and lack of cooperation between the Southeast Asian community and city agencies. While Southeast Asians complain of poor responsiveness by the police department, the police, on the other hand, express great frustration with the reluctance of Southeast Asians to come forward and cooperate in investigations. Lt. Smith of the CPR Unit cites “communication problems” and “getting information” as the biggest problems facing the Police Department in dealing with the Southeast Asian community. And it's not only the police department that faces these

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obstacles. Claire Maier, Deputy Director of the Commission on Human Relations, describes Asians as “probably the most under-reported segment of the population”, though she points out that the rate of reporting is also thought to be very low among the city's Hispanics.

We have no way of scientifically measuring the rate of reporting by Southeast Asians. All we can do is make some educated guesses. So in the course of conversations and interviews, Southeast Asians and others who deal with the community were asked to do just that. “If you had to take a guess”, these individuals were asked, “what percentage of crimes against Southeast Asians in Philadelphia would you say are reported to the police?" (The respondents were asked to include both racially-motivated and “ordinary” crimes in their estimates.) The responses ranged from 2% to 60%, with most people speaking in terms of well under 25%. Here is a sampling of estimates from some of the respondents: “15 to 20%" (Kau Our, Cambodian Association President, PCHR Representative); “Extremely low - probably under 10%" (Joe Russo, South Philadelphians United); “2% or so. Very, very low.” (Nathalie Emam, Cambodian-born Community Legal Services staff); “40 to 60%, if you include all categories.” (Officer Fred Silberman, 4th Precinct); “50% - that's a guess.” (Phong Ngo, Public Service Officer, 18th Precinct); “Between 15 and 20%.” (Phoua Xiong, ex-Logan resident); “25%.” (Mary Cousar, Philadelphia Anti-Drug/Anti-Violence Network); “Less than 2%. Vandalism is never reported. Of cases involving injury, maybe 15%.” (Dan Sengsourysack, Southeast Asian Coalition); “Racial incidents are usually not reported at all.” (Debbie Wei, President of Asian Americans United).

There is nothing scientific about these responses. Some of these individuals, for example, are apparently envisioning the problem as it exists just for their ethnic group, while others are looking at the bigger picture. But these figures do give us some sense of how widespread the failure to report incidents is perceived to be by some of those in a position to know.

Why do so many offenses against Southeast Asian residents go unreported? Several explanations are offered so consistently by such a wide range of people that they deserve to be explored here. These are: fear of retaliation; lack of results (i.e. slow police response or the perpetrator is ultimately let off); language obstacles; lack of understanding of the American criminal justice system; traditional fear of police and other authorities in countries of origin; and cultural and religious factors. Let's look at each of these.

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1) Fear of retaliation

“(Southeast Asians) do not want any kind of trouble. They don't want to make problems. If they report something, they are afraid of revenge. They are afraid the police will not succeed in putting someone in jail.”

- Dr. Tong Hin, Cambodian-born dentist and landlord for Cambodian tenants in S. Phila.

This is a big one. Southeast Asian residents, particularly in the tougher neighborhoods, often cite fear of retaliation as the reason for not reporting instances of crime and harassment. Cambodian Association President Kau Our calls it the “biggest reason” that more people don't report, as does Cuong Nhu Pham of the Vietnamese Association. Fear of retaliation is greatest when the perpetrator is a neighbor or someone who lives nearby. Cases like this sometimes result in situations of ongoing harassment and torment, with the victims unable to call in authorities out of concern for the safety of their families.

2) Lack of results

“Why don't they report more? Mainly because they think nothing is going to happen.”

- Mary Cousar, Anti-Drug/Anti-Violence Network

“The biggest problem is that the police don't come. They almost always do not come. Even if they understand clearly, they do not come.”

- Moua Lor, Hmong resident of Logan area

“When they heard it was an Asian, they hung up on me. The second time they said they couldn't transfer the call to a translator, that I would have to call back. I had to call four times, and it was an emergency.”

- AS. Phila. resident who called 911 on behalf of an Asian neighbor

Frustrated by language obstacles and lacking an understanding of how the system works, many Southeast Asians believe that the slow police response is a result of the fact that they are Asian. Nearly everyone seems to be able to recall an instance when they called the police more than once

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only to have them show up either after a very long delay or not at all. Others point out, however, that the police response is generally slow for all residents in the neighborhoods where Southeast Asians live, where reports of disturbances are commonplace and the police are overburdened and understaffed. Community Relations Officer Fred Silberman of the 4th District, who has had extensive dealings with the Southeast Asian community:

“South Philadelphia gets more reports of disturbances than any other part of the city, and we're not always going to be able to respond quickly to all of them…On a Friday night, we've got a disturbance on practically every street corner.”

One officer said, in a tone that implied that he was stating the obvious, that a report of a disturbance in Center City is going to be responded to much more quickly than in neighborhoods where reports of disturbances are commonplace.

In fairness, the police have faced some serious frustrations in responding to calls from Southeast Asian residents. In addition to the obvious obstacle of language, Southeast Asians are consistently reluctant to follow through with charges once an offender is arrested. A few too many cases like this serve to diminish the enthusiasm of officers responding to calls from Southeast Asians:

“A hundred times I've been told (by SEA residents) - 'I would rather lose the $100 than go through all the trouble of bringing charges'…Asians generally don't want to get involved. It's an attitude that prevails…Often, a Southeast Asian will call, then when the police arrive they are gone.”

- Joe Russo, South Philadelphians United

“Take the incident that occurred last Wednesday. The police are sure who did it. If people would speak out, they could do a lot more…The police need cooperation…But you have an Asian community which is hush-hush.”

- Kahlil, W. Phila fish store owner in area with large SEA population

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3) Language barrier

The language barrier is a big problem for both sides - Southeast Asian residents and city authorities. It is easing somewhat as Southeast Asian residents have lived here longer. Most households have at least one member who can communicate in English. The police department now utilizes a California-based telephone translation hook-up service. The service is said to provide translation in any of the SEA languages (and dozens of others) within two minutes, though its effectiveness depends on the 911 dispatchers, and it is said to be under-utilized. (See Part Three, “The Police Department”.) The police department also now has two Southeast Asian Public Service Officers who, between them, speak Chinese, Cambodian, and Vietnamese. (There are no Laotian or Hmong speakers on the force.)

4) Lack of understanding of the American criminal justice system

“A lot of them still don't understand the system at all. They think that, just by reporting something, that should be it. They don't understand why they have to go through the whole process, why the person isn't just taken off the street.”

- Joe Russo, South Philadelphians United

Southeast Asian residents often express bewilderment and frustration at the frequency with which perpetrators of serious crimes are identified and arrested, only to be released and back in the neighborhood again the following day. They are intimidated by the long and complicated judicial process which a victim who wishes to bring charges must endure.

5) Traditional fear of police in countries of origin

“Our people are not used to trusting the police. In Vietnam they didn't do much to help.”

- My-Nhat Tran, Field Representative, Commission on Human Relations

Traditional mistrust of police and other authorities in Southeast Asia is commonly cited as a big influence on attitudes toward the police here. In the Police Department, both Captain David Morrell of Community Relations and Lt. Marshall Smith of the Conflict Prevention and Resolution Unit, for example, offer this as a primary reason for low rates of reporting among Southeast Asians. It is a real phenomenon; there is this traditional mistrust. But it's just one of a number of reasons that Asians don't report, and

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probably not one of the most important ones at that.

6) Cultural and religious reasons

The Southeast Asian tendency to not complain or seek action against those who commit offenses against them has some cultural and religious roots. There is virtue, in the predominantly Buddhist Southeast Asian cultures, in accepting suffering, in not complaining, in forgiveness and patience. “There is a saying in Buddhism”. says Kau Our of the Cambodian Association, “If you lose, then you will win.”

Effects of under-reporting

The low rate of reporting among Southeast Asians of crime and instances of harassment is a serious problem for several reasons: Obviously, and most importantly, it prevents police and judicial action against the perpetrators (though such action, to be sure, is not always forthcoming). Also, unreported cases are not reflected in the statistics - they do not become public knowledge - and thus there is less consciousness of the extent of the problems and less of an inclination to act on them. Furthermore, failure to report crimes reenforces the perception that Asians are easy targets. Many people, including those in law enforcement and Southeast Asians themselves, believe that one reason Asians are victimized as often as they are is because of their reputation for not going to authorities.

Despite all this, it must be said that, from a Southeast Asian perspective, there may be some good reasons to not report to the police in certain cases. There is a tendency (in the police department and elsewhere) to think that “If we could just do more outreach, more education about how the system works, then we can get the Southeast Asian community to see that it's in their best interest to report more often”. This is true to a point, but the problem with this line of thinking is that the decisions not to report are usually not irrational or based on ignorance, but more often are well-thought out and based on experience. In other words, in some cases the problem may not be that Southeast Asians need to be better informed of how the system works; it may be that they know - in a particular neighborhood or setting - very well how it works. The better solution is to make the system work better, so that victims who report will be rewarded with results.

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Report to whom if not police?

There are alternatives to police involvement in some types of cases. Mary Cousar of the Anti-Drug/Anti-Violence Network cites, for example, a case of a Vietnamese woman in North Philadelphia who had rocks thrown at her home by two white youths who lived nearby. Because her house was located in a somewhat isolated spot near the end of a street the victim felt very vulnerable to retaliation and was afraid to press charges. Instead, an agreement was reached with the parents of the rock-throwers to ensure that she was left alone. This was a preferable solution for both parties. (Let's remember, though, that the only reason this solution was preferable to the victim was because of the near certainty that the result of court action would be insufficient to ensure her safety.)

If Southeast Asians tend not to report to the police, to whom do they turn when they are victimized? Very often the tendency is not to go outside the Southeast Asian community at all, but rather to rely on networks of friends and relatives for necessary support or assistance. Phong Ngo, a Chinese Vietnamese Public Service Officer (PSO) based at the 18th District Mini-Station at 44th and Walnut, says that in less serious cases the most common response is simply to ignore the offense.

“They will usually let it go. They feel that there is nowhere to turn. If they do take revenge, it will be very, very serious. Otherwise they will let it go.”

Cuong Nhu Pham, the new Vietnamese Association President and a former staff member at the Southeast Asian Coalition, said that in cases of harassment or violence, most Vietnamese turn to friends or someone in the Vietnamese community. Dan Sengsourysack of the Southeast Asian Coalition says that it is “very unusual” for a Southeast Asian victim to go first to the police:

“They will usually call an MAA (Mutual Assistance Association) first. Then the MAA will speak to the Human Relations Commission or whichever the appropriate agency is.”

Khampone Louanphon, a Southeast Asian Coalition youth worker and University City H.S. graduate, said that if his family were victimized, they would first call the Lao MAA, then the Commission on Human Relations and

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the police, in that order. Many Southeast Asians with limited English ability or who are unfamiliar with the system turn first to the MAAs, who can provide bilingual intermediaries to assist in dealing with the police and other city agencies.

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4. IV. WHY THE HOSTILITY?

Why the resentment of incoming Southeast Asian refugees? Why the hostility and violence? Again, there are several themes repeated often enough in answer to this question that some explanations can be offered. But one suspects that these explanations do not go deep enough in answering the question. It's an age-old question, really: What makes people hate? Somehow, the fact that they may fear losing their jobs to newcomers, or that they resent the intrusions into neighborhoods that were once “theirs”, don't seem to fully explain the hate. James Baldwin wrote that Americans live under the influence of a “labyrinth of attitudes” about race which create distance between people and prevent real knowledge of ourselves and others. “The person who distrusts himself”. Baldwin wrote, “has no touchstone for reality - for this touchstone can only be oneself”.

Carl Jung, explorer of the unconsious, spoke of the “shadow" - the manner in which we project onto others that which we repress or deny in ourselves. Self-hate is sometimes projected onto others.

So there are reasons deeper than we will venture here for the tensions between Asians and non-Asians, and among other groups as well. All we can do here, really, is to listen to what people are saying in answer to the question - “Why the hostility?" - and try to make some kind of sense out of their responses. Whatever deeper influences there may be upon our interactions with each other, the following seem to be factors contributing to the hostilities toward the Southeast Asian refugee population:

1) Economic competition

“It's always the people on the bottom that are the most visible to each other as a possible source of their troubles. It's easier to take it out on people on the bottom.”

- Berit Lakey, former Executive Director of the Fellowship Commission

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“Everything starts off from an economic basis. When you take people and put them in the ghetto with other people who are poor, they are going to be fighting for survival.”

- Dan Sengsourysack, Southeast Asian MAA Coalition

This is a big one - the reason most cited as a source of tension. There is a widespread belief among neighbors of Southeast Asians that the government gives them cash or provides them with special business loans. A South Philadelphia cab driver offered an opinion shared by many:

“I don't have anything against them, but what I don't understand is, how they could have so much, when they've been here such a short time. The only way I can see it is that they must have received special treatment from the government. A lot of them are buying expensive new cars and vans. People can't figure that out.”

- Steve Horvath, Italian/Hungarian American resident of South Phila.

What many Americans don't take into account is that Southeast Asians often live with extended families of ten or twelve people under one roof. Purchases of cars or houses are often made with the pooled earnings of four or five breadwinners. Asians also have a greater propensity to save than do many Americans. Officer Fred Silberman:

“These folks are frustrated that they are not doing well. They can see that the Asians are living 18 in a house, that they are saving every penny. And they are not saving a dime, and that really pisses them off. They are looking for a scapegoat.”

Many Southeast Asians work two and even three jobs to achieve the modest incomes that most of them earn. Asian American family's incomes are not as high as they appear to be if we take into account the fact that they are achieved with more workers per household and more hours worked than the average American family.

