Echo and KEPW welcome Jenny Jonak

Presenter: KEPW’s Underground Echo follows up after the Asian American Pacific Islander and Allies Public Safety Forum. Your host, Echo:

Echo: Are we safe here? In Eugene, Oregon, what began as local isolated reports—a theft here, a burglary there—has now revealed itself as a coordinated pattern. Homes of Asian business owners specifically targeted, not by chance, not by coincidence, but by design. Asian Americans have been both hypervisible and unseen, mythologized as the model minority, then treated like perpetual foreigners. It’s the paradox of presence without belonging. And when crime touches that tension, it reveals every fracture beneath the surface.

[00:00:46] So when we talk about break-ins, we are also talking about exclusion acts, internment camps, scapegoating, and silence that stretch from the 1800s to now. We are talking about how quickly The Other becomes the target and how slowly the justice system tends to respond.

[00:01:04] Jennifer Jonak, legal mind and community advocate will help us decode what’s really at stake legally, socially and spiritually in this moment for Oregon’s AAPI families. Hello Jenny. Welcome to Underground Echo. 

[00:01:18] Jenny Jonak: Hi. Happy to be here.

[00:01:20] Echo: So, you have a legal background. How does it shape the way you see these crimes and the system that’s supposed to stop them? 

[00:01:28] Jenny Jonak: Yeah, so I think on one hand it makes it easier to understand why some of these patterns are repeating. Because being part of the legal system, I also know the limitations of it.

[00:01:40] So, for example, one of the things that’s most frustrated the community is there have been a number of these. We know that they’re targeting the homes of Asian American business owners and their families. 

[00:01:52] When suspects have been arrested, most of them have been released. Most of them have fled. Being part of an organized crime ring, they’re highly unlikely to show back up for a hearing or for trial. So I think there’s been a lot of frustration with that and with the way our bail system works. 

[00:02:11] Echo: Was there a moment when you realized that, ‘We can’t stay silent anymore. Something must change for our community?’

[00:02:19] Jenny Jonak: I think the moment was really about a year ago when many of us in the Asian community here locally realized that these crimes were happening and they had been happening and targeting AAPI members, and none of us had been told. 

[00:02:37] One thing that I was hearing from victims in these burglaries is frustration, that they felt like there wasn’t acknowledgement publicly of what was happening, and they felt that sense of erasure, they felt that sense of we’re not being seen. 

[00:02:54] We had the chief of the Eugene Police say that they didn’t have some of the historic contact channels that they did with other parts of the community. And so, they’ve gone a long way towards improving that. 

[00:03:07] But it also reminds us, okay, what can we do to make sure that we put forward effort in establishing those communication channels, making ourselves available, and making sure that this information is getting out as widespreadly as we can to the people who need to hear it? 

[00:03:25] If you read social media on these burglaries, there’s a real sense of: ‘What did the victims do to deserve it?’ (Mm-hmm.) And I think that is really frustrating for victims to read. You know, there’s a lot of times gratuitous advice about, you know, ‘Don’t do this’ or ‘Don’t do that,’ or ‘Buy a security system.’ And the victims may have had a security system that was jammed by a Wi-Fi jammer that would work on 99% of all of our security systems.

[00:03:53] So I think some of that frustration feeds into this fear of, ‘What can I do right?’ And ‘Should I have kept myself more invisible? Did I somehow make myself too visible? Did I bring this on to myself?’

[00:04:06] And I think people don’t realize these are people who are targeting people by ethnicity and finding their homes and surveilling them, stalking them, and then invading their home, turning it inside out.

[00:04:20] There is nothing that anyone does that ever deserves that. All of us deserve to be able to sleep at night in their home and feel safe. And a lot of these victims, and even some people that haven’t been victimized but know this is happening are having a really hard time with that. 

[00:04:36] I mean, this stereotype of a lot of the public not wanting to believe that Asian Americans are specifically being targeted. I hear a lot, ‘Well, they probably weren’t targeting Asian Americans. They were just targeting wealthy people.’

[00:04:51] And when I talk to some of these victims, some of these victims will say, ‘No, I own this small business. It has never ever made me wealthy. I’ve saved my whole life. You know, I’ve worked my whole life.’ They are not wealthy. They don’t drive fancy cars, they don’t live in huge houses. They don’t do anything that you and I would think of as having a wealthy lifestyle.

[00:05:15] In a lot of Asian cultures, social harmony is very important, right? And so to bring that much attention on yourself, it can involve feelings of shame, which shouldn’t be the case, but in fact they are. So if you report that something bad like this happened to you, it’s really hard to do that without that feeling of shame. 

[00:05:37] And I think that message that I would say is the reporting and the helping increase our transparency and data about this.

[00:05:46] First of all, no one should feel ashamed for being victimized by a crime. And secondly, that kind of information and knowing more about it helps our entire community get the information we need so we can apply the resources we need.

[00:06:01] I know that when I went to college and law school, one thing that really struck me and made me want to become a lawyer was realizing how underestimated the role of Asian Americans in the Civil Rights Movement was.

[00:06:14] We tend to think of other groups as really involved in civil rights. But there are some really key cases and they’re often categorized as immigration cases, but they actually, a lot of them are what I would call civil rights cases where they were about the ability of Asian Americans to get citizenship, to enjoy the privileges of all the other members of the community, to be able to live in housing without discrimination or prejudice. I mean, you had San Francisco that would refuse business licenses in industries known to be populated by Asian Americans. 

[00:06:52] One silver lining—if there can be one of this situation—is it has made some of us realize that our community is so decentralized that communication isn’t as easy as we wish it would be, and we need to have, I think, more of an ongoing civic voice and ability to communicate effectively with different parts of our community because there are so many different languages and so many different parts, so that when we hear information that’s affecting us, we can get it out to the community at large.

[00:07:25] Echo: So how can neighbors or everyday folks step up and help without putting themselves in danger?

[00:07:31] Jenny Jonak: I think people continuing to push back against these both stereotypes of Asians as wealthy people who maybe deserve to be targeted, and also pushing back against denialism of what’s happening. 

[00:07:45] Law enforcement talked about being a good witness, so noticing if something unusual is happening—taking notes, taking license plates, taking descriptions. I think being really aware of anything unusual that’s happening.

[00:07:59] So for example, I got a phone call from a friend that lives in a neighborhood close to where a recent burglary happened, and she noticed people walking around the neighborhood kind of trying to go into people’s garages and things like that, which already kind of set off some red flags, and they claimed that they were soliciting work for a contractor.

[00:08:18] She kind of joked with me, she said, ‘You know, if you’re a contractor right now, you don’t have to solicit work.’ So she was already very suspicious. And it wasn’t that surprising that we found out that this most recent burglary in Eugene happened only a few blocks away.

[00:08:32] Echo: Yeah. Thank you for coming on the show, Jenny. 

[00:08:36] Jenny Jonak: My pleasure. Thank you for having me. 

[00:08:39] Echo: What Eugene is facing right now is not new—not in America, not in history. But what we choose to do with it can be new. We can choose to rewrite the pattern. And to those listening who feel unseen, you are not invisible. This is the beginning of a movement towards informed safety, collective vigilance, and radical neighborliness, because the goal is not to build walls higher, but to build trust deeper and stay connected. Thank you, Eugene.

[00:09:10] Presenter: That’s KEPW’s Underground Echo interviewing Jenny Jonak.  You can listen to the full hour-long program at our website KEPW.org. Underground Echo is broadcast every Wednesday evening at 6 p.m. on 97.3, Eugene’s PeaceWorks Community Radio.