Some lawmakers fight to label Georgia killings as hate crimes

ATLANTA • A year ago, Georgia was one of four US states that had no hate crime legislation.

But the deadly rampage last week that left eight people dead, six of them women of Asian descent, is now providing a test of a law passed last year - and a window into the way that the state's increasingly diverse electorate has altered its political and cultural chemistry.

Georgia, after earlier false starts, passed its legislation following the shooting death of young black man Ahmaud Arbery.

He was stopped, detained and then shot to death by white residents in a south Georgia suburban neighbourhood.

Last week's shootings, in which Robert Aaron Long, 21, has been charged with eight counts of murder, are providing a major stress test for when the legislation can be applied, what it can achieve and how it plays into the state's increasingly polarised politics.

Political leaders, civil rights activists as well as national and local elected officials have condemned the killings at three spas as an act of bigoted terror, drawing a link between the majority-Asian victims and a recent surge in hate crimes against Asian and Pacific Islander Americans.

Law enforcement officials and some legal figures have shied away from labelling the killings a hate crime. Prosecutors in two counties are still weighing whether to invoke the hate crime law.

But that has not stopped the shootings from resonating as bias crimes for many in Georgia, a state that has been at the forefront of the demographic changes coursing through the South.

In recent years, Georgia has been a microcosm of the racial divides that have affected the entire United States.

In February last year, the killing of Mr Arbery, 25, ignited a national outcry, particularly after law enforcement officials initially failed to make any arrests following his death.

In the aftermath of last week's killings, the response from law enforcement was criticised once again, after a spokesman for the sheriff's department in suburban Cherokee County, where one of the attacks took place, downplayed the role of anti-Asian racism in the shooting there.

Instead, he attributed the suspect's motivation to sex addiction - the gunman's own characterisation - and the fact that he had been having "a really bad day".

However, political leaders, especially in the state capital Atlanta, have gone much further, characterising the events as domestic terrorism and, at least in part, motivated by a web of racial and misogynistic intolerance.

President Joe Biden and Vice-President Kamala Harris travelled to Georgia last Friday, casting the shootings in the context of broader abuse and intolerance directed at people of Asian descent.

But absent clear evidence of the shooter's intent, there is broad division on whether there are sufficient grounds for adding hate crime charges.

Representative Sam Park, a Democratic member of the Georgia House and the state's only Korean American legislator, has said it is impossible to separate the crime from the anti-Asian bias and violence that has surged over the past year.

But Republican Byung Pak, a Korean American and former US attorney for the Northern District of Georgia, has urged caution before linking the killings to a hate crime.

"Prejudging the case before the completion of the investigation puts pressure on prosecutors to perhaps file charges which may not hold up in court, or raise expectations that cannot be satisfied," he said.

Racist violence has a particular sting in the American South, considering the region's long arc of racial discrimination. Though it is often framed in the familiar context of black-white community relations, a dramatic increase in Asian and Latino populations has also shifted the state's political and cultural composition.

The approval last year by the state's general assembly of the hate crime legislation in the wake of Mr Arbery's death reflected an increasingly purple electorate, as well as pressure from the business community. Three white men have since been charged in connection with his death.

Efforts to pass the hate crime legislation were led by Representative Chuck Efstration, a former assistant district attorney and a Republican who represents an increasingly Democratic district in Gwinnett County.

Mr Efstration said he first pushed the Bill in 2019, when it was adopted by the House but failed to gain support in the Senate. The legislation was finally adopted despite efforts in the Senate to derail it.

But after last week's killings, lawmakers are discussing whether the hate crime legislation needs to be enhanced, and whether it will be applied in this case.

NYTIMES