Many Americans remember the highly publicized tensions in the early 1980s on the Texas and Louisiana Gulf Coasts between local white shrimp fishermen and Vietnamese refugees who competed with them. Referring to the work habits of the Vietnamese fishermen, the director of the Vietnamese Fishermens Association was quoted in a 1987 Public Opinion article: “They don't go in for a beer. They don't go in to watch football. That makes other people mad.” The article

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went on to say that “Established fishermen complained that the Vietnamese represented unfair competition because they worked day and night.”

2) The threat of numbers

“Historically I think you'll find that when a group is only a very tiny minority, people aren't really much concerned with them. The tensions begin when the numbers increase, especially when you get up to around 10 or 15% (in a given area).”

- Bernard McGee, Principal of Elverson Middle School, North Philadelphia

McGee compares the Southeast Asian influx with what happened when Puerto Ricans began settling here in large numbers in the early sixties. People were not troubled by the Puerto Ricans' presence at first, when they lived only in isolated pockets, but when their numbers rose above a few percent, tensions rose. Federal government resettlement policy for Southeast Asians has vacillated between encouraging rapid assimilation of refugees by spreading them out over wide areas, and “clustering” them in places where other refugees live. The 1975 refugees from Vietnam, for example, were generally not clustered, and they encountered far less hostility than did the later waves who tended to concentrate. (There are also other reasons, mentioned earlier, for their relatively smooth assimilation.) “We didn't experience harassment”, says My-Nhat Tran of the Commission on Human Relations, who came from Vietnam in 1975. “When we arrived, the government spread us all over. We weren't gathered in one place the way they are now.”

Refugee families who found themselves resettled in suburban neighborhoods where they were the only Asian family (usually those with a family or church sponsorship there) often report far fewer problems with neighbors than do those in areas with large refugee communities. There is less of a perceived threat. Joe Russo, who has watched parts of South 7th Street become predominantly Asian in a matter of six or seven years, comments on the changes there:

“It's all been intensified by the huge influx. The numbers alone are the cause of a lot of the problem, I think. The neighborhood has changed so much.”

George Moy, a Chinese American whose family immigrated at the turn of the century, was born and raised in South Philadelphia. Moy, who now heads the Chinatown Development Corporation, recalls that he and his family were the only Asians in a predominately Irish neighborhood, yet he doesn't remember ever experiencing any overt racial hostility. This would likely come as a suprise to current Asian residents of the area, where hardly a week passes without a hostile encounter.

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3) Confusion of SEA with other Asians

“They misclassify us. They regard us all in a group with the Koreans and Chinese, who own a lot of businesses. There is a lot of resentment because of their business success.”

- Mour Lor, Hmong resident of Logan area

Particularly in areas where there has been a history of tension between residents and Asian businesses, such as Logan and parts of West Philadelphia, Southeast Asians often serve as lightening rods for misdirected anger. If they distinguish at all between one Asian group and another, most residents are unfamiliar with the differences between the various cultures, and tend to lump them together. Thus the frequent references to “Chinese” in slurs directed at Southeast Asians in Philadelphia.

Fueling the resentments are the popular stereotypes of the “successful Asian immigrant”. “Asian whiz kids” who earn straight A's in school, etc. The failure of the public to differentiate between the established Asian groups (some of whom are doing very well) and Southeast Asian refugees (the majority of whom are struggling) has been difficult for Southeast Asians.

4) Language and communication

“For me, it (the harassment) got better as I learned the language. When I first arrived in 1981, I was called a lot of names and bothered a lot on the street and in school. These problems are worse for people who don't speak English well.”

- Khampone Louanphon, Laotian-born Youth Counselor and University City High School graduate

Language barriers are a common cause of misunderstandings leading to conflicts between Southeast Asians and long-time residents. Refugees who lack English proficiency are more identifiable as “foreign” and may be more

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likely to be targets of harassment or violence than those who communicate well in English.

5) Ordinary day-to-day neighborhood issues

A suprising number of disputes between Southeast Asians and longtime residents, including some that have escalated into more serious conflicts, originate with seemingly minor, day-to-day concerns like parking, trash disposal, and noise. Cultural misunderstandings as well as language problems fuel these disputes.

6) Cultural unknowns

“A lot of people just have a hard time dealing with someone from a new culture.”

- Phoua Xiong, former Logan area resident

“For many people in the neighborhood, it was the first time they experienced being close to another racial group.”

-Mary Ware, Pennsport Civic Association, speaking about the friction caused by the opening of the Cambodian Buddhist Temple in 1987.

It may well be that much of the initial resentment of the resettlement of Southeast Asians has to do with the fact that they are an unknown entity. In fact, there are indications that, in some neighborhoods, as time passes and familiarity with the new arrivals grows, tensions ease. For example, My-Nhat Tran of the PCHR reports that some Vietnamese families in parts of Southwest Philadelphia report fairly good relations in areas that used to be prone to conflict, though tensions are still high for many. “Because they have been there for awhile”. Tran says, “they are becoming known by their neighbors”. In some other neighborhoods as well, there is growing acceptance from longtime residents who express a feeling of “Well, I guess they are here to stay”.

7) Vietnam War-related resentments

There is some of this - resentments left over from the war experience which are directed at Southeast Asian refugees. Southeast Asians occasionally hear comments invoking war memories. Nathalie Emam of Community Legal Services believes that war-related hostility is still common. “Americans have experienced Southeast Asia through the war”,

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Emam said, “and some of those that were hurt by the war direct their resentment toward refugees.” Others feel that war-related resentments are not widespread. “Only a few feel this”, says Joe Russo. “It's other things.”

8) Abuses by Southeast Asian neighborhood youth

It must be said that in some neighborhoods hostility toward the Southeast Asian community has been fueled by the excesses of SEA teenagers. In the University City area of West Philadelphia, for example, a small minority of Southeast Asian youth have been involved in acts such such as throwing objects at passing cars, breaking into resident's homes, and harassing passerby. (Abuses by Southeast Asian youth are discussed later in Part Two, “Southeast Asian Responses”, and in Part Four, “Circle of Violence”.)

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5. V. WHO ARE THE PERPETRATORS?

In Philadelphia, Southeast Asians generally report a higher level of tension, and more incidents, with the black community than with whites. In fact, in some parts of the city the pervasiveness of black-Asian tension is such that it begins to feel to residents as if there were something inherently problematic about the black-Asian relationship. Many Southeast Asians, in fact, have been victimized so often by black Americans - either through racially-motivated abuse or common crime such as robbery - that they have developed a generalized distrust of the black population.

But the fact is that where Southeast Asians live among lower income whites, the same kinds of problems exist. And where they live among Hispanics, the tensions exist as well. In Boston, for example, which has a strong tradition of white ethnic blue collar neighborhoods, the worst violence against Southeast Asians has been perpetrated by whites. Boston police statistics show that of the 156 perpetrators involved in 105 racial attacks against Asians during a four year period, 150 were white (5 were black and 1 was Hispanic.).

In Dallas, Texas, home to 30,000 Southeast Asians, some of the worst problems have been with the city's large Hispanic community.

In Philadelphia, as we know, the majority of Southeast Asians were resettled in black neighborhoods - generally the poorer and tougher areas. But in those parts of the city where their neighbors are white - sections of South Philadelphia in particular - Southeast Asians have suffered harassment and violence as severe as that experienced in predominantly black sections. Most of those interviewed agreed that the race of the perpetrators depend largely on geography:

“When they live in white neighborhoods, there are problems with whites. When they live in black neighborhoods, there are problems with blacks.”

- Fred Silberman, Community Relations Officer, 4th Precinct

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“I think it just depends on what neighborhood you are dealing with, because things are just as bad or worse in places like Kensington and Port Richmond (predominantly white areas).”

- Mary Cousar, Anti-Drug/Anti-Violence Network

“A lot of it might be proximity - what neighborhoods they happen to be in - because if you ask (a SEA) in South Philadelphia what their concerns are, they may say they are more concerned with tensions with whites.”

- Dee Lewis, Field Representative, Commission on Human Relations

“Maybe white-Asian conflict is less visible. But I think it really just depends on what neighborhood we are dealing with. Maybe we hear more of Asian-black problems because Asians tend to live in black neighborhoods.”

- Debbie Wei, Asian Americans United

Los Angeles is a racially diverse city with a huge Asian population. A Chinese American community leader interviewed by the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights offered the following:

“What you have (in Los Angeles) is Chinese immigrants moving into Latino areas…the problems have been between the immigrants and Latinos…If you go next door to Monterey Park or Alhambra where there is more of a middle class white area…the problems are with whites. For Korean businessmen, the conflict has been with the black community…I think geography has a lot to do with who the perpetrator is.”

The likelihood of tension between Asians and non-Asians in a particular neighborhood seems to have a lot more to do with the economic status of the neighborhood than its racial composition. Lt. Marshall Smith of the police bias unit cites Germantown as an example of a higher income area where there are a lot of Korean-owned businesses, yet fairly good relations between Asians and blacks as well as whites.

Still, there do seem to be some particularly tough aspects to the black-Asian relationship, especially that of low-income blacks and Asians. African Americans are painfully aware that newly arrived Asians tend to experience less discrimination in housing, employment, and other areas, than blacks who have been here for nearly 400 years. James Fallows, writing in the Atlantic Monthly, made the same point:

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“To many American blacks, it seems obvious that the immigrants, so new to the country, have been more warmly treated than the blacks, who have been here all along.”

Jack Shepherd, a Supervisor at the Commission on Human Relations, said in an interview that he believes Southeast Asians moving into white neighborhoods encounter fewer barriers in terms of housing than do blacks.

“People in Southwest Philadelphia, for example, were always ready with their prejudices and rationalizations toward blacks, but when the Southeast Asians came in, they were for the most part able to move in…Our staff finds that when there are problems between whites and Asians, there is a reasonableness displayed by the white residents that we don't see toward blacks.”

Heng Lim, who died after a beating suffered in a white South Philadelphia neighborhood on June 16, might not agree. Nor might the hundreds of other Southeast Asian residents of Philadelphia who have been verbally abused or physically assaulted by white Philadelphians in recent years. Part of the problem is that Southeast Asians, who tend to be poor inner city dwellers, are more visible to low income whites and often serve as lightning rods for anti-Asian hostility. The perceived benevolence of whites toward Asians may apply much more to better off, more assimilated Asian groups than to low income Southeast Asians.

Dan Sengsourysack of the Southeast Asian Coalition agrees with Shepherd that Asians may encounter less hostility than African Americans when seeking to move into a white neighborhood, but he points out that Southeast Asians are experiencing severe difficulties with housing for other reasons. They are in effect barred from public housing in the city, Sengsourysack says, by the threat of physical danger they would face there. Furthermore, he said, Southeast Asians are widely exploited by landlords who take advantage of their poor English, their lack of knowledge of their legal rights as tenants, and their tendency to not complain.

Perpetrators of racial attacks - not only upon Asians but in general - tend most commonly to be young males. A 1988 PCHR study, The State of Intergroup Harmony, showed that juvenile males made up only 8% of Philadelphia's population but were identified as perpetrators in 46% of the “intergroup events” reported to PCHR between January, 1986 and June, 1988.

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7. VII. THE CASE OF HENG LIM

Heng Lim, a 37 year old Cambodian man, was a passenger in the grey Chevy Astro mini-van as it drove west on Tasker Street in South Philadelphia just after 11:00 p.m. on the night of June 16. Lim and his relatives were returning from a visit with a cousin who lived in the area of 6th and Dickinson Streets. The family was making the short trip back to their house near 15th and Tasker. Lim, along with his wife and daughter, had moved to the city just days earlier from Florida to assist with his in-laws' business on South Street.

As they approached the intersection of 9th and Tasker Streets, Timothy Meitzler, a 19 year old South Philadelphia resident, was nearing the same corner as he and a female companion walked north on 9th Street. Driving the van was Hok Varin, Lim's brother-in-law. With them in the vehicle were Varin's 64 year old father, along with Lim's wife and daughter (age 7), and Varin's common law wife and infant son. Just behind the van were other family members in a white Nissan Sentra. In the Nissan were Varin's mother, his sister Vary with her three year old daughter, and Vary's boyfriend, Ray Bun Nong, who was driving.

As he approached the stop sign, Varin felt mildly apprehensive. It was the kind of apprehension that residents of turf-conscious South Philadelphia are used to. In these neighborhoods, one block might be Italian, another black, the next largely Asian. The narrow streets are walled by rowhouses and every intersection, it seems, is a four-way stop, where drivers make cautious eye contact before proceeding.

The incident

Varin tried not to reveal his discomfort as the young white man and his female friend passed a few feet from the van. He stiffened as the heavyset Meitzler yelled: “What are you looking at, motherfucker?” Varin was not unused to remarks like this. Normally he drove with windows up and music

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playing, and managed to ignore them. On this occasion, though, since the family had only a few blocks to travel, he had seen no point in turning on the airconditioning and had left the windows down instead. After an exchange of words, Meitzler kicked the side of the family's van. Heng Lim opened the van's side door. Meitzler shouted: “Come on out you fucking chink!” When Heng Lim did step out, Meitzler shoved or swung at him, prompting Lim to turn around and reach in the van for a baby stroller which he attempted to use as a shield. Meitzler picked up a trash can from nearby and threw it at Lim, but it fell short and rolled on the ground. Meitzler subsequently turned and headed north on 9th Street.

