Pressure has mounted since the fatal shootings in Georgia last week to prosecute Robert Aaron Long for hate crimes in the killings, which included six women of Asian descent.

But history shows that law enforcement is largely uninterested in that category of crime, despite a long national record of deadly racial violence by white Americans.

Long, who is white, has been jailed on charges of murdering four people at spas in Atlanta and four others at a massage parlor in nearby Cherokee County on March 16. The victims included Soon C. Park, Hyun J. Grant, Suncha Kim, Yong A. Yue, Delaina Ashley Yaun, Paul Andre Michels, Xiaojie Yan and Daoyou Feng, Reuters reported March 19.

FBI director Chris Wray has said that it "does not appear" that race factored into the incident, Reuters reported March 21. And a Cherokee County sheriff's department official caused some uproar when he initially relayed Long's own explanation that he has a "sex addiction," and "wanted to eliminate" the sources of his temptation. The same official – who previously promoted racist T-shirts blaming Asians for the COVID-19 pandemic, according to the March 19 Reuters article – added that the mass murderer had "a really bad day."

The Cherokee County sheriff's office later said the official, Captain Jay Baker, never intended to offend and that he's no longer serving as a spokesman for this particular case. Responding to my request for comment, Cherokee County Sheriff Frank Reynolds sent an email saying that the office would not comment on the case except to say that Long is facing "malice murder and aggravated assault charges."

Authorities have since added that they haven't yet ruled out charging Long with hate crimes. Of course, many Asian-Americans, other Americans, and even lawmakers have already concluded that it was an act of hate, linking the incident to a recent and continuing rise in anti-Asian sentiment in the country. Hate crimes against Asian-Americans rose by 149% in 2020 in 16 major cities compared with 2019, according to the Center for the Study of Hate and Extremism.

Tammy Duckworth, one of only two Asian-American U.S. Senators, has said flat-out that the Georgia shooting "looks racially motivated," Reuters reported March 21. And most of what California Representative Ted Lieu has said about the killings indicates his agreement with Duckworth, short of using those exact words.

The episode demonstrates law enforcement's permissive attitude toward white Americans who commit racist attacks against people of color, rooted in historical white supremacy. It also shows that significant swaths of the public often differ with law enforcement's assessment of the role of race in a crime – a notion that undermines our sense of collective justice and points to a need for more robust protections against crimes that target minority groups.

Yoonsun Choi, a professor at the University of Chicago, said law enforcement's historical inclination to "defend white criminals" is an illustration of "systematic and structural racism." Choi's research focuses on acculturation and how the so-called model minority myth harms Asian-Americans and Pacific Islanders.

The Cherokee County sheriff's department official "was almost trying to convince us that this was not racially motivated," Choi said.

"I think it's an effort to reduce the punishment he'll get, and it's nothing new. It happens where the victims are African-Americans too," Choi said. "Many of us can quickly tell when a shooter is a white man based on the language police use."

Elizabeth OuYang, a civil rights attorney, advocate and professor at New York University, told me it is too early to say the shooting doesn't appear to be a hate crime. She said she was "shocked" by the initial comments from police.

"Having 'a bad day' is not a reason they would give if a minority person was charged with a serious offense," OuYang said. "The perpetrator obviously had certain establishments in mind that he intentionally targeted. She added that "more needs to be known about why he chose those locations."

In the simplest terms, a hate crime is a crime motivated by bias, like racism, sexism or anti-Muslim bias, for example. But charges for the crime have been relatively rare.

In 2019, 86% of law enforcement agencies either affirmatively reported no hate crimes, or didn't report any data about those crimes to the FBI at all, Scott McCoy, interim deputy legal director for the Southern Poverty Law Center, told Reuters March 20.

Anne Oredeko, supervising attorney of the racial justice unit of Legal Aid New York, told the New York Times on March 18 that she's "rarely seen" socially privileged Americans accused of hate crimes. "Often what you end up seeing is people of color being accused of hate crimes," Oredeko said.

In fact, the only person who's been prosecuted for an anti-Asian hate crime in New York city this year is a Taiwanese man, despite a spate of reported random assaults against Asian victims in the past month alone, according to the New York Times.

Three states still lack hate crime laws, including Wyoming, Arkansas and South Carolina, Reuters reported on March 20.

In Georgia, the laws that officials are considering against Long were passed as recently as June 2020, Reuters reported. That came after the killing of Ahmaud Arbery, another case in which police were criticized for supposed lenience toward white perpetrators of a racially motivated crime.

Many of the laws are also effectively toothless.

Georgia had a hate crime statute since at least 2000. But lawmakers didn't list specific protected groups, which caused the state high court to throw it out for being unconstitutionally vague, USA Today reported in May 2020. In 2019, Indiana Republicans amended a proposed statute by stripping it of the list of specific protected groups – knowingly making it too vague to be implemented, in other words – before passing the law, USA Today reported in February 2020.

Matthew Briones, a cultural historian and professor, also at the University of Chicago, agreed with Choi and the lawmakers' assessment. Briones wrote a 2012 book called "Jim and Jap Crow: A Cultural History of 1940s Interracial America."

"This particular event does underscore the flattening and dehumanization of Asian women generally – that they are sexual baubles, scapegoats for a guy's supposed sexual addiction," Briones said. "But it's really about white supremacy and violence."

Opinions expressed here are those of the author. Reuters News, under the Trust Principles, is committed to integrity, independence and freedom from bias.

Correction: A previous version of this column erred in stating that Elizabeth OuYang said it was premature to call the shootings in Georgia a hate crime.