An Asian Woman Was Kicked and Stomped in Broad Daylight and No One Did Anything

A 65-year-old woman in New York City was hospitalized Monday after being repeatedly kicked by a man on the street, the latest in a series of brutal attacks against Asian-Americans in the COVID-19 era.

The New York Police Department released a graphic video of the attack, taken from security footage from a luxury apartment building at 360 West 43 St. in midtown Manhattan, where the beating took place shortly before noon Monday. 

The video shows the woman walking on the sidewalk, when a man comes into the frame from the other side and kicks her to the ground. He then continues to brutally kick her head and stomach as she lays on the ground. The man then walks away. 

Multiple people are shown in the video watching the attack and doing nothing, including multiple hotel workers. One of the workers eventually closes the door as the woman continues to struggle to get up. 

The NYPD is investigating the Monday attack as a hate crime, and said the woman’s attacker “made anti-Asian statements” to the woman he attacked. 

The Brodsky Organization, the property management company for the luxury apartment building in Midtown, suspended the hotel workers “pending an investigation in conduction with their union,” and said in a statement that the company “condemns all forms of discrimination, racism, xenophobia and violence against the Asian American community.” 

The incident came on the heels of another attack being investigated by the NYPD’s Hate Crimes Unit, in which an Asian man was brutally beaten in a subway car and then choked until he became unconscious. The video was posted to TikTok before being shared on Twitter, where it’s been viewed nearly three million times as of Tuesday morning. 

The NYPD did not immediately respond to requests for comment seeking more details on either attack.

The U.S. and Canada have both seen a surge in anti-Asian abuse and harassment since the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic. There were thousands of  “hate incidents” in the U.S. as of March 16, according to the group Stop AAPI Hate, with more than 10 percent of those incidents involving physical violence. But just this month, there have been more incidents of violence against Asian-Americans, including two elderly people attacked in San Francisco, a Nepalese Uber driver assaulted and coughed on by his passengers, and the killing of eight people, including six Asian women, in a series of shootings targeting massage parlors in Atlanta. 

Following the shootings in Georgia, the NYPD’s Counterterrorism Bureau said it would “be deploying assets to our great Asian communities across the city out of an abundance of caution.” 

“Not enough has been done to protect Asian Americans from heightened levels of hate, discrimination and violence,” Stop AAPI Hate said in a press release after the Atlanta shootings. “Concrete action must be taken now. Anything else is unacceptable.”