Hoping that the incident was over, Lim got back in the van and it proceeded west on Tasker Street, followed by other family members in the Nissan. But the two vehicles got tied up in traffic before they reached 10th St. and Varin's sister Vary saw Meitzler running towards them holding a long piece of wood. (It was later recovered and identified as a tree support of the kind seen on many city streets.) He hit the van with the stick, then turned and used it to break the windshield on the passenger side of the Nissan, where Vary was sitting with her and Ray Bun Nong's three year old daughter. Vary ducked down and crouched over her child. Meitzler swung the stick against the roof of the car. Ray Bun Nong, the Nissan's driver, got out. Meitzler ran around the car toward him with the stick raised. Ray Bun Nong brought out a registered .22 caliber handgun and aimed it up in the air. (He had purchased it because he operated a grocery store and often carried cash to and from the business.) He asked Meitzler to put down the stick. Varin, who along with Lim had gotten out of the van, instructed Ray to fire in the air to scare Meitzler off. Ray did just that, firing one shot, but Meitzler, still wielding the stick, wasn't fazed and reportedly shouted something to the effect of: “You want to shoot? Go ahead - shoot!”. Varin's father, Hok Chhay, heard the shot, got out of the car, and ran over, shouting for them to stop. When the elderly Chhay came over to try and intervene, Meitzler brought the stick down on him. Chhay got his arm up to block it but was knocked to the ground. Vary went to her father's side and called for help.

Heng Lim started to go to the aid of his father-in-law, who was lying on the ground. As he did, Meitzler brought the stick down full force on Lim's head. Lim stumbled and fell to the sidewalk. Vary went to him, holding her brother-in-law's head in her lap. He wasn't speaking. The veins in his face

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were twitching and his body shivered convulsively. When Lim fell, Meitzler moved to hit him again, but Lim's father-in-law Chhay went toward him and tried to push him off, so Meitzler swung the stick at Chhay instead. Chhay again tried to shield himself, but this time his arm was broken by the force of the blow. The five foot, one inch Vary grabbed Meitzler's shirt and begged him to stop, but he shoved her aside.

It was at about this point that there were some shouts from onlookers telling Meitzler to run. A number of residents of the predominately white block had come out of their homes upon hearing the gunshot fired by Ray. Meitzler did run. He dropped the stick and headed South on 9th Street. Varin tried to follow him, but residents, some of whom wielded bats and sticks, warned him off. Vary, attending to the badly injured Heng Lim, at one point called for help from the people watching, but no one came forward. One person did provide assistance. An Italian American man who owns a store near the scene called the police.

The family is held

Just as Meitzler left the scene, two patrol cars approached from the north on 9th Street. Almost simultaneously, an ambulance arrived from the opposite direction. Vary pointed out to one of the officers that the assailant had just passed down 9th Street behind the patrol cars. She asked him to give chase. The officer replied that it would be difficult to go back down the one way street, and instead had her get in while they drove around the block to look for him. By the time they did get around the block, though, Meitzler was gone.

Except for the critically injured Heng Lim, who was sent to Thomas Jefferson Hospital, the police took the entire family to “South Detective” at 24th and Wolf Streets, the base for South Division detectives. Varin was ordered to follow the lead patrol car in the family's van, which held all but Ray Bun Nong. Ray was in custody in another police vehicle following the van, presumably because he was the one who fired the shot. The whole group, including the three children, was held for nearly four hours at South Detective. Varin was questioned intermittently, as was Ray (who was being held separately), but the others mostly sat and waited. Requests to allow Heng Lim's wife Mala to join her husband at the hospital were denied, as were requests for medical treatment for the broken arm of Chhay Hok.

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At about 3:30 a.m. the family was told they could leave. As they left the South Detective station, they were told they should go right to the hospital because 'papers might have to be signed for Heng Lim to have surgery'. On their way out, one officer told Varin that Heng Lim's condition was 'really bad… He might not make it.' This was the first word they had on his condition. Heng Lim died later that day of his head injury.

The investigation

Although Timothy Meitzler's identity was learned by police just hours after the incident, he was not arrested until five weeks later. A witness had recognized Meitzler's female companion and informed police. Homicide detectives visited her the morning after the incident, and she identified Meitzler. Why no arrest? The police reportedly told Heng Lim's family that there was “not enough evidence to get an arrest warrant”.

As the facts of the case began to come to light in the aftermath of Heng Lim's death, members of the Asian community became increasingly concerned that no charges had been brought, and began to press for explanations from the District Attorney's office and the police. On Thursday, July 25th, District Attorney Ronald Castille and several of his staff met with Heng Lim's family and about 40 supporters, many of them from Asian organizations in the city. A few days earlier, Meitzler had finally been arrested and charged with murder and related offenses. Why did it take five weeks, the D.A. was asked? “Because we wanted to do our job and get all the available facts”. the group was told. The group was also told that it took the police a week to get the statements from witnesses to the D.A.'s office. There was a lack of information, one D.A. staff member said, because witnesses were not being very forthcoming. Why was the family held for almost four hours and prevented from joining Heng Lim at the hospital? “Because initially some members of the family were considered possible targets of investigation - because of the gun.” (Castille told the group, however, that it was then determined that the person with the gun acted in self-defense.) Why, the group asked, except for Varin Hok and Ray Bun Nong, were statements initially not taken from family members? Heng Lim's widow, for example, who was a witness, was not questioned until a week and a half after the incident. (Vary, Lim's sister-in-law, was questioned two days after the incident by Homicide detectives.)

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Ethnic Intimidation is not charged

An eight year old Pennsylvania law provides for a charge of Ethnic Intimidation to be added to charges against a person suspected of having committed a crime “with malicious intention toward the race, color, religion, or national origin of another individual or group of individuals”. At least one racial slur was reportedly used in the attack on Heng Lim and his family, but Ethnic Intimidation is not charged. Police guidelines require that crimes supected of having a racial motivation be referred to the bias unit (Conflict Prevention and Resolution Unit), but the Homicide investigators did not make such a referral in the Heng Lim case. In any event the CPR Unit, with or without a referral, can enter a case on their own initiative if they see fit, but Lt. Marshall Smith, the CPR head, said in an August 7 phone interview that he decided against it in this instance. Smith, who is widely respected for his fairness and sensitivity in dealing with cases involving racial conflict, said that he discussed the Heng Lim case with Homicide (the Department's city-wide homicide unit), and after reading the results of the police investigation he concluded that the attack did not have a significant racial element. (At the August 1 preliminary hearing, according to a Philadelphia Inquirer article, Assistant D.A. Joseph McGettigan did ask that Ethnic Intimidation be added to the charges, but the request was denied by Common Pleas Judge Milton Bashoff.)

The family hopes for justice

Although the District Attorney's office now appears to be vigorously prosecuting the case, Heng Lim's family expressed disappointment with the earlier response of law enforcement authorities - particularly the police - in the aftermath of the incident. “We were treated as if we were the criminals”. said Varin Hok. “It seemed like the whole system failed”. Hoping that leaving Philadelphia might help them recover from the ordeal, the whole family has moved to Florida, returning for court appearances. They express hope that Heng Lim's killer will receive justice, but like many Southeast Asians, the family is amazed at what they perceive to be the lenience of the American courts. “After killing someone”. Varin said, referring to the possibility of the defendent being let out on bail, “for a few thousand dollars he could be walking around again, just like you and me.” (Timothy Meitzler was released on $75,000 bail on September 17 pending trial.)

[The account of the incident itself is based primarily on the court testimony

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of Vary Hok, Heng Lim's sister-in-law, and Mala Lim, his widow, at the August 1 preliminary hearing. The description relies on the author's notes and recollections - no transcript was obtained - and is therefore subject to error. Also, the defendant has not provided court testimony as of this writing, and his account of the episode may differ.]

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6. VI. SOUTHEAST ASIAN RESPONSES TO HARASSMENT AND VIOLENCE

If Southeast Asians tend not to report acts of harassment and violence to the police or other authorities, how do they respond to these abuses? There are two main tendencies at work. The first - it might be considered the traditional response - is basically a strategy of conflict avoidance. The second - and we are seeing it increasingly among Southeast Asian youth - is to fight back. Most commonly, the fight-back responses consist of verbal reactions to slurs and so forth, but there is also an increasingly willingness among Southeast Asians, especially youth, to defend themselves with physical force when necessary.

The tendency of Southeast Asians (and other Asians) not to report crime and to ignore rather than respond to harassment has given rise to a stereotype of Asians as easy targets of crime and racial abuse. This may have encouraged further acts against Asians, both by criminals (who don't fear prosecution) and bullying types in neighborhoods and schoolyards (who sense easy prey).

The conflict avoidance strategies of the older generations of Southeast Asians grow out of cultural and religious traditions which emphasize tolerance, patience, and endurance of hardship. It is also a product of the lack of confidence which accompanies the sense of being foreign here, of being in a land which is not “theirs”. One Asian community leader pointed out also that the reluctance of many Southeast Asian to take action against perpetrators has been reenforced by the inaction of city authorities. Some Southeast Asians who in the past sought action were not given support, and have instead chosen to withdraw.

Fighting back

But the younger generation of Southeast Asians - especially teenage youth who have endured years of abuse in the school system - express

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increasing impatience with the reticense of their parents. In self-defense, they are increasingly banding together and in many cases responding forcefully to harassment and violence. Dan Sengsourysack, who came up through the city school system in the early 1980s, recalls that the attitude of Southeast Asian youth started to change in about 1986. The youth have become bolder, he says, as they have become more familiar with American ways. More and more Southeast Asian youth are adopting the conviction of urban youth culture that, “When challenged, one must respond. Otherwise, one will be targeted again and again”. Sengsourysack says that:

“If you ignore it, it will keep happening. You must respond strongly when someone insults you…I don't know what else to suggest. People who are weak usually are the ones who get picked on. If you don't respond, they keep picking on you. If you do respond, you get in fights.”

The confidence of Southeast Asian youth has also been bolstered by their increasing numbers. As mentioned earlier, Southeast Asian youth have established themselves as the dominant presence in small SEA enclaves in South, West, and North Philadelphia.

A watershed incident of sorts occurred on 7th St. in South Philadelphia in August, 1988, when a Cambodian teenager shot and wounded two white youths after a street encounter. The incident sent tensions in the area soaring, and it symbolized the increasing willingness of Southeast Asian youth to respond to abuses with violence of their own. Accounts of what caused the incident vary. The father of one of the boys was quoted in the paper as saying that his son and his companion were returning from an errand when they were chased by a group of Asian youths. Asians say that at least one of the boys had a habit of bullying Asians in school. Sengsourysack, who was involved in mediating the tensions that followed, said of the Cambodian youth that “the kid got picked on so many times that he couldn't handle it anymore”.

A white city official who also dealt with both the Asian and white communities after the incident had this to say about it:

“The shootings were very unfortunate, but I think they had a couple of positive effects. It seemed to me that since that time - it was a turning point - Asians started to say: 'We're not going to take it anymore. We are tired of getting hit with baseball bats

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and having our windows broken…'.”

Effects of fighting back

While most Southeast Asian parents are clearly alarmed at the fighting between their children and non-Asian youth, many of them at the same time say they understand why their kids are becoming more assertive. Some older Southeast Asians reluctantly agree that the increasingly strong response of SEA youth to intimidation is having a positive effect. An ethnic Chinese Cambodian who was one of the first businessmen to begin renovating the run-down South 7th Street area in the early 1980s summarized the feeling of a lot of Southeast Asian residents:

“It used to be that a Cambodian could not stay at home alone on 7th St. without a gun. Now we are reacting to harassment; it's working. People don't have to worry so much now…People don't come into the area anymore to harass people, because they know there will be retaliation. They will be taken care of right away. This is what Cambodians have learned to do - if there is harassment, respond right away.”

While wary of the danger of escalation, police and other agency people who work closely with the Southeast Asian community acknowledge that the increasing tendency of Southeast Asian youth to stand up for themselves against harassment and violence may be having an effect. Dee Lewis is a Lao-speaking Field Representative for the Commission on Human Relations:

“As someone who is fairly committed to pacifism, I'm distressed at the violence. But in the overall scheme of things, it may have some benefits…Though I'm saddened (by the violence), I can see that they needed to break out of that role (of the easy, passive victim).”

Rocko Holloway, a Supervisor for the PCHR who has observed the Southeast Asian community since the early 1980s, was asked whether he thought that the harassment problem was worse or better for SEA youth as a result of their increasingly assertive tactics:

“Better, because they are becoming less and less the easy

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victims…They are fighting back…Remember that we are dealing with the bully mentality…When the bully finds that his victim fights back, he figures it's too much trouble and goes to look for another victim.”

Thavone is a Laotian father of several teenage boys in West Philadelphia. He was asked through a translator how he and other parents feel about the fact that their kids are increasingly fighting back:

“Yes, the kids are fighting back…They are more familiar with the system, with American ways…I don't support the violence, but if they don't fight they will be attacked.”

One would not want to overstate the degree to which Southeast Asians are responding to harassment and violence with violence in kind. The phenomenon is limited largely to youth, and only a portion of Southeast Asian youth at that - generally those from poorer families, in the tougher areas, who tend to become hardened and streetwise more quickly than others. Yet the trend toward reacting more forcefully to intimidation is something that the whole Southeast Asian community is very conscious of.

Unfortunately, the growing assertiveness of Southeast Asian youth has sometimes been carried to excess. Recently there have been a number of instances in which Southeast Asian youth have been responsible for initiating attacks on non-Asians. (More on this in Part Four, “Circle of Violence”.)

Loss of authority for parents

The clusters of Laotian, Cambodian, and Vietnamese youth who can be seen gathering on the streets in Southeast Asian neighborhoods such as South 7th St., the area around 45th and Chestnut in West Philadelphia, and in parts of Logan, are in a sense a mixed blessing from the point of view of the parental generation. From the point of view of their parents and older Southeast Asians, these groups of youths symbolize many of the worst problems facing their communities: drop-outs, delinquency, loss of traditional culture, and a decline in parental authority. Yet at the same time these youths serve as a kind of protection in some neighborhoods against harassment from non-Asian neighbors, and against vandalism, theft, and other crimes. (Ironically, small elements of these youths are also

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responsible for crimes against the Southeast Asian community itself.)

