Cement block dropped on head of San Francisco councilman in apparent hate crime

A California councilman allegedly had a cement block dropped on his head in what he says was a racially motivated attack.

Anders Fung is the first Chinese immigrant to serve on Millbrae’s city council. The city is located just south of San Francisco in northern California.

“We went out to Lands End for a little family hiking, it’s a beautiful place,” Mr Fung told the San Francisco Chronicle on Sunday. “Then this big concrete block landed on my head and I instantly fell to the ground.”

According to Mr Fung, two young men wearing hoodies fled the area, but his wife managed to take photos of them. When his wife and two children began shouting at the two assailants, their response was to flip them off.

“When my family confronted the perpetrators demanding them to stop, one of them gave my family an obscene hand gesture,” Mr Fung wrote on Facebook. The men ran from the scene and haven’t been detained or identified.

The attack, which Mr Fung believes was racially motivated, took place when the family was going down a steep trail. Mr Fung, who has served on the City Council since 2020, first thought it was an accident, but smaller objects came flying after the concrete block.

“When my wife called out, the response was this hateful obscene gesture,” he told the Chronicle on Sunday night. “That’s when I realized ‘this is not an accident, this is an attack.’”

Mr Fung suffered injuries to his head and neck, including “a cervical disc herniation around my neck” and six metal clamp stitches to pull together his two-inch head wound.

Amid a rising number of hate crimes against Asians in the Bay Area, Democrats voted to recall San Francisco’s District Attorney Chesa Boudin last Tuesday.

The vote was partly prompted by Asian American groups calling for Mr Boudin’s ouster after he said the killing of an 84-year-old Thai immigrant was caused by a “temper tantrum” and choosing not to charge the assailant with a hate crime.

Asian Americans and Pacific Islanders have been the targets of increasing attacks since the start of the Covid-19 pandemic in 2020. In San Francisco in 2021, 60 hate crimes against Asians and businesses owned by Asians were reported. According to police data, that’s an increase of 567 per cent between 2020 and 2021.

“I know I’ll recover, but what can we do to make sure that attacks like this don’t continue?” Mr Fung asked in his Facebook post about the attack. “Being a victim is not a shame.”