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On a February evening, a 50-year-old Asian woman was waiting in line at a bakery in Queens, New York, when a man threw a spoonful at her and then pushed her so violently that she was 10 points on the head. In a surveillance video, a crowd sees a man attacking a woman, doing nothing when he hits her, and then walks away.
“When I saw that, I thought, ‘That could be my mother. That could be my grandmother. It could be someone I knew,'” says Teresa Ting, a Flushing neighbor in the neighborhood where the attack took place.
The attack in Queens was one of the attacks on vulnerable or elderly Asian-Americans caught in viral videos in recent months. The massive March shooting of eight friends in Atlanta, six of whom were Asian-Americans, was a rupture.
Surprised, Ting turned to Instagram Stories, the app’s fleeting video or photo collections. He proposed gathering a bunch of neighborhood activists on Flushing Main Street in groups of four to be vigilant in the face of riots or violence. A few days later, he assembled a group of 100 volunteers who offered strategies trained in peaceful interventions, strategies to reduce situations of violence, patrolled Main Street on Saturdays and Sundays for three hours and focused on possible hate crimes.
“I started with an Instagram story and shared my frustration when I wanted to give it an extra set of eyes and ears, and here we are,” says Ting.
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