The growing militancy of Southeast Asian youth is troubling to their parents, because what they are experiencing is not only a greater willingness of their children to assert themselves. Southeast Asian parents are greatly distressed at the rapid manner in which their youth are adopting American values, many of them negative, and departing from their traditionally strict adherence to parental authority. A great many Southeast Asian parents truly feel as if they are losing control of their young. This intergenerational crisis - and it is indeed perceived as a crisis by the Southeast Asian community - is much more of a problem among the poorer, less educated families than it is among educated, better off ones. It's the poor parents, the ones who are really struggling in this new culture, who are the least able to serve as strong role models and maintain traditional lines of authority. In many of these families, parents have experienced the painful and bewildering phenomenon of having traditional roles reversed, as they are forced to rely on their children, who speak better English and adapt more easily, to help them negotiate the day-to-day obstacles of the new culture.

3. PARTIES OF RESPONSIBILITY

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1. I. THE SCHOOL DISTRICT

The School District gets very low marks from a wide range of observers for its performance in dealing with racial conflict in general and for its response to the abuse experienced by Asian students in particular. The most frequently heard complaints are that:

• - The schools tend to deny the existence of racial problems and generally seek to minimize them when they do become public.
• - They tend only to respond when pressured or forced to, usually by the occurrence of a serious incident.
• - Their responses are usually only palliative and temporary, and causes of the problems are rarely explored in depth.
• - Little support or protection is given to victims of harassment, and perpetrators generally carry on unimpeded unless a particularly severe incident comes to light.
• - Most schools tend to keep their doors closed to agencies with expertise in conflict resolution and a desire to help, such as the police Conflict Prevention and Resolution Unit, Commission on Human Relations staff, and the Anti-Drug/Anti-Violence Network.

It is troubling indeed to hear from so many individuals that the schools, which serve as perhaps the formative introduction to American culture for Southeast Asian youth, fall so far short of their responsibility to provide support and protection to victims of harassment and violence and act against the perpetrators of these incidents.

Nearly every Southeast Asian student, it seems, has stories of some form of racial harassment by other youth in the public schools. And over and over again one hears - from police officials, Commission on Human Relations

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staff, parents, community organizations, some School District staff, and students themselves - that when incidents occur, the common response of the schools is to minimize them, mute criticism, and turn away inquiries from concerned parties.

Several agencies who play important roles in responding to inter-group conflict in the city (including the Police Department's bias unit, the Commission on Human Relations, and the Anti-Drug/Anti-Violence Network) would like to work more closely with a number of schools particularly affected by racial tension and violence, but by and large they are frustrated by closed doors and reluctance to cooperate.

Who is responsible?

Lt. Marshall Smith of the police Conflict Prevention and Resolution Unit (CPR) said that school principals are reluctant to involve them, because they feel that to reveal problems will reflect badly on them and their schools.

“The principals don't want to be held accountable. The problem is that what happens then is that a powder keg situation develops. The problems keep building up. And the victims don't get to vent.”

Jack Shepherd of the Commission on Human Relations agrees with Smith:

“A school is in many ways controlled by its principal. Most perceive any kind of outside inquiry as a threat. Some principals are secure enough to see the opportunity of outside strength, but it takes a special kind of individual.”

Mary Cousar of the Anti-Drug/Anti-Violence Network not only agrees that the schools tend not to be open to dealing with incidents, but she goes further and says flatly that “they try to hide them. They try and act as though it isn't happening. It seems as though the worse the problem is, the more they try and hide it”. But Cousar thinks the pressure to suppress evidence of racial conflict in the schools goes beyond the principals:

“It may look and feel like the principals, but I have a feeling that it's higher than that…I think the principals feel that 'You better have a good school if you want to be a principal, and that means no problems with drugs or racial violence.'”

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Rocko Holloway of the Commision on Human Relations agrees with Cousar: “It's a systemic thing”. Holloway says, “It's not just the fault of the individual principals. To ask for help or admit that there is a problem would be seen as an admission of failure.” One city employee who has dealt with the schools on issues of racial violence complained that the schools often avoid responsibility for incidents by using the technical argument that they aren't occurring on school grounds. (A large portion of incidents occur on the way to and from school.)

Effect on students

The climate of racial hostility in the schools affects everyone - Asians and non-Asians alike. The race of the victim often depends simply upon who the identifiable minorities happen to be in a particular school - be they Hispanic, black, white, or Asian. For many Southeast Asians, though, particularly recent arrivals who have few places to turn for support, the experience of being victimized can be especially traumatic. Debbie Wei teaches at University City High School in West Philadelphia:

“The atmosphere of intimidation and violence exists for everyone. It's everywhere in the schools. But it's worse for Asian kids in that there is such a sense of non-belonging. It's much harder for them to speak out. But the climate of violence is endemic to the whole system. It reflects the problems all the way around.”

Phoua Xiong, a Hmong graduate of Lea Elementary School and Girls High, speaks from personal experience about the psychological toll of being a victim in the schools and receiving no support or reenforcement from school authorities.

“It (racial harassment and violence) is very poorly dealt with by the schools. They don't pay enough attention to the problem. I know from my own experience that the way the school handles these problems really has an effect on the victims…The victims begin to have a sense of inferiority…I started to think there was something wrong with me…I was always scared…I would always have to walk home with friends, never by myself.”

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Xiong believes that the level of harassment and fear experienced by Asian youth in the schools is so severe that it contributes to the high drop-out rate for Southeast Asian youth.

“The violence turns some students away”. she says, “They don't want to come to school and face these kinds of things…Some quit school because of it. I really think that this is one factor in the high drop-out rates we have now.” Rocko Holloway of the PCHR, who has been observing the problems faced by youth in the schools for years, was asked if he agreed with Xiong's assessment. “I'm sure that there are kids”. he replied, “who don't continue with school simply as a result of sheer terror”.

Debbie Wei states that Asian students' responses to the abuse run the gamut:

“Some drop out because of it. Some just become quiet. Some become super achievers, trying to rise above it all. Some fight back.”

The poor performance of the School District in responding to racial conflict has perhaps got to be considered the most critical breakdown in the city-wide response to the problem. The schools do represent, after all, the formative inter-group experience, the major activity of most children ages five or six to seventeen or so. For many, the first encounters of racially-motivated bullying and harassment occur in the schools. The reaction (or inaction) of school authorities teaches the child a great deal about what is acceptable and unacceptable to the culture. In some cases, lack of support for a child who is a victim can be a formative experience which leaves a real imprint, causing the child to internalize the problem and carry it as a private burden. When the adult community seems not to object to the abuses, the child may believe that indeed perhaps something must be wrong with him or her.

One of the worst parts of the harassment for Asian kids, says University City H.S. graduate Dan Sengsourysack, is that many of them have sought assistance at one time or another from school authorities - Counselors usually, and sometimes Principals - but their efforts to get help have largely failed. “They really need someone to turn to”. says Sengsourysack. “But they don't have anywhere to go. They feel that no one is trying to help.”

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People familiar with the problems say that the tendency of schools to minimize racial conflict and keep discussion of it in-house is far-reaching -the norm even. “It's the rule”. says Dee Lewis of the PCHR. “We remark on it when there is an exception.” But there are exceptions, some of them notable. PCHR staff and others cite Jones Middle School, Harding Middle School, Olney High School, Stetson Middle School, and Thomas Middle School, among others, as examples of schools which have taken initiatives and exhibited a willingness to discuss problems and work on them. Schools that take the steps toward promoting inter-group harmony and healing racial divisions would not be able to, in most cases, without a principal who is motivated to do so.

An approach that worked

Thomas Middle School is a formerly all-white school at 9th and Johnston streets in South Philadelphia which has been desegregated. In 1985 it was the scene of escalating tensions between white and black students, including a couple of violent incidents that threatened to touch things off. Rocko Holloway of the PCHR recalls that Thomas' Principal Bernard McGee took that step that few principals in the city seem willing to do:

“He called me and said, 'We've got a problem here, and I don't want this kind of problem in my school. Can you come in and do something about it? Whatever you decide to do, I'll support you.'”

McGee, who is now Principal at Elverson Middle School at 13th and Susquehanna in the Temple University area, describes the strategy that was successfully employed to defuse the tensions at Thomas:

“Rocko met with the students about once a month for a year or so…We identified a group of about twenty-five kids. Some of them were good kids. None of them were Rhodes Scholars, but some of them were real leaders. We found that each group (black and white) had someone in it who commanded respect and could make an agreement stick…We responded to some of the students' requests. For example, there were a lot of problems with the bathrooms. A new toilet was needed. We agreed to put it in if they would see to it that it wasn't vandalized.”

Holloway reflected upon the episode at Thomas and the approach that

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he and McGee successfully employed there:

“You've got to go in, bring the most hostile elements from both sides together, and deal with the common issues, even if they don't seem to be related at all to the problems. The important thing is creating a dialogue.”

The problem that McGee sought help with at Thomas was resolved within a year. Why don't more schools seek to create the kind of dialogue that McGee and Holloway initiated at Thomas, given its success there? Is the experience of Thomas applicable elsewhere? Holloway and McGee both say yes, but McGee cautions that circumstances at other schools might require different approaches. “We had a lot of good things going for us”. McGee recalls, “a good police captain, good timing, a security guard who knew what was going on and worked with Rocko and the kids.”

Asked for some suggestions for other schools who are seeking to resolve similar kinds of problems, McGee offered the following:

“Identify those things that most need addressing at the beginning. Put in mechanisms for addressing them…Clean house - you might find that eight or ten kids are the ones that are really causing you problems and need to be transferred…Support the teachers. Support the people who want things improved. The problems are bad for morale…Make some hard decisions quickly…Get a process in place… Build a reputation for reliability by following through…Develop a relationship with the (School) District. Get people there to follow through.”

McGee succeeded at Thomas because he was willing to admit that his school had a problem, and he was willing to seek help. “You've got to be willing to get other people involved”. he says. “If you don't, you're a fool. You've got to realize that you can't do it all yourself. Also, you've got to be willing to expose yourself and your weaknesses.”

Lack of support

School District rules require that serious incidents be documented on an incident report form and submitted to the “Deseg" office, the unit that oversees desegreation and is responsible for monitoring tensions in the

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schools. Some schools use this reporting system conscientiously, but many others don't. “People have the presumption that the more they file, the more they will be viewed as doing a poor job”. McGee says. But he sees some other reasons for the reluctance of principals to report problems:

“Part of it is that, in cases of a white principal dealing with a black clientele - or in any situation which is cross-racial -there is often a fear of being accused of picking on people, of having some other motivation. People are afraid to confront the issues. There is a CYA (cover your ass) mentality operating.”

One principal said that he believes (like Mary Cousar, PCHR staff members, and others) that the School District administration does not give sufficient support to principals who seek to open up a dialogue and address the problem of racial divisions in their schools:

“There is a lack of support from above. Some people (principals) have gone into these situations expecting support, then when they don't get it, there's a feeling of being burned. If this happens once or twice, you are likely to feel, well, it's not worth it.”

Trouble spots

Just as there are schools such as Thomas and others cited above that have made serious efforts to heal racial divisions, a number of schools have acquired reputations for resisting dialogue about their problems, suppressing public knowledge of them and keeping them in-house. Schools in this category with large Southeast Asian enrollments include Furness High School at 3rd and Mifflin streets and South Philadelphia High School. A number of attacks against Asian students have occurred at each of these schools. Referring to Furness, where a Cambodian girl had her face slashed in 1987, a PCHR staffer says that “Incidents occur continually there due to the large number of Asians, but we can't get in there to save our lives.”

Efforts to promote awareness

The School District does have a number of programs for promoting cross-cultural awareness and good relations among its students. The most notable of these is Adventures in Harmony, a retreat program run in cooperation with Fellowship House Farm in Pottstown. Through this

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program, Junior High School students attend human relations workshops and other activities designed to promote cross-cultural awareness in an inter-racial setting. The program originally targeted ninth graders, but now includes leadership training workshops for older high school students as well. Adventures in Harmony is generally highly regarded, and students have reacted with enthusiasm to it. Renee Yampolsky, Principal of Key School which has the city's largest proportion of Asian students (64%), calls the Fellowship Farm trip “one of the things they really look forward to…It's not the kind of thing you would think they would like. It's very structured. But they do. They love it.” (Key School has since been limited to elementary level and thus no longer participates in the Fellowship Farm program.)

The problem with most of the School District's efforts to promote cross-cultural understanding is that they tend to be short-term and superficial. Most of them are one-shot deals - a workshop, an international food fair, an international festival at which students are invited to wear their culture's traditional dress or perform its music. These are all positive influences, to be sure, but they are lacking in continuity, and many of them are optional.

Asians were the fastest growing group in the public schools during the last decade. During the 1988-89 school year, the latest for which figures could be obtained, there were about 7,500 Asians enrolled out of a total enrollment of 191,000 students.

More than 4,000 of the Asian enrollment was Southeast Asian. A successful lawsuit charging neglect of Asian students was brought against the School District by several Asian groups and the Education Law Center in 1986. Some corrective measures have been taken as a result of the settlement, such as hiring of certain staff and the creation of workshops on Asian cultures for teachers and counselors, yet there continue to be shortages of Asian language bilingual staff throughout the system.

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2. II. THE POLICE DEPARTMENT

The Police Department has a critical role in responding to acts of racial hostility, of course. Their dependability (or lack of it, as the case may be) shapes people's expectation of what behavior the city will tolerate and what it will not.

