Driving the news: Robert Aaron Long, a 21-year-old white man, was charged with murder this week after confessing that he killed eight people in shootings at three spas in the Atlanta area.
- Local law enforcement says it is still too early to call the shootings a hate crime. Long told investigators that he had a sex addiction and he saw the spas as a "temptation he wanted to eliminate."
The big picture: TheFBI describes federal hate crimes as a "criminal offense against a person or property motivated in whole or in part by an offender’s bias against a race, religion, disability, sexual orientation, ethnicity, gender, or gender identity."
- Attacks on against Asians and Asian Americans have been on the rise, according to the Center for the Study of Hate and Extremism, noting anti-Asian hate crimes rose 149% last year. Stop AAPI Hate received nearly 3,800 self-reported incidents from March 19 last year to Feb. 2.
- But, but, but: "Many incidents have either not led to arrests or have not been charged as hate crimes, making it difficult to capture with reliable data the extent to which Asian-Americans are being targeted," the Times writes.
- Experts told the Times it is difficult to prosecute attacks against the Asian American and Pacific Islander (AAPI) community because there's no universal anti-Asian symbol that clearly demonstrates a racist motive — such as a noose or a swastika.
- "Proving a hate crime isn’t just about the identity of the victims but also the suspect’s motives and state of mind — specifically, whether an accused assailant targeted people because of their race and gender or other characteristics covered by state and federal hate-crime statutes," the Wall Street Journal writes.
What they're saying: David Barkley, senior Southeast counsel for the Anti-Defamation League, told AJC that Georgia's hate crime law adopted by state lawmakers last year protects categories including race, gender, religion and national origin.
- Since Long said his “sex addiction” provoked the attacks, and if it’s proven that he specifically targeted women, that would constitute a hate crime under the gender provision, according to Barkley.
Go deeper: Atlanta shooting tests Georgia's new hate crime law
