It was not possible to contact a lawyer from the Legal Aid Company, which represents Barker. Barker, of Merritt Island, Florida, also faces four counts of second-degree harassment and one count of third-degree assault as a hate crime, according to the complaint, which details the statements of four alleged victims, all of whom are Asian women. . Each of them told the detectives that the woman used pepper spray, hitting three of them, but lost the fourth, and said something about: “Why do not you return to your country?” The attack, which was investigated by the Hate Crime Task Force of the New York Police Department, took place on June 11 in the Meatpacking area of ​​Manhattan and was partly recorded on video. The video, released by police, shows a woman shaking something that appeared to be pepper spray. The woman sprayed pepper on four women during the altercation, the NYPD said. The women refused medical care, according to an earlier police press release. At one point during the fight, which is not recorded in the video released by the NYPD, an unknown Asian man crossed the team on the sidewalk, NYPD Sergeant Anwar Ismael told CNN earlier. The suspect allegedly turned to him and said, “Take all your gifts back from where you came from,” Ishmael said. In addition, according to the complaint, the investigators showed the accused a still image taken from a video at the scene of the attack, who allegedly replied: “This is me.” Hate crimes, including those against Asians in the US, have risen sharply in recent years. The Covid-19 pandemic has sparked attacks on Asians amid online and political rhetoric that stigmatizes them, but this category of hate crimes is often under-reported. From March 31, 2021 to March 31, 2022, 110 of the 577 hate crime cases targeted Asians, according to the NYPD Hate Crime Schedule. In March 2022 alone, there were nine incidents treated as hate crimes targeting Asian Americans, with five arrests. In 2020, attacks on Asians nationwide increased to 279 from 161 in 2019, according to the FBI Hate Crimes Report. And despite the alarming rise in such crimes, a small percentage of the reported attacks on Asians end in convictions. A report by the Asian American Bar Association in New York found that of the 233 attacks reported on Asian Americans in New York in the first three quarters of 2021, seven led to hate crime convictions in late May. CNN’s Rob Frehse and Aya Elamroussi contributed to this report.