Still, it is good to keep in mind that it is only in a very small percentage of acts against Southeast Asians that police are involved. The vast majority of racially-motivated crimes against Southeast Asians occur entirely out of the sphere of police involvement, and never enter police records. Based on our knowledge of the under-reporting phenomenon, and on the frequency of hostile acts reported by Southeast Asians, it's probably safe to assume that more than 90% of such acts do not result in police involvement.

The Police Department's responsiveness to the Southeast Asian community, and its performance on matters which concern race and ethnicity in general, vary greatly depending on what part of the department is involved. Not all of the police force, for example, is as sensitive on matters of race as is the specially-trained bias unit. Rank and file officers often don't exhibit the forward-looking views that many of their superiors espouse. And standards adhered to in one part of the city may not be adhered to in another.

High marks for the bias unit

Philadelphia is fortunate to be one of just a handful of cities in the country with a special unit which focuses only on bias-related crimes. The Conflict Prevention and Resolution Unit (CPR), headed by Lt. Marshall Smith and headquartered at 3rd and Race streets below Chinatown, was one of just three such operations when it was first established in 1986. (New York and Boston were the others.) The CPR is primarily an investigative unit, joining investigations of every crime which is suspected of having an ethnic or racial motivation, but they also do prevention work - seeking to defuse

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tensions in a particular area before an incident occurs.

The CPR unit gets high marks from a wide range of people in the city who are involved with issues of racial and ethnic intimidation. A Commission on Human Relations supervisor calls the CPR “the most important tool we have in getting action on a lot of these cases. Before, we had to work around the police department to get action. Now we go to the CPR Unit.” Another PCHR supervisor said that there is “nothing that works this well in any other state”.

Judy Kruger of the U.S. Justice Department's Community Relations Service in Philadelphia said that she has been “very, very impressed” with the CPR, and particularly with Lt. Smith.

Police guidelines require that the CPR Unit be notified of every case suspected of being bias-related. How does this work in practice? Lt. Smith says that field supervisors are conscientious and consistent about identifying acts of prejudice. Lt. Smith and other officers say, however, that the same may not always be true for the officers at the scene. Working day after day in environments where abusive behaviour is the norm, many police officers become numb to the subtleties of motivation and tend to see everything as “another disturbance”. Though CPR usually enters a case by referral from other units, they may also enter on their own initiative if they have reason to wish to do so. And cases may also be brought to CPR's attention by the Commission on Human Relations or others who have reason to believe that a racial dimension may be present.

Lt. Smith says that his unit likes to err on the side of considering something racial at the outset, even when it may not be:

“We consider it racial if there is any suspicion that it might be, until we prove otherwise. We have to assume that it might be if there is a possibility of it.”

Lazar Kleit and Rocko Holloway of the PCHR, who have worked closely with the bias unit in a number of instances, agree that the CPR is diligent about pursuing cases. They say also that they are aggressive in filing the charge of “Ethnic Intimidation”. which under state law provides for added penalties for crimes of prejudice. Holloway explains that there are other reasons that the Ethnic Intimidation law is not as effective as it could be:

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“The police utilize it. The biggest problem with it is at the judicial level…The D.A.s and the police will bring the charges, but the judges will drop Ethnic Intimidation. There are two reasons for this. Among a lot of judges there is a lack of understanding of the act. Secondly, a lot of these cases involve juveniles, and most judges are of the generation that tends to see this kind of behavior as “kid stuff.”

Old and new schools

On matters of race and other critical issues, there is a sometimes a wide gap, observers say, between the sensitivity of higher ranking officers, who have been influenced by the continuing education they have received, and the rank and file who are continually exposed to an onslaught of abusive attitudes on the streets. These observers point to some dramatic changes in the outlook of police in Philadelphia which are, at least in part, the result of new opportunities for education and training. Jack Shepherd of the PCHR watched these changes come about over the years:

“Twenty or thirty years ago, if there was a conflict between a group of white youths and a group of black youths, the response would always be the same - arrest the black youths and send the white youths home…In the last dozen years or so, this has changed radically. A big reason for this change inadvertently came out of (former Mayor) Frank Rizzo's policies..Frank Rizzo was in the habit of making sure that his police got well taken care of, and one of the things he did was create educational opportunities for them. This had the effect of creating a new crop of educated officers with a different kind of approach.”

But what about the rank and file - officers on the street, the ones with whom the public normally deals on a day to day basis? New recruits receive some training at the Police Academy on matters of racial and cultural diversity, and on how to deal with inter-group tensions. A remedial training program on these issues is also in place to reach veterans who joined the force before the Academy's current curriculum was put in place. In addition, a representative from the CPR itself goes to every unit in the department, telling them what the CPR's function is, and what the procedures are for responding to inter-group conflicts.

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In terms of time investment, though, these efforts are barely significant. Police officers, like everyone else, are products of the communities they come out of, and the current program is hardly able to counter the deep strains of prejucide and lack of knowledge of Southeast Asians and other new immigrant cultures which currently prevail. Judy Kruger of the Justice Department says the issue of training and education is made much more difficult for the police department at present, because due to the drug-related crisis “the pressure on the department now is to get the maximum number of bodies onto the street”. Alluding to the clash between “old” and “new” lines of thinking in the department, Kruger states that “the last two Police Commissioners have made a lot of high profile statements about the need for more training, community sensitivity training, community relations training, but the old school officers are really dug in, and have resisted it”.

Communication problems

To the average Southeast Asian resident of the city, this discussion of the police force would so far appear to be very abstract, and far removed from their daily experience. And indeed it is. Because for most Southeast Asian residents, especially those less used to American ways, the level of trust and confidence in the police is low. It is also apparent to many of them that among a great many police officers, the level of understanding and tolerance of their cultures is low, as is the patience of the average officer with the frustrations posed by language and communication barriers. (Many of these difficulties were discussed in Part Two, “Under-reporting”.)

Southeast Asians consistently say that the biggest problem they have with the police is their poor response - that they come either belatedly or not at all, and that when they do come, crimes are not investigated or pursued vigorously. From the police point of view, by far the biggest problem in relation to Southeast Asians is the problem of communication. “There is no question,” says Officer Fred Silberman. “The biggest problem we face is language.” Lt. Smith states that “Our biggest problem is getting information”. Captain David Morrell of the Community Relations Division, who serves as a liaison to Asian organizations in the city, says that communication is more difficult with Southeast Asians than with other Asian groups. “It's much better, much easier, with the more established groups”. Morrell says.

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Abuses

More troubling than the slow response of police are the fairly frequent reports of abusive behaviour by some police officers toward Southeast Asians. Many of these reports concern verbal abuse and racial remarks by police directed toward Southeast Asian youth. Dan Sengsourysack, Laotian-born Youth Project Coordinator at the Southeast Asian Coalition, says that, while there are many good officers, some police in the city have “an attitude” toward Asian youth that reflects the ethnic communities that they grew up in. Sengsourysack says that it is “very common” for police to verbally abuse Southeast Asian youth. One 20 year old Lao youth being questioned at the 18th District headquarters (55th and Pine) reports that a white officer taunted him by saying that “I fucked your mother and your sister”. Another Southeast Asian youth, picked up for questioning in South Philadelphia, reported that one officer alluded to the Vietnam war. “What happened in Vietnam was because of you people”. the officer reportedly said. “My (relative) was killed over there…Now you're making trouble over here.” A Laotian youth mistakenly identified as the perpetrator of the October, 1988 shooting on South 7th Street, told his attorney and others that, while in custody in a police van, one officer said to him that “If it was my brother, I'd cut your balls off.” An Asian Americans United representative said that they receive numerous reports of abusive behavior toward Southeast Asian youth by police.

Not all of these kinds of incidents are racially-motivated. Indeed, youths of every race in the city have similar stories to tell. But Southeast Asian youth may be particularly vulnerable because they have few advocates. “They will only do it to someone who doesn't have anyone to speak on their behalf, because they think they can get away with it”. says Sengsourysack. “They think these kids are just nothing.” When asked about the race of the offending officers, Sengsourysack says that they tend to nearly always be white. “Maybe the black officers don't do it more because they know how it feels”. he adds.

Not everyone shares the view that police mistreatment of Southeast Asian youth is widespread. Moua Lor, Hmong resident of Logan, says that “It depends on the Asian person. If they have a good attitude, then no problem”. While Lor is troubled by the slow response of police -"Sometimes they don't come at all.” - he says that he has “never had any problems dealing with them.”

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As the city's anti-discrimination agency, the Commission on Human Relations (along with the District Attorney) is responsible for investigating and acting upon bias-related abuses by police. However, as a sister city agency, some observers question whether or not they are free enough from political restraints to vigorously pursue these cases. How would the PCHR act if they received a complaint of racially-motivated abuse by a police officer? Jack Shepherd explains that an individual wishing to file a complaint with the PCHR has two options. The first is to file a citizens police complaint. “This would be forwarded to the Police Commissioner's office with a request to investigate”. Shepherd says. These complaints are then investigated by the Police Department's Internal Affairs unit. At one time, according to Shepherd, complaints of police misconduct had to be filed directly to the police. But because citizens were sometimes made to feel less than welcome in their local police stations under these circumstances, provisions were made to allow two other agencies - the District Attorney's office and the PCHR - to receive complaints. “A second option”. Shepherd explains, “is for a citizen to file what is known as a 'city services' complaint aginst the officer under the Fair Practices Ordinance prohibiting discrimination in city services”. (By executive order of the Mayor, the PCHR's authority to enforce anti-discrimination laws has been expanded to include cases involving AIDS sufferers and city services.)

Hiring

The urgent need to hire more Asian language speaking police officers has come up before and will be coming up again. The Department announced in 1987 that it planned to hire an additional 40 Asian language officers, including 10 fluent in Cambodian and 10 fluent in Vietnamese, but so far few have been added.

In fact, out of the more than 6,000 regular police officers on the force (Public Service Officers are not considered regular officers, but are a special supplementary force), not a single Southeast Asian has yet been hired, despite the fact that it has been more than ten years since SEA began arriving here in large numbers. As a result of federal lawsuits filed during the 1970s, the city agreed to significantly increase hiring of black, female, and Hispanic officers, but Asians were not included in the settlement. Referring to the issue of police hiring, Mayor Wilson Goode, remaining purposefully vague, told the Philadelphia Inquirer in May, 1990 that:

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“I will continue to look for ways to make all city departments inclusive of non-whites, including African-Americans, Puerto Ricans, Asians, and others. If there is a way to achieve that, I would want to achieve that.

A number of police officers who deal frequently with the Southeast Asian community would like to see the city make more progress in getting SEA on the force for purely practical reasons: without bilingual officers to gain trust and communicate with the often insular SEA population, cooperation sometimes can be nearly impossible to obtain. One officer recently hinted at dissatisfaction with the obstacle presented by the current civil service system, which many recently arrived immigrants find difficult to pass. “The civil service system is good”. he said, “but there are times when a need has to be met”. A police official who believes that the department needs to hire more Asian and Southeast Asian officers as soon as possible to help it cope with the problems said offhandedly in a conversation last year that he believed a lawsuit pressing for the hiring of more Asians, in the manner of the successful suit brought against the School District, would very likely succeed.

Building bridges

The Department has taken some small steps to overcome communication barriers. The force now includes two Southeast Asian Public Service Officers (PSOs) - a Cambodian woman and a Chinese-Vietnamese man. (There are no Laotian or Hmong speakers on the force.) In theory, these PSOs may be utilized by police in any part of the city in need of translation or mediation in a case involving Southeast Asians. Mary Cousar, who believes that slow police response is a problem for everyone in the city, not just Southeast Asians, says that it may be worse for Southeast Asians because of the language problem. “My advice to them is just to keep it up, to keep calling”. she says. Cousar also recommends that Southeast Asians follow up their calls to 911 with a call to the 18th District mini-station, where the Southeast Asian PSOs are based. Another improvement is the Department's utilization of the telephone translation hook-up service in California, which is said to provide nearly immediate interpretation in a hundred dialects including all of the Southeast Asian languages. Tsiwen Law of the Mayor's Asian-American Advisory Board told the Inquirer last November, however, that the Board continues to get reports of Asians who call 911 and are “denied help because they could not speak English”.

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The mini-station and the PSOs are intended to help bridge barriers of language and culture which currently lie between the police and the Southeast Asian community. Members of both the SEA community and the police department generally seem to agree that the mini-station with its bilingual PSOs is a good idea. Kau Our of the Cambodian Association and Commission on Human Relations thinks that it's been serving its purpose. Officer Fred Silberman says that “The PSOs can go into a situation involving Southeast Asians and get results that I can't get, simply because I can't speak the language”. In theory, the Public Service Officers can be called upon by any police unit in the city, but one officer who deals with the two Southeast Asian PSOs says that they are under-utilized. In any case, people both inside and outside the Department agree that two PSOs out of 6,600 officers on the force are not going to be enough.

Community policing

There is a movement among some of the nation's more forward-looking big city police departments toward what has been called “Community Policing”. Community policing is basically about increasing the visibility and accessibility of police officers by basing them in neighborhoods, increasing foot patrols, and maximizing interaction between officers and residents. It was originally attempted as a response to the crisis in black ghettos during the 1960s, when it became obvious that there was a huge breakdown in trust and communication between big city police departments and ghetto residents.

Several large departments have begun to employ community policing models with success in their new immigrant communities. Houston, Newark, and New York City have in recent years enacted successful community policing programs. A recent New York Times article, referring to the Newark and Houston programs, said that while these cities had not experienced statistical drops in crime, the programs were “enormously popular” among residents. “The residents reported that they felt more secure and that the police were more accessible”. according to the article.

