NEW YORK (WPIX) — The NYPD launched an investigation on Monday into an anti-Asian incident caught on video in Manhattan.
Police said a 25-year-old woman was waiting at a crosswalk around 1:25 p.m. on Sunday when a woman got in her face and said, “You’re not from here, you’re from China. Go back to China.”
The victim and her boyfriend confronted the woman and started filming the incident, which was later posted to social media.
Video showed the woman inside the backseat of a yellow taxi cab, arguing with the victim’s boyfriend. The woman yelled that she was being assaulted, but the video showed no one was touching her in the backseat of the cab.
“She yells at us to be left alone after she was the one instigating all this by yelling racist slurs to us first,” the victim wrote in an Instagram post along with several videos of the incident.
As the couple walked away, the woman rolled down the window of the cab and yelled, “Go back to communist China b—h,” according to the victim.
“So we confront her again. When we ask, ‘Did you just tell us “go to communist China b—h”?! She replies, ‘Well isn’t that where you’re from?’ I think that just says it all right there,” the victim wrote in her Instagram post.
At one point, the cab driver tried to get the woman out of his vehicle, but the woman offered to pay him double to leave.
The victim wrote on Instagram that the woman’s actions initially stunned her.
“I was honestly shocked and didn’t really know how to react,” she wrote. “At this point, I want to make sure people know there is zero tolerance for this type of behavior and cannot be condoned.”
A harassment complaint was filed with the NYPD, police said.
The incident was reported amid a surge of anti-Asian hate crimes in the city and across the country.
President Joe Biden condemned the violence last week, saying “it is wrong, it is un-American and it must stop.”
The NYPD started an Asian Hate Crime Task Force last year amid increasing attacks as the coronavirus pandemic reached the United States.
Former President Donald Trump repeatedly used xenophobic terms to refer to the virus that originated in China’s Wuhan province. Critics say the former president’s language stoked violence against Asian Americans and immigrants.