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“We’re Not Where We Should Be”: Enhancing Law Enforcement Responses to Hate Crime
Abstract
In an era when reported hate crimes are increasing dramatically, it is troubling that there appears to be, at best, an uneven response to the problem from law enforcement in Canada. Our pilot study of policing hate crime in Ontario is the first attempt to understand whether and how law enforcement think about and act on hate crime. Interviews with officers in eight police forces across eastern and southern Ontario ( N = 38) uncovered three clusters of factors that appear to shape how they manage hate crime: environmental, organizational, and individual. What we offer in this paper is a series of related recommendations for enhancing police responses to hate crime along each of the three dimensions.
... challenges. Hence, hate crime prosecution often ends up suffering from the same ailments as femicide laws as legal practitioners struggle to translate 'hate crime' into legal argumentation, or they end up not doing so for pragmatic reasons (Perry & Samuels-Wortley 2021;Grattet & Jenness 2008;Mason et al. 2017). In 'easy' cases, proving bias relies on the perpetrator's demonstrated use of slurs or denigrative language in relation to the offence (Levin & McDevitt 2020, 184), motivating Jacobs & Potter to argue that a perpetrator can "avoid the hate crime tariff by committing his crime silently" (Jacobs & Potter 1998, 162). ...
... In many cases, police will then refrain from investigating such motives because they lack training in how to do so, it is too time-consuming, they lack resources, or the unlikelihood of prosecution demotivates it (Perry & Samuels-Wortley 2021, 76). Second, hate crimes are also consistently under-reported (Perry & Samuels-Wortley 2021;Mason et al. 2017;Walters et al. 2018;Levin & McDevitt 2020). Thus, if popular conceptions of hate crimes are increasingly expansive, as victims and communities call for hate crime charges to be laid, police often deploy restrictive conceptions due to the low margins of prosecutorial success (Perry & Samuels-Wortley 2021, 75-76;Mason et al. 2017, 16-17). ...
... tools (Walters 2018), alongside non-legal tools such as public education (Toledo 2019;Heinze 2018), communal and cultural approaches (Howe 2019), improved police training, and the addition of resources for hate crime investigation (Perry & Samuels-Wortley 2021;Walters 2018). What this exploration has unearthed is then that adding 'gender' to the hate crime equation is an entirely logical and principally sound legal stance to take. ...
Drawing on insights from human rights law, femicide laws, and hate crime studies, this article discusses the viability of including ‘gender’ in hate crime legislation, and the extent to which a legal approach of ‘gender-based hate crimes’ could serve a more efficient response to the global prevalence of violence against women than similar types of legal measurements. The article argues that, although there are sound principal reasons for including ‘gender’ in hate crime legislation, it could ultimately prove practically unviable, motivating instead a plethora of legal and non-legal approaches to counter and combat systemic violence against women.
... The reasons law enforcement agencies fail to report hate crime statistics vary, but include organizational factors (e.g. resources, policies, organizational culture), environmental factors such as political climate and local laws, and individual factors and convictions (see Nolan & Akiyama, 1999;Perry & Samuels-Wortley, 2021). ...
... Still other approaches have suggested the incorporation of community policing initiatives as a way to improve responses to hate crimes (e.g., Mason et al., 2016). These strategies are not without their own potential pitfalls and limitations (see Chakraborti, 2019;Mason & Stanic, 2019;Perry & Samuels-Wortley, 2021), but they may still serve as a useful starting point for addressing the systemic underreporting that occurs in America today and should be the subject of further research. ...
The Hate Crime Statistics Act (HCSA) of 1990 requires the federal government to publicly release official hate crime statistics annually; the HCSA does not, however, mandate that local agencies submit hate crime reports to the government in the first place. Although research has evaluated the reporting of hate crime statistics in a dichotomous fashion (compliance vs. noncompliance), the current study suggests that the consistent and invariable reporting of zero hate crimes in a particular jurisdiction over time is unlikely and thus better conceptualized as a third response strategy: ceremonious compliance. We examine this strategy as a potentially unique institutional behavior, structured by local political and historical contexts, including discursive differences in the identification of hate crime as an important social problem, and localized histories of racial oppression. This research then uses multilevel multinomial logistic regression models to estimate variation in the likelihood of differential compliance strategies (i.e., true compliance, ceremonious compliance, noncompliance), according to several political and historical factors, including Republican vote share, location in the Confederate South, and historical lynchings. Findings reveal that political and historical contexts are important predictors of agency responses to hate crime, with a particular tendency toward ceremonious compliance in Republican‐leaning locales.
... Of all types of criminality, hate crimes are probably among the most underreported for reasons that include fear of retribution and victims' distrust or fear of authorities (Allen, 2015;Pezzella et al., 2019). Even where hate crime is reported to police, there is some doubt as to whether it will ultimately become recorded by police, largely because most police officers are not trained well enough to recognize it when they see it (Perry and Samuels-Wortley, 2021;Perry and Scrivens, 2016). Data gathered by Jewish community organizations like B'Nai Brith Canada represent a useful supplement, in that they tap the experiences of Jewish communities specifically. ...
Both federal government and civil society organization data point to consistently rising incidents of antisemitic narratives and acts across Canada. In spite of this, antisemitic hate crime has not been the focus of any academic research here, some would argue because Jews are not typically thought to be an at-risk community. Rather, the Jewish community is thought to occupy a relatively privileged place in society which shields them from bias motivated attacks. Countering this narrative, our study, based in Ontario and Quebec, reveals that Jewish individuals and institutions are highly vulnerable to discursive, physical, and property violations. Many of those we spoke with felt embattled by the narrative attacks that rendered the community vulnerable to corollary physical attacks. Of particular significance are the enabling images of Jews that equate “Jewish privilege” with excessive power and control. We explore these themes, concluding with calls for strategies intended to counter hateful narratives.
... In effect, a principal recognition of all ordinary hate crimes as human rights violations might inflate the existing practical challenges of efficiently embedding abstract human rights ideals into local realities of recording, policing, and prosecuting hate crimes -a rift that could further exacerbate existing trust deficits Natalie Gunthel · Unveiling hatred -Delineating hate crime vulnerability of veiled ... 17 (1) · 2023 · pp. 35-53 between minority individuals and "the system" (Mason et al. 2017;Perry and Samuels-Wortley 2021). Second, even if Hanan had reported the incidents, it is far from certain that they could also be litigated as human rights violations. ...
Although anti-Muslim hate crimes have been on the rise in most Western nations for decades, according to influential hate crime scholar, Barbara Perry, little attention has been given to the particular vulnerability of veiled Muslim females to such crimes (Perry 2013), thereby potentially disregarding a sustained source of human rights violations (Perry and Olsson 2009). This paper delves into Danish sociolegal reality to delineate the scope of such concern, attempting to ascertain any specific hate crime vulnerability among veiled Muslim women in Denmark. It identifies a number of preliminary empirical indications that resonate with Perry’s claim, reasoning that the hate crime vulnerability of veiled women be more thoroughly scrