Late-night assault on Tacoma-Pierce public health chief should shake us up a little
Hate in America today has so many subsets, hashtags and niche markets —fueling attacks against different groups based on color, creed, career or other characteristics — that it’s hard to believe in random acts of violence anymore. Even when circumstances strongly suggest it.
Consider last week’s assault on Dr. Anthony Chen.
The Tacoma-Pierce County Health Department director was out for a walk on the Chihuly Bridge of Glass around 1:40 a.m. May 19, according to a police report. Chen later said he “nicely” confronted a young man he thought was damaging public property with BMX bike tricks. The man knocked down and punched Chen, injuring him badly enough that Chen later drove himself to a hospital.
This assault would seem to be a fairly clear case of wrong place, wrong time, wrong person to approach in a gesture of civic responsibility.
Then again, Chen identifies with two distinct groups that each has endured hostile outbursts during the past year of COVID-19 tension: Asian Americans and public health officials.
TPCHD’s 12-year director expressed some ambivalence about whether either of those associations could’ve been a factor in last week’s assault.
“I do not think so,” he wrote in a very personal blog post about the pandemic of American violence, “but the fact that people have to ask is a sad commentary for our times.”
It sure is.
Fortunately, the wave of violence against Asian Americans, which swelled after former President Trump recklessly popularized the term “China virus,” has been roundly condemned. It’s become a law enforcement focus for everyone from the Tacoma Police Department to the US attorney general.
Congress this month overwhelmingly adopted bipartisan legislation to improve the review, reporting and public outreach surrounding anti-Asian hate crimes.
Cracking down on threats against public health officials is a stickier wicket. They aren’t a protected class under harassment and discrimination laws. They don’t have impassioned defenders taking to the streets on their behalf.
But it remains a big area of concern for public health leaders such as Dr. John Wiesman, Washington state’s Department of Health secretary for the first 10 months of the pandemic.
Wiesman told us how colleagues around the US have received threatening phone, email and social media threats against themselves and family members over controversial health orders, quarantine, masking and vaccination guidelines.
In Okanogan County, community health director Lauri Jones was interviewed by national reporters last summer when she spoke of being the target of ongoing contempt. After a barrage of Facebook comments, she installed surveillance cameras and filed a police report.
Who can blame her for being cautious? Shots were fired into the home of Ohio’s assistant state health director in January.
“It’s really unconscionable and not something that public health officials have had to deal with before at this level,” Wiesman told us Monday from his new home near the University of North Carolina, where he’s about to start teaching. “They’re doing their best to describe the science as they know it at the time.”
Wiesman calls it a sign of growing divisiveness in our country, made worse when politicians undermine their own public health professionals. We’d be remiss not to note where it started: at the top, as Trump openly showed disdain for the country’s leading infectious disease expert, Dr. Anthony Fauci.
Not surprisingly, as of last summer at least 27 public health officers in 13 states had resigned or been fired since the outset of the pandemic, according to a study in the Journal of the American Medical Association.
As for Chen, he faced ill will long before winding up in the emergency room last week. The animosity grew intense when he told Pierce County school districts they shouldn’t reopen for in-person learning last fall. “I get hate mail. And I get trolled on social media,” he told TNT reporters in August. “It’s unpleasant. But at the same time, I actually get more positive comments.”
Consistent with his optimistic outlook,, Chen doubts he was roughed up because of his race or high-profile public job. That it happened during a middle-of-the-night encounter initiated by Chen would seem to support this conclusion.
Still, there’s a lesson here for Washingtonians who suspect few violent acts these days are entirely random: We must rediscover the tolerance, decency and respect for authority that started slipping away even before COVID.
News Tribune editorials reflect the views of our Editorial Board and are written by opinion editor Matt Misterek. Other board members are: Stephanie Pedersen, News Tribune president and editor; Matt Driscoll, local columnist; and Jim Walton, community representative. The Editorial Board operates independently from the newsroom and does not influence the work of news reporting and editing staffs. For questions about the board or our editorials, email matt.misterek@thenewstribune.com
This story was originally published May 25, 2021 at 10:40 AM.