People are pushing back after Georgia police were reluctant to say race was a factor in the shooting spree that killed mostly Asian women

• Police in Georgia are getting backlash for their handling of shootings that left 8 people dead.
• The killings took place at 3 spas around Atlanta. Six of the victims were Asian women.
• Critics say the police were wrong to downplay the possibility that race was a factor.

Georgia law enforcement are being criticized for their handling of a killing spree at massage parlors around Atlanta after downplaying the possibility that race was a motive.

The shootings killed eight people, six of whom were Asian women.

The suspect, 21-year-old Robert Aaron Long, denied to police that race was his motive, which law enforcement officials conveyed to the media at a press conference Wednesday.

Officials with the Atlanta Police and the Cherokee County Sheriff's Office said that Long told them he had a sex addiction and that the spas that were targeted were a "temptation" for him that he wanted to eliminate.

"He was pretty much fed up and kind of at the end of his rope. Yesterday was a really bad day for him and this is what he did," Cherokee County Sheriff's Office spokesman Capt. Jay Baker said during the news conference.

People immediately started pushing back, saying the fact that most of the victims were Asian women can not be ignored.

"Just because someone says their acts of violence weren't 'racially motivated' doesn't mean they weren't," Bernice King, the daughter of Martin Luther King Jr., tweeted. "Racism is viciously nuanced, with historical context, economic considerations, and warped ideology."

David Palumbo-Liu, a Stanford comparative literature professor, told The Washington Post that, whether or not the shooter believes the attack was racially motivated, he is part of a dark tradition of white men fetishizing Asian women.

"The shooter said it wasn't racially motivated, but on the other hand, he's going specifically to these spas where Asian women work precisely to serve the sexual fantasies of white males, so to disentangle them is really to do a disservice to the fact that these things are so linked together," Palumbo-Liu said.

The Post pointed out that 68% of documented reports of anti-Asian harassment and violence have been against women, citing data from Stop AAPI hate.

Vivien Tsou, national field director of the National Asian Pacific American Women's Forum, posted on Twitter about the multiple points of issue she saw in how the shooter's motives were described by the police.

She said Asian women were "reduced to a sexual fantasy, an 'easy target,' and a threat at the same time."

"I'm sick to my stomach thinking about the ideations that led to the violence in Georgia - steeped in xenophobia, sexism, imperialism, and white supremacy," she said on Twitter.

Much attention has also been paid to Capt. Baker, the Cherokee County Sheriff's spokesman, who it was later revealed had recently promoted anti-Asian COVID-19 T-shirts on Facebook. The T-shirts called COVID-19 an "imported virus from Chy-na."

Rep. Ted. Lieu of California said that if the Facebook post is indeed from Baker, he "would not have confidence in the Cherokee County Sheriff's Office" conducting a "fair investigation that respected the Asian victims." He urged the FBI to conduct an independent investigation.

Insider reached out to the Atlanta Police Department and the Cherokee County Sheriff's Office for comment on the backlash Thursday, but did not immediately receive a response from either.