One small but extraordinary program has been operating in Dallas' “Little Asia” section since the late 1970s. Led by a highly motivated Vietnam veteran named Ron Cowart and based in a mini-station staffed with both Southeast Asian and non-Asian officers, it has been looked to as a

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model by a number of other cities with large SEA constituencies. Officer Silberman of Philadelphia visited the Dallas program, and others in the department here have taken note of its success. Philadelphia's mini-stations and its Asian PSOs, small steps in the direction of community policing, were inspired in part by the Dallas example.

In the January, 1990 edition of the FBI Law Enforcement Bulletin. Robert Trojanowicz and David Carter describe the philosophy of community policing:

“Community policing…says that police departments must deploy their most innovative, self-desciplined, and self-motivated officers directly into the community as outreach specialists and community problem solvers. Only by freeing these new community policing officers (CPOs) from the isolation of their patrol cars, so they can interact with people face-to-face in the same areas every day, can departments develop the rapport and trust necessary to encourage people to become active in the process of policing themselves.”

The authors describe how CPOs can nurture a two way information flow between an immigrant community and a police department, familiarizing the department with what it needs to know about the immigrant cultures, and at the same time educating these cultures about the police and the American system of law enforcement. It is only through decentralizing and personalizing police service, the authors state, that police departments can hope to gain the trust and cooperation of these large new immigrant populations.

The community policing phenomenon, if it takes hold, would be a kind of reversal of a modern trend away from the old-fashioned neighborhood beat cop, who patroled on foot and was a known fixture in the neighborhood. New York City Police Commissioner Lee Brown, quoted in the New York Times article, summarized the philosophy of community policing by speaking of the need for police to be “part of, and not apart from, the community”. The article calls foot patrols “the cornerstone of community policing”.

Phillip Taft, writing in Police Magazine (“Policing the New Immigrants”) put it this way:

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“While police officers once made daily rounds on foot, making personal contact with the newest ethnic groups, they now remotely observe immigrant behaviour through the windows of air-conditioned patrol cars…The distance is both real and psychological.”

The main impetus for community policing comes from the chiefs and other higher ranking officials in the departments, and they don't always find it easy to win acceptance for the changes from the rank and file. Again, Phillip Taft in Police Magazine:

“Unlike the rank and file, chiefs and police administrators are in almost total agreement that police departments should adjust their routines and policies in order to respond to the unique needs of new ethnic communities. 'We have to work with them', says St. Paul's (Police Chief) McCutcheon. 'If we don't, then they withdraw and that causes us more problems than reaching out and giving a hand.'…In Santa Ana, Chief Raymond Davis agrees: The police have an obligation to help the ethnic group get settled in the most rapid way. If you don't try to make the transition as smooth as possible, then you're in for trouble. Making it easier for a new community to settle is a good investment in the future'.”

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3. III. PHILADELPHIA COMMISSION ON HUMAN RELATIONS

The Philadelphia Commission on Human Relations (or PCHR) has a mandate from the city both to enforce anti-discrimination laws and to work, through education and mediation, to promote inter-group harmony. It's Compliance Division, which responds to complaints of discrimination in housing, employment, and city services, is its enforcement arm. This report, however, focuses mainly on the Community Services Division, which fields representatives around the city whose goal is to promote dialogue and community-based solutions to neighborhood conflicts.

A strength and a weakness

The Community Services Division, which includes the Field Representatives, is staffed by talented and dedicated people, many of them with a great deal of experience in human relations work. One notices among them a real commitment - a sense of mission, even - which is rare among employees of government agencies. In visits to PCHR's offices and in conversations with its staff, the motivation level and morale of staff members seems high, again quite in contrast with what one comes to expect of a city agency. The Supervisors (there are currently four, of which three were interviewed) have a well-conceived and well-articulated vision of their mission, which Field Representatives appear to be well-versed in. Despite complaints of inaction by the agency (to be examined shortly) and low name recognition of the PCHR in some areas, interviews and conversations with a wide variety of Asian and non-Asian residents and community leaders indicate that Field Representatives are generally well-regarded among people who have had experience with them.

Yet the Commission on Human Relations as a whole (particularly at the upper, policy-making level) is widely seen as overly bureaucratic, ineffective, and muted in its criticisms, particularly when the targets of the criticism are other city agencies. In June the Philadelphia Inquirer referred to the PCHR in an editorial as “a low profile agency that is cloutless, virtually penniless and not typically deferred to by the powers that be”.

There is a

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widely held perception among people who deal regularly with the PCHR that under the current Executive Director the agency has become increasingly bureaucratic and inaccessible. Information flow is strictly controlled, they say. Nothing is permitted to leave the agency without clearance from above. So strict are the Director's rules prohibiting staff from speaking to the media, for example, that even Assistant Directors and Supervisors are forbidden from speaking to reporters on any matter except after prior clearance from the Executive Director or the Public Information Director. One observer who has dealt for several years with the PCHR said he felt that the gag order was unfortunate because it means that those staffers who have the greatest exposure to what's happening in the neighborhoods are prevented from sharing their insights, and it sometimes results in inaccurate or sanitized versions of events being presented to the public.

The head of a small private agency who has dealt with the PCHR for many years said with regret that, while it was once a mission-driven activist operation, it “is now as bureaucratic as any other government organization”. This individual referred to the change as “a government tragedy”. and agreed with the assessment of the former head of another private organization that the bureaucracy and inaccessibility which now afflicts the agency “is a reflection of the style of the current Executive Director”.

[I did not ask PCHR staff to comment on the criticisms of outside observers about the agency's leadership, nor did they offer opinions on this matter. This was outside the scope of the research for which I was granted access to the agency, therefore it did not seem appropriate to ask staff to discuss the issue. I must say also that after being told by several people that I had a slim chance of gaining permission to speak with staff, in my case I was granted generous access and, once access was granted, I encountered a genuine sense of openness at all levels.]

Confusion about PCHR's role

As the PCHR has a two-fold mandate - generally speaking, to enforce the anti-discrimination laws (Compliance Division) and to promote inter-group harmony (Community Services Division) - residents often are confused about what the agency's response to a given incident should be. While Field Representatives have earned respect for their fairness and their willingness to become involved, many people complain that they “do not do enough”. Residents wonder, for example, why PCHR does not take forceful action against perpetrators, or why they don't always seem to clearly side with the

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victims in neighborhood conflicts. But these are not the roles of the Field Representatives or the Community Services Division. Mary Cousar comments:

“The (Human Relations) staff are good. They are good about working with us through the whole process. But their mandate from the city is very narrow. People expect them to do a lot of things they can't do. There is a role for them, but the grassroots action has to come from others.”

The PCHR faces a public relations dilemma of sorts in that their success in neighborhood interventions depends on their staying off center stage. The public tends to look for quick and visible responses to neighborhood problems - punishment of perpetrators, for example, or vocal denunciations of wrongdoing. But the PCHR Supervisors and Field Representatives take a longer view of these conflicts. They serve as catalysts, bringing parties together and promoting dialogue, but they insist that the actual solutions must be developed by the residents themselves. Supervisor Jack Shepherd, a senior staff member and architect of many of PCHR's intervention strategies, explains the reasoning behind this approach:

“Any resolution to a problem always ends up being implemented and enforced by whoever puts it in place. If it is designed by someone from outside the community, then the resolution is only in place as long as they are there…If the resolution is designed and implemented by the community, then they will see to it that it works, and they are there permanently…What is important is that they design it…Our job, while the police are stopping the mayhem and standing on the corner to keep order, is to work behind the scenes toward a permanent resolution…That resolution has to belong to the community; they have to feel that it is their…They have to have ownership of it.”

Many Southeast Asian residents, frustrated with the inaction of police and the courts, would like to see PCHR play more of a role in getting action against perpetrators. Often they are puzzled by the neutral, facilitator role that the agency plays in neighborhood tensions, particularly when one party is clearly being victimized. But PCHR's Community Services staff say that their interventions are not designed to provide supplementary law enforcement, or to compensate for any inaction by the police or the courts.

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In many cases of neigborhood conflict, the Field Representatives' role seems, on the surface at least, to be limited simply to information gathering. This is hard for many residents - some of whom desparately feel a need for more support and protection from the city - to accept. Nathalie Emam of Community Legal Services, who is Cambodian-born and counts many Southeast Asians among her clients, speaks for many of them when she says:

“They (the Field Representatives) just report incidents…I don't know what their job description is. They should follow up more on their cases. They should provide some remedies, not just report.”

Tom Morton, a Field Representative assigned to the Olney and Logan areas who has worked extensively with the city's Asian population over the years, calls the desire for quick solutions a natural tendency:

“People want to see quick results. That's a job hazard. Sometimes people expect us to come right in and solve the problems right away…We can facilitate the process. But the solutions - any agreements - have to come from the parties themselves…We don't want people thinking in terms of - 'OK, Human Relations is going to come in and solve the problem for us.'…Success for us is when the parties become capable of solving the problem themselves.”

Field Representatives are instructed to develop long-term relations with the communities to which they are assigned. The emphasis is on building trust. In response to an incident, the representatives work not just with the victims (Morton says that often both sides perceive themselves to be victims) but seek also to engage the offending party in a dialogue, and to develop lasting lines of communication between the two sides. “You are not going to motivate them to change by making speeches in front of them”. says Jack Shepherd, “because the people are emotionally charged and they are going to feel threatened… We want to get them to see that they have a self-interest in doing things differently…Their long-term interest - the long-term interest of all sides - is a calm, stable community, where anyone can live.”

Some observers say that, while they understand the PCHR's non-partisan approach to neighborhood conflicts, the agency as a whole could be playing a much more activist role, even within the limits of its mandate. The PCHR

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originally was strictly an enforcement agency, set up in 1952 to enforce Philadelphia's Fair Practices Ordinance. “It has evolved a lot over the years”, explains former Fellowship Commission Executive Director Berit Lakey. “The current structure is very difficult to manage”, she says. “Its mandate is both to enforce and to educate, but it doesn't know quite which to do. It's hard to do both.” Berit Lakey again:

“They are not acting powerfully. There are times when they should be more forceful, but they have taken to seeing themselves as a third party. They seek to be neutral, but that only confuses things. They are meant to be an enforcement agency, and at the same time they seek to be neutral.”

PCHR and the Asian community

Asian concerns came to the forefront for the agency for the first time in 1984. In October of that year, in response to community pressure building up around a series of racially-motivated attacks against Asians, the Commission held a four-day public hearing on the problems facing Asian residents of the city. Asian groups were troubled, however, by the fact that no Asians were a part of the process of planning for the hearings, nor were they represented on the panel of observers overseeing the proceedings. Some Asian groups criticized the ensuing report - Asians and their Neighbors - as superficial. PCHR Deputy Director Claire Maier, referring to the report in retrospect, acknowledges that “It appeared as though we were on the outside, looking in, which we were at that point.” But as a result of the hearings, Maier said, PCHR was able to take the necessary steps to better serve the Asian community, such as in the hiring of bilingual Field Representatives. It wasn't until three and a half years later that five Asian language bilingual representatives were actually hired, however. (A Cambodian, a Vietnamese, and an American woman fluent in Laotian were among them.)

In 1986 Ida Chen, a Chinese American attorney (now a Common Pleas judge) was appointed to serve as the agency's first Asian Commissioner. But in 1988 the entire nine-member Commission was dismissed by the Mayor, reportedly at the behest of the Executive Director, and the newly appointed group included no Asians. After an outcry and much lobbying, YoAn Kim, a Korean American businessman, was named to the panel when a vacancy opened up a year later. Kim has a reputation for being savvy about city politics. “He knows how to deal with people in the city and get results”, said

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a proponent of his. But he is not seen as an activist. Nor is Kim thought to be in tune with the poorer, less educated elements of the city's Asian population. A member of one Asian organization complained that “If he thinks you are somebody important, then he'll pay attention to you. Otherwise forget it.”

Some Asian American activists point to PCHR's most recent report - Race Relations in Philadelphia, released in January, 1990 - as evidence that Asians are still not a priority for the agency. Asian Americans United, perhaps the Commission's most vocal critic, issued a sharply worded rebuttal to the PCHR report, saying that it minimized the concerns of Asians and “reflected an anti-Asian bias within the PCHR itself”. The AAU statement went on to say, in part:

“It continues to be difficult for the Asian American community to trust the PCHR. Our relationship with this agency has been historically strained. We have had to fight every step of the way to receive any kind of acknowledgement from the PCHR, and by extension, the City of Philadelphia, that we are a community with legitimate problems and concerns.”

Mary Cousar didn't like the report either:

“I know that they (PCHR) know better than some of the stuff that's in there…They have a history of producing bad reports. Part of it is that it's a city agency. The Director is appointed by the Mayor. They have to be careful with what they come out with.”

AAU complained that the report manipulated statistics to downplay the incidence of anti-Asian harassment and violence; that the report misrepresents the history of anti-Asian discrimination and violence; and that blame for hostilities was placed on individual ignorance rather than on institutions. “Indeed, every single city agency and department appears to be immune from criticism in this report”, said the AAU statement.

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4. THE MEDIA

A popular radio talk show host - Georgie Woods of WDAS, who is black - created an uproar in 1986 by making remarks over the air which were interpreted to be anti-Asian. Common Pleas Judge Ida Chen, then an attorney and a Human Relations Commissioner, was one of those who attended a meeting with Woods and others to try and resolve tensions surrounding the episode. As Judge Chen recalls it, a reporter zeroed in on her after the meeting and asked: “As the Asian Commissioner, isn't it true that the Asian community is currently having problems with the black community?” As Commissioner Chen readied a response, to her side came Mr. Cody Anderson, the WDAS General Manager. “Watch this, Miss Chen”. Mr. Anderson said. “In one quick second, if you fall for this, they will be able to make the gap between people that much wider. Please be careful.” Commissioner Chen did take his advice, and answered cautiously. “I always remember that”, she said recently. “It made me aware of just how easy it is for the media to exploit these incidents.”

