Introduction
CAAAV March, undated, CAAAV Digital Archives.
Group Commemorating Victims of Anti-Asian Violence, June 23, 1992, CAAAV Digital Archives.
Protest at Manhattan Bridge, April 25, 1995, CAAAV Digital Archives.
The Coalition Against Anti-Asian Violence (CAAAV) was founded on October 18, 1986, by Asian working-class women seeking to mobilize against the rising violence against the Asian community that stemmed from systemic and institutional racism. CAAAV was one of the first organizations to directly address the increase of crimes against immigrant working-class Asians in the New York City area.
During the 1970s and 80s, New York City was plagued by some of the highest crime statistics in the country, the crack epidemic, the AIDS outbreak, and an economic downturn. In 1990, TIME magazine ran a cover story that referred to the city as “the Rotting of Big Apple”; once a beacon for the best and brightest, it had rotted to the core.
The Quality of Life Campaign (QOL) was first introduced during Rudolph Giuliani’s mayoral campaign in 1993, based on cleaning up the streets and taking back public spaces. The concept of Quality of Life was based on the “broken window theory” from the 1982 article “The Police and Neighborhood Safety,” by James Q. Wilson and George L. Kelling, which concluded if a community allows broken windows and other signs of disorder, it will ultimately spiral into a series of uncontrollable crime. The theory links the increase in disorder to communities fleeing because they feel unsafe and cannot use public spaces.
By the 1990s, CAAAV’s leadership began to directly address the growing “connections between violence against Asians and the economic trends of a shifting economy heavily reliant on immigrant labor.”[1]
After Giuliani was sworn in as mayor in 1994, QOL became a city-sanctioned policing policy based on zero tolerance by the New York City Police Department (NYPD), increasing the amount of criminalizable offenses that were categorized as disorderly, like “public urination, open-air drug deals, public consumption of alcohol and threatening behavior by squeegee users.”[2] The NYPD was given almost unlimited power to enforce the zero tolerance policy under the ruse of “law-and-order to attack the most vulnerable targets while covering over underlying socioeconomic problems.”[3] The unchecked power to police those viewed as ‘disorderly’ - poor working-class immigrants and other marginalized groups- for low-level offenses ran rampant during Giuliani’s two terms. Police focused policing on neighborhoods with a “high concentration of “quality of life” crimes on the theory that these petty “criminals” will lead to bigger fish.”[4]
In 1997, the organization renamed themselves as CAAAV: Organizing Asian Communities, widening their mission to advocate for a wider range of issues, including “concentrated urban poverty, displacement and gentrification, detention and deportation, worker exploitation, police violence, and criminalization of youth and workers.[5] CAAAV’s newsletters are covered with incidents of anti-Asian attacks in New York City and across the nation. Victims, often listed by their initials, fill these pages and are those most suspectable to abuse - livery drivers attacked by police, women harassed by neighbors, and deadly shootings at the hands of the police.
For the duration of the Giuliani administration, CAAAV’s leadership fought against anti-Asian attacks that had been labeled as ‘random’ but were extremely targeted as a consequence of unchecked systemic and state-sanctioned racism that manifested itself “in the form of police brutality, environmental racism, labor exploitation compounded by physical and sexual abuse at the worksite, and the deepening of poverty through a domestic legislative war against the urban poor.”[6] This digital exhibition explores some of CAAAV’s important leadership roles in fighting for the quality of life for every New Yorker.
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[1] "Brick by Brick: Celebrating 15 Years of Breaking Down Walls and Building Movement."
[2] Norimitsu Onishi, “Police Announce Crackdown on Quality-of-Life Offenses,” New York Times, March 13, 1994, https://www.nytimes.com/1994/03/13/nyregion/police-announce-crackdown-on-quality-of-life-offenses.html.
[3] The Voice, CAAAV Newsletter, Fall 1998.
[4] The Voice, CAAAV Newsletter, Winter 1996.
[5] CAAAV and the Community Development Project of the Urban Justice Center, Converting Chinatown: A Snapshot of a Neighborhood Becoming Unaffordable and Unlivable, December 2008.
[6] "Brick by Brick"