On Thursday afternoon, just after 1 p.m., a man in a black hoodie walked toward the intersection of Stockton and Sacramento streets in Chinatown, drew a kitchen knife, and plunged the blade into a bystander’s back.
CCTV footage shows the victim yell out in pain, then turn confused to look at his attacker. He collapses to the ground as other passersby stare, seemingly unaware of what just happened.
Video of the incident was published the same day on r/sanfrancisco on Reddit by a “friend of a friend,” according to the post, and it immediately incited fierce reactions and a debate about anti-Asian crime in San Francisco. Specifically, some Reddit users made snap assumptions about the race of the perpetrator using veiled references and dog-whistle tropes.
“gonna guess the victim was Asian and the stabber was a race we're not allowed to mention?” one user wrote.
“More important than anything, DO NOT share the mugshot of this suspect! When he’s released in a few hours we must make sure he’s not discriminated against,” chimed another.
Once again, an Asian person was violently attacked in San Francisco. And once again, a vocal reactionary commentariat emerged to use the incident to advance their agenda: A call for more policing, a crackdown on all forms of crime with no “woke” interventions, and the framing of racial stereotypes as radical truth.
To this conservative, law-and-order cohort, seeing proof that a perpetrator is Black is the ultimate “I told you so.” It’s a mindset that fits into a broader anti-progressive movement that demonizes the Black community and paints criminal justice reform as a folly.
It’s not just coming from a fringe of brainrotted Redditors: Some of SF’s most influential voices, such as Y Combinator head Garry Tan, lean into a specific argument that claims assaults on Asian people are ignored, while Black and brown suspects get leniency at the expense of Asian safety.
The day after the attack, Tan weighed in, lamenting how the mayor’s bodyguard brawl got a press conference but the Chinatown incident received none. (He apparently did not see the near-instant local news coverage.) Instead of waiting for details, Tan boosted an X post from Liz4SF, whom he described as a local “community advocate,” who posted that, “This looks like another hate crime.”
Tan also reposted Kane Hsieh, general partner of the VC firm Root Ventures, who posts daily about the horrors of progressivism. “@sfgov needs to stop pretending anarchy is welfare,” Hsieh wrote. (Why did Hsieh use the word “welfare”? You can guess.)
On March 7, Tan continued to push his narrative on X, criticizing one specific city policy: The ban on releasing mugshots implemented in 2020 by then-San Francisco Police Department Chief Bill Scott. Scott cited research that mugshots create “illusory correlations” and racial bias; mugshots are now only released if it is to protect or request help from the public.
“Bring back booking photos…,” Tan wrote. “Protecting criminals and prioritizing their rights even over those of innocent people is not justice.”
Bring back booking photos. It’s basic accountability for society.
— Garry Tan (@garrytan) March 7, 2026
Protect victims and prevent creating more of them. A functioning society does this.
Protecting criminals and prioritizing their rights even over those of innocent people is not justice. https://t.co/T7rFlat7kC
One wonders if Tan ever anticipated that the alleged perpetrator might be Chinese.
Following the March 5 stabbing, SFPD swiftly tracked down 37-year-old Jian Feng Huang four blocks away. Huang was carrying a bloodied knife in a plastic bag. Further reporting by the San Francisco Standard revealed that Huang is the son of an influential Chinatown businessman, and had a history of vandalism, an arson case in San Mateo, and has failed to report to court. He pleaded not guilty to the assault on Tuesday, and awaits a mental health evaluation. (The victim remains hospitalized.)
Tan, for what it’s worth, never corrected the record. He only followed up on March 7 with a (presumably sarcastic) question about the criminal justice process: “Is diversion working?” (Another dogwhistle.)
I have a different question: Would a mugshot have done anything other than fuel prejudice and Asian distrust of other minority groups?
The answer is no.
Yet the myth of rampant Black-on-Asian crime continues to be perpetuated by some members of San Francisco’s Asian communities, buoyed by loud voices who believe the criminal justice system is broken because “progressives” protect certain racial groups over others.
A rush to judgment about the race of the perpetrator is also a feature of the city’s “moderate” voices like Susan Dyer Reynolds, the former Marina Times editor-in-chief who founded Voice of San Francisco. “I think it’s fairly obvious from the video that the attacker chose this victim and is not someone who lives in Chinatown. Likely a lunatic drug tourist who has a violent record and has been in a diversion program one or more times,” Reynolds posted on X the day after the Chinatown stabbing.
Diane Yap, the “whistleblower” who sparked the 2022 school board recall with claims of anti-Asian racism, went ahead and said the quiet part out loud: “This ‘no mugshots’ policy needs to go. Mugshots ‘perpetuate racial stereotypes’ to the exact degree that those stereotypes are true,” she wrote on X on March 7. “To combat the stereotype that black men commit crime, fight the root cause: get black men to commit fewer crimes. Lock them up when they do.”
Commentators like Tan, Yap, Hsieh, and Reynolds are not merely concerned citizens advocating for crime victims; they’re part of an organized, concerted effort to push the city to the right. Since the recalls of progressive school board members and District Attorney Chesa Boudin, this very vocal, very online coalition has gained prominence and shaped a narrative about San Francisco that has been dutifully picked up by press outlets like The New York Post, The Atlantic, Fox News and others that have delighted in our “woke” city’s supposed decline.
A crucial example for this argument is Vicha Ratanapakdee, an 84-year-old Thai man who was fatally shoved to the ground by Antoine Watson, a young 19-year-old Black man, in 2021. Watson was found guilty of involuntary manslaughter and assault last month, and could go to prison for more than a decade. However, the prosecution did not pursue a hate crime charge, and Watson was ultimately acquitted of murder because of evidence that the shove was not premeditated.
None of that swayed critics and activists who still believe Ratanapakdee died because he was Asian, and maintain that what Watson did was a hate crime. A similar assumption now colors almost every violent incident involving an Asian person in this city.
Naturally, nobody really bothers to correct the record or reflect on what it might mean when it turns out an Asian person was at fault. What matters most is pushing the narrative and linking race and crime, evidence be damned.