Fanning the flames

Although there are a few reporters who have earned reputations for fairness over the years, community leaders and others who deal with racial tensions in the city are generally extremely wary of media portrayals of racially charged incidents. Mary Cousar of the Anti-Drug/Anti-Violence Network, like many others, believes that the media tend to play up the racial element:

“They like to build incidents up into a good guy, bad guy situation. …If whites are the perpetrators, it's not hyped as much. If blacks are the perpetrators, they are vicious criminals. And when it comes to incidents between blacks and Asians, even the minor stuff is news.”

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Nathalie Emam of Community Legal Services:

“Incidents involving Southeast Asians are much more likely to come to light and be publicized if the perpetrator is Asian. If the victim is Asian, the community probably won't hear about it.”

Emam is troubled that Southeast Asians seem to be “always portrayed in connection with some problem…They are never portrayed just as neighbors. It's always a negative portrayal.”

Several Southeast Asian representatives, some of whom were once open with the media, said that they now prefer to avoid speaking with reporters if possible. Initially unfamiliar with the American media's tendency to exploit tensions and sensationalize news, these individuals felt as if they had been burned by their earlier efforts to be forthcoming.

An exception

One reporter who has gained respect for his reporting on race relations is Murray Dubin of the Philadelphia Inquirer. Berit Lakey, formerly of the Fellowship Commission, calls Dubin's reporting a blessing. “Here is someone who has taken it on himself to report what is happening in the Asian community, and not only if something negative occurs”. Lakey says. Jack Shepherd of the PCHR also commends Dubin, saying that he presents the news “with considerable accuracy and depth. He is attuned to the sensitivities involved and avoids statements that might make things worse”. Mary Cousar appreciates Dubin's sense of responsibility, citing his reporting of a very tense situation at Northeast Catholic High School in which “an irresponsible reporter could have brought the city to a riot”.

Print vs. electronic media

Rocko Holloway and Jack Shepherd, Supervisors at the PCHR, both like to distinguish between print and electronic media. “The print media are relatively responsible”. Shepherd says. “You've really got to dig in…A guy like Murray Dubin digs in very well, and he's sensitive…On the other hand, I've never seen anything that remotely resembled that on TV…We've seen TV crews, for example, practically panting and salivating over a report of a cross-burning…”.

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Holloway, who has looked at newspaper coverage of racial tensions elsewhere in the state, says that “Philadelphia newspapers are better than most…Statewide, Philadelphia and Harrisburg have the fairest coverage…TV, on the other hand, is bad news when it comes to these incidents…They create events.” Shepherd recalls that “We even had an incident where an event that was shown on TV was entirely created by television.” Holloway speaks of the magnifying effect of TV reporting:

“Generally, if it's something positive, TV will make it better. If it's negative, TV will tend to make it worse…Television highlights whatever is happening.”

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5. V. ASIAN ORGANIZATIONS AND OTHERS

Asian organizations

The Southeast Asian refugee community has a number of recognized leaders, but few individuals who speak out publicly about anti-Asian hostility or other controversial issues. Southeast Asians, the majority of whom have been in the country less than ten years, lack the large pool of educated and westernized activists that other Asian groups have working on their behalf.

The Mutual Assistance Associations (MAAs) are perhaps the most widely acknowledged representatives of the five main Southeast Asian ethnic groups, but the MAAs have a reputation for being very cautious and reserved, preferring to stay out of the public eye and shunning activist politics. The MAAs are generally headed by older traditionalists, and their conservatism has alienated many younger Southeast Asians. Younger Southeast Asians, particularly those in the schools, face enormous cultural pressures - pressures to Americanize, and to respond forcefully to intimidation, for example - which they feel their parents are not fully aware of or sympathetic to. The MAAs are also chronically short of funds - two of the five MAAs now have no full-time staff - and they often simply don't have the personnel to intervene effectively in situations of crisis or community need.

SEAMAAC (Southeast Asian Mutual Assistance Associations Coalition) is the umbrella agency which represents the five MAAs. While it once had a reputation for activist leadership, it has in recent years drifted increasingly away from activism and advocacy and toward non-controversial and politically neutral social service provision through contracts and grants it has received from the School District, Department of Public Welfare, foundations, and others.

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One of the more outspoken and effective Asian organizations in responding to matters of anti-Asian harassment and violence is Asian Americans United (AAU). Though its leadership consists mostly of young Asian activists from the more established Asian groups and not the refugee community, it has developed strong links with Southeast Asian youth, including politicized and activist high school and college students as well as some of the less intellectually inclined but street-wise elements.

Many Southeast Asians, as well as non-Southeast Asians who have worked with the refugee community, have expressed frustration that, in cases when racial attacks have occurred or in other cases when the community needs a spokesperson, there sometimes is a lack of outspoken leadership. There are some cultural tendencies at work. Conflict avoidance is traditonally valued by Southeast Asian cultures as an effective approach to situations of hostility or disagreement. Another explanation, offered by SEAMAAC's Dan Sengsourysack and others, is that the city's refugee population is predominately made up of less skilled, less educated persons who lack the confidence or knowledge of the system to advocate for the community. Particularly for recent arrivals or poorer, less educated refugees who lack the confidence or English skills to assert themselves in the new culture, there is great reluctance to speak out publicly against the status quo or challenge the abuses they encounter. Many refugees still feel very much as if they are in a foreign country, almost as if they do not have a right to complain or be critical. Also, community service has not traditionally been an occupation of choice for upwardly mobile Asians. Those with skills and education tend to seek professions with better pay and more security, and they are likely to move out of the city or at least out of the more troubled areas.

The city does have an officially-designated liaison to the Asian community in the form of the Mayor's Commission on Asian American Affairs. Headed by Tsiwen Law, a Chinese American attorney with a reputation for being a strong advocate, the thirteen member Commission includes three Southeast Asians. Though lacking any formal authority of its own, the group is a forum through which Asian concerns are directed to the Mayor and, in some cases, presented to the public. Previously known as the Mayor's Asian American Advisory Board, it was elevated to commission status by executive order on July 12 of this year. Its role remains the same,

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but as a commission it remains in place from one mayoral administration to the next, unless disbanded by another executive order.

Community organizations

Perhaps the best known, and one of the most effective, community organizations which has been involved in mediating neighborhood tensions is the Philadelphia Anti-Drug/Anti-Violence Network. Formerly known as the Crisis Intervention Network (CIN), this group, which is now overseen by the Urban Coalition, is highly regarded for its effective interventions in numerous inter-group conflicts. Several people interviewed praised the responsiveness of the group and their readiness to enter directly into troublesome situations. One staff member, Mary Cousar, was one of the first in the city to address tensions between Southeast Asian refugees and long-time residents of the city. Cousar, whose family was among the first African Americans to move into the Logan section twenty years ago, has been particularly active in working to resolve differences between the black and Asian populations in that area.

The Fellowship Commission has a long history of working to promote harmony among groups in the city. Established in 1941, they were instrumental in creating what is now the Commission on Human Relations, and in setting up the Southeast Asian MAA Coalition in the early 1980s. The Fellowship Commission rarely is directly involved in mediating neighborhood conflicts, however. Their focus is on larger policy issues. Most recently, they were the impetus behind the formation of the Coalition for Inter-Group Harmony, an effort to coordinate the efforts of the many activists and organizations working toward a common goal of racial and ethnic unity in the city.

[There are many other Asian and non-Asian organizations which mediate tensions or otherwise work to improve the racial climate of the city who are worthy of note but are not mentioned here.]

City administration

Perhaps it is because elected leaders tend to respond to the force of numbers that Philadelphia has earned a reputation as a city which in many ways appears to ignore or neglect its Asian residents. (Asians are an

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estimated 3 to 5 percent of the city's population.) The Mayor's office and the city administration has been criticized by Asian leaders for failing to recognize and address the problems of Asians, not the least of which is the problem of racially-motived harassment and violence. Also, Asians (especially Southeast Asians) are under-represented in a whole range of key city agencies, including the School District, the Housing Authority, Licenses and Inspection (which hundreds of Asian vendors and small businesses have to communicate with daily), the Police Department, the District Attorney's Victim Services Unit, and others.

4. THE FUTURE

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1. I. A CIRCLE OF VIOLENCE

Occasionally we are now beginning to see Southeast Asian youths perpetrating acts of hostility upon non-Asian residents of the city-sometimes innocent bystanders, targeted by association based on their race or skin color.

On May 23, a Cambodian woman was struck and robbed by at least one black youth in the area of 52nd and Walnut streets in West Philadelphia. In response, the woman's son mobilized a group of Cambodian and Lao friends, youths who regularly gather in the area of 45th St. between Chestnut and Walnut, and wreaked their revenge upon an innocent black youth. They beat him up at the corner of 45th and Sansom streets as he returned home from school. Neighbors said that he was not a troublemaker, living with his aunt just a few doors down from the spot where he was attacked. He wasn't beaten for anything he had done. He was beaten because he is black.

Thus the circle of violence is perpetuated. One wonders what the historical progression leading to this particular incident was. White to black to Asian to black? Or did it follow another path? And what innocent person might later pay the price for this act?

The increasing tendency of Southeast Asian youth to fight back when attacked was discussed earlier. (Part Two, “Southeast Asian Responses”) But there is a big difference between fighting back against an aggressor and retaliating randomly against innocents based on their race. Incidents such as the assault at 45th and Sansom are bound to produce a new group of people with resentments, perhaps people who previously were sympathetic to the abuses suffered by Southeast Asians. It's a painful phenomenon for some older community residents to watch, because they know the history and they know the implications of these acts. Kahlil is an African American fish store owner who once lived in Thailand, speaks Laotian, and serves as something of a bridge between the Southeast Asian and black residents in his neighborhood. Two days afterward, he reflected on the May 23rd

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incident, which took place just a half block from his store. “It's going to go around again”. he said.

On a Friday afternoon in June, Dan Sengsourysack of the Southeast Asian Coalition spoke to a visitor while standing on 45th St. not far from where about fifteen Cambodian and Lao youths were gathering at their regular spot:

“A lot of these kids have had a lot experience being picked on and beaten up, especially in school. Being a part of these groups gives them a sense of power that they never had before…A lot of them feel like they are getting revenge for things that were done to them earlier.”

A Vietnamese youth, quoted in the Oakland Tribune, gave similar reasons for his gang membership:

“Society treated us badly. Blacks, whites, Mexicans - they jump on us, they pick on us, they hit us. School people ignore this. They pretend they don't see it. So we get together. We stick up for ourselves.”

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2. TRENDS

“Things are getting better. People understand us better. We understand them better. That's the key, isn't it?”

- Kau Our, Cambodian Association President and PCHR Field Rep.

“I don't see any improvement, really…City officials are focusing on drugs and homelessness, but they aren't paying much attention to race relations. They ignore it. Maybe they don't want to create a bad image.”

- Dan Sengsourysack, Southeast Asian MAA Coalition

Most Southeast Asian residents say they feel more at home in the city now than they did when they first arrived. They are more of an established presence here now. There is a greater sense of security that comes with increased numbers, less of a sense of isolation. There are Cambodian, Laotian, and Vietnamese as well as Chinese-owned businesses. English proficiency is growing. There are support networks for new arrivals which did not exist for many who came earlier.

Debbie Wei of Asian Americans United has observed the changes over the last ten years or so:

“Now there is a sense that they are here to stay. They are more of a fixture. There is some respect for them in this, a sense that `OK,you're here to stay.' The Southeast Asians now have more of a feeling of settling in. There are more services. More Asian businesses. When they first arrived there was none of this. They really had a sense of being complete foreigners here.”

Hope for the youngest

Many Southeast Asian parents, who themselves have had a difficult adjustment period and have been distressed at the problems encountered

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by their teenagers, have higher hopes for the younger children who are following them. My-Nhat Tran of the PCHR calls the current group of teenagers and young adults a “transition group”, because they lost years of education under the post-1975 communist regimes and had their lives further disrupted by long waits in refugee camps. Tran believes that the younger ones, who entered school here at an early age and don't have to play catch up, are going to be better off. The easier adaptation of these younger children may result in smoother relations with other groups as well as better academic success. Heather Peters, in her 1988 study of Southeast Asian Youth in Philadelphia writes.

“The exclusivity of ethnic identity is beginning to break down among the younger children (ages 7-10), which is natural. These children speak good English and are acculturating in ways which go much deeper than their older siblings. These children form much wider circles of friends.”

A danger is that the large poor and uneducated segment of the Southeast Asian population is showing few signs of the upward mobility exhibited by other Asian immigrant groups. With the drop-out rate for Cambodian and Lao youth in the city exceeding 40% (it's much lower for Vietnamese) and delinquency on the rise, the fear is that the stage is being set for a kind of permanent Southeast Asian underclass.

Trends in racial violence

Because the statistics are so inadequate - reflecting such a small portion of actual incidents - it's impossible to say with any certainty whether the level of hostility toward Southeast Asians in the city is rising or falling. Mary Cousar states that “It's getting better as far as the dumb stuff goes…there are less random incidents”. But she cites ongoing tensions in the Logan section between Asian youths (who gather in the vicinity of video arcades and other Asian businesses) and black youths in the area. It's the interactions between Southeast Asian and non-Asian youth that are the greatest cause for concern. Joe Russo of South Philadelphians United said that his neighborhood (South 7th St. area) has seemed quieter this year than it did between 1987 and 1989, when a string of serious incidents occurred there. But he is greatly concerned about the potential for future violence among youth in the area:

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“Generally I'm accused of being an outrageous optimist, but we are starting to get a whole bunch of interactions between negative young Asians and negative young Americans, and with that is going to come many, many problems.”

Fred Silberman, whose territory as a Community Relations Officer for the 4th District includes Russo's neighborhood, is perhaps more optimistic but is also concerned about the trends among Southeast Asian youth:

“The coming years are going to bring a mixed blessing. The Southeast Asian kids are becoming Americanized very fast. They are learning how to get along here, but they are taking on a lot of negative attitudes too.”

Lt. Smith of the Conflict Prevention and Resolution Unit observes that things have calmed down somewhat for Southeast Asians in West Philadelphia. The tension between Southeast Asians and black residents is still very evident, but residents say that things are better now than they were in the early 1980s, when violence drove out virtually the entire Hmong population as well as some other Asians.

Nathalie Emam of Community Legal Services says she thinks that hostility toward Southeast Asians is worse now than it was ten years ago. Phoua Xiong doesn't think things have improved either. “I don't see much changing”, she said. “But people might be finding new ways to deal with it”. My-Nhat Tran of the PCHR said “We have been here long enough now to have experience (with other groups). People know each other better now.” Sayhong, a Cambodian-born Bilingual Counselling Assistant at Morrison Elementary School in North Philadelphia, thinks things are getting better. “People are more settled now”, she said. “The English is better. That makes things easier.”

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3. III. CONCLUDING NOTES: THOUGHTS ABOUT SOLUTIONS

Neighborhood residents, on the one hand, and institutions on the other, each have responsibilities for healing racial divisions and ending the kinds of hostilities that have been described. There are those (perhaps most commonly of the political left) who believe that the root causes of these problems are institutional, as if the State were some kind of a parent to be blamed for our failures and individuals aren't to be held responsible for their actions. And there are others (most commonly on the right of the political spectrum) who seem to believe that institutions need not participate in efforts to heal racial divisions and other social ills, as if personal effort without corresponding institutional support were enough. Change results from action at the personal level coupled with institutional action. One doesn't succeed without the other.

A common stake

“To deal with these problems just in terms of Asians is not a solution. The problems Asians are encountering reflect the way the whole system works…Sure, we need more multi-cultural sensitivity taught in the schools, but not just about Asians. It needs to be for everyone. A lot of Asians know almost nothing about African American culture, for example. You can't just take a piece of it and say, we're going to deal with this piece. You've got to look at it as a whole.”

- Debbie Wei, University City H.S. Teacher, AAU President

There is no point in looking at the problems of Southeast Asians in isolation. Everyone in the city - all groups - has a common interest in making Philadelphia's neighborhoods safe and welcoming places. Reducing tension and promoting good relations is not a win-lose proposition. Solutions applied toward Southeast Asians are in effect solutions applied toward the improvement of intergroup relations overall.

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Speaking out

“I really think that if people in power did not tolerate these things, not as much violence would occur.”

- Phoua Xiong, former Logan resident and Girls High graduate

Anti-Asian harassment and violence (along with all racially-motivated hostility) needs to be explicitly and publicly rejected. Speaking out against these acts is needed at all levels - from the top (the Mayor's office, the PCHR, School District officials, City Council members) and from the bottom (neighbors, schoolmates, on the street). Experience has shown us often how one strong voice, especially when it symbolizes what is unspoken but widely felt, can have more of an effect than any number of expensive programs. People at the top have a special obligation to speak out, because their silence implies that the activities are excusable or to be condoned.

Protection

“The city should better protect refugees…They should enforce the laws to protect refugees.”

- Nathalie Emam, Community Legal Services

Protection of individuals who are subject to harassment or violence is an immediate and critical necessity in a number of neighborhoods. The threat of violence for many Southeast Asians is such that any talk of long-term work on deeper, underlying issues seems almost irrelevant to them without first addressing the basic issue of protection. It's clear that many Southeast Asians are not adequately protected by the city's police and judicial system and that many Southeast Asian students are not adequately protected from harassment and violence in the public schools.

Asian and bilingual personnel

The shortage of Southeast Asian and bilingual personnel, which is critical in nearly every key city agency, denies the Southeast Asian community proper access to a whole range of city services and cuts them off from participating in many aspects of the life of the city. The city needs to improve its communication with the Southeast Asian community, and this means more bilingual staff in the Police Department, School District, the District Attorney's Victim Services Unit, and elsewhere. Those few Southeast Asians who now serve with city agencies, with one or two exceptions, are

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not in upper-level or policy-making positions. There are a number of agencies with so obvious a need in critical areas (The Police Department has no SEA among its more than 6,000 regular officers; The School District has no Cambodian, Lao, or Hmong teachers; the Victim Services Unit has no Asian staff) that it is hard to imagine justification for further delay in recruitment and hiring. Washington D.C. has a full-time liaison to the Asian community working out of the Mayor's office. Seattle has roving bilingual staff who assist with translation in the provision of city services, in hospitals, etc. Philadelphia has neither of these and, in general, lags behind other cities in meeting its obligations to its Southeast Asian residents.

City agencies

(A few brief things can be said here about the obligations of the three agencies discussed in depth earlier in this report - the School District, the Commission on Human Relations, and the Police Department. This is not to imply that agencies not mentioned need not take steps of their own.)

The Commission on Human Relations owes it to the city to project more of a public voice in opposition to acts against the Asian and Southeast Asian communities. The agency needs to break out of its political preoccupations - its concern with who it will or will not offend - and be specific in its criticisms. This necessarily means that it must be prepared to come into conflict with other city agencies. The PCHR would benefit from being freed from political constraints, and given more independence from the Mayor's office. One way to achieve this would be to create a fixed term for the Executive Director, like that of the School District Superintendent, rather than have the agency's head serve simply at the pleasure of the Mayor, as is now the case.

The Police Department would do well to be more conscious of the fact that their responsibility to support and protect victims and potential victims of crime is just as great toward groups who do not have the strength of numbers, political clout, or powerful public defenders, as it is toward others in the city. Their responsibility to the Southeast Asian community, in other words, is just as great as it is toward the more established groups in the city. On too many occasions involving Southeast Asians, as in the case of Heng Lim and in the aftermath of the October, 1988 South 7th St. shooting, local police units, either because they reflect the outlooks of the communities they are based in or because they are vulnerable to community pressure,

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appear to have been less than evenhanded in the conduct of their investigations.

The School District, to put it simply, needs to stop trying to hide the reality of racial conflict in the schools and put the highest priority on healing racial divisions. This would require that they acknowledge and reject the abuses that are perpetrated in the schools, initiate a dialogue about these problems, provide more support and protection for victims, take stronger action against perpetrators, and work with agencies (like PCHR, CPR, and PAAN) that are willing and able to help.

Education

“There needs to be a conscious decision made from the top down that one of the main goals of education is to build tolerance…We need to work across the board. We need to do more with staff, in recruitment, development, in training…There needs to be more initiative on the part of the city and the School District. We are always responding after the fact, as a result of being pushed. Action always seems to follow a lawsuit or public outcry of some kind.”

- Debbie Wei, University City H.S. and Asian Americans United

“Someone needs to develop a plan to teach, and share with each community, lessons about the others.”

- Joe Russo, South Philadelphians United

“Schools, politicians, church agencies…need to do more to teach people about the different cultures. There needs to be more exploring of cultural differences. We need workshops in schools and communities. We need to bring people together more. The schools are the key.”

- Dan Sengsourysack, Southeast Asian MAA Coalition

“We should be getting kids from different groups to talk together, work together, learn more about each other's cultures.”

- Kahlil, West Philadelphia storeowner

Education is not just the responsibility of the schools, but the schools have got to take the lead in promoting an awareness and acceptance of the multi-cultural reality of the city. The schools ought to be teaching tolerance, and putting a priority on it. An occasional workshop or intercultural event

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doesn't go far enough in developing an awareness and appreciation of other cultures. An understanding of these things, as advocates within the school system itself have pointed out, must be integrated into the curriculum itself.

Focus on youth

“Efforts to reach the youth are going to make the difference in terms of whether we succeed in reducing inter-group tensions.”

- Dee Lewis, PCHR Field Representative

Perhaps less resources are directed toward youth because as a group they have little power or influence. They lack advocates. They don't have a public voice. But it is among youth that many of the worst conflicts occur. The young are good barometers of community relations. Often they reflect underlying conflict which is not as visible among adults. Adults are not always as expressive of what they are feeling. Perhaps they are better at disguising their prejudices. Perhaps kids are more honest. Adults often are able to insulate themselves from interaction with other groups. Youth can't easily do this, expecially those in school. Often, the younger generation carries with them the projected prejudices of their parents.

Some good work has been done to improve relations between Asian businesses and their non-Asian neighbors (particularly in black communities). If the same kinds of efforts could be made to improve relations between Asian and non-Asian youth, it is likely that we would see some good results. Few resources are now directed toward work with Southeast Asian youth, but if there were more at this early stage, the future payoff might be great.

Adult responsibility

The adult communities ought to be sending their youth a clear message: `racial harassment and violence are not OK.' At present, the behavior is not only tolerated in many neighborhoods; it is implicitly encouraged by some parents and other members of the adult population. Many youths, including Southeast Asians, report parental pressures against social interaction with other groups. Parents - Asian and non-Asian - could do a great service by taking care not to teach separation and distrust. Southeast Asian parents would do well to play a greater role in the lives of their rapidly Americanizing children, particularly in their education. (And they will

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depend on the schools to support them in this by having, for example, adequate staff working as Bilingual Community Coordinators and in other positions.) Too many Southeast Asian parents have adopted a non-involvement strategy to cope with the mainstream culture, taking refuge by insulating themselves, but this has a negative effect on their kids, who have to be involved (in school, for example) and need the support of their parents.

Listening

“We ought to be giving legitimate leaders the chance to emerge as leaders…Let them determine what their communities really need, then support them.”

- Rocko Holloway, PCHR Supervisor

“The city should do more listening to the people that are out there working on these things.”

- Mary Cousar, Phila. Anti-Drug/Anti-Violence Network

“You've got to be out there face-to-face with people on the street, listening to people and talking with them.”

- Fred Silberman, Community Relations Officer, South Phila.

The city would do well to listen and learn from the experiences of neighborhood residents, human relations professionals, community leaders, and others who have worked with these problems. There is a wealth of insight and expertise in the neighborhoods and among those who work closely with them. And some tried and tested strategies have evolved for dealing with inter-group conflict: “Create a dialogue; deal with the common issues; involve the leadership of both sides; get out and listen; give people a chance to vent; avoid win-lose propositions; focus on the common stake”.

Reaching out

“One week after I moved into my home, I invited all my neighbors in. I said to them: `When I was in Vietnam, I had a big family, but now that I am here I no longer have a big family, so I would like to treat you all like my family'…And they give back to me. They treat me like a brother.”

- Cuong Nhu Pham, Vietnamese Association and Southeast Asian MAA Coalition

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To the degree that Southeast Asians and their neighbors reach out and communicate with each other, the cycle of mistrust, fear, hostility, and violence is broken. It would be a mistake to assume that all responsibility for reducing tensions lies with long-term residents. The cultural ignorances are two-way. Southeast Asians can be as insular or more so than their non-Asian neighbors - an understandable defense in an alien and often hostile environment. But the obligation of Southeast Asians to seek to understand and relate to cultures alien to them - those of their neighbors - is as much an issue as are the obligations of longtime residents. Obviously there is never any justification for acts of harassment or violence, and for Southeast Asians to reach out they need to feel protected, but a peaceful long-term resolution of the current conflicts depends on Southeast Asians meeting their neighbors halfway. Cuong Nhu Pham believes that he enjoys good relations with his neighbors in part because he has extended himself to them. “You can't always blame things on your neighbors”. Pham says. “It depends on you, not the neighborhood…It's not all the other side…This is a mistake…It depends on you, too.”

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SELECTED BIBLIOGRAPHY

Asian Americans United, Untitled analysis of Race Relations in Philadelphia: A 1989 Perspective - A 1990 Opportunity, PCHR. Philadelphia: AAU, 1990.

Peters, Heather A. A Study of Southeast Asian Youth in Philadelphia: A Final Report. Washington D.C.: U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, Family Support Administration, office of Refugee Resettlement, 1988.

Philadelphia Commission of Human Relations. Asians and their Neighbors: A Public Investigatory Hearing. Philadelphia: PCHR, 1985.

—. The State of Intergroup Harmony - 1988. Philadelphia: PCHR, 1988.

Philadelphia Commission on Human Relations and Institute for Public Policy Studies, Temple University. Race Relations in Philadelphia: A 1989 Perspective - A 1990 Opportunity. Philadelphia: PCHR, 1990.

U.S. Commission on Civil Rights. Recent Activities Against Citizens and Residents of Asian Descent. Clearinghouse Publication No. 88. Washington D.C.: GPO, 1986.

About this text
Courtesy of Special Collections and Archives. The UC Irvine Libraries, Main Library 5th Floor, PO Box 19557, Irvine, CA 92623-9557; https://special.lib.uci.edu
http://content.cdlib.org/view?docId=hb596nb2x7&brand=oac4
Title: Who killed Heng Lim? : the Southeast Asian experience of racial harassment and violence in Philadelphia
By:  Thayer, Robert P, Author, Southeast Asian Mutual Assistance Associations Coalition, Author, Asian Americans United, Author
Date: 1990
Contributing Institution: Special Collections and Archives. The UC Irvine Libraries, Main Library 5th Floor, PO Box 19557, Irvine, CA 92623-9557; https://special.lib.uci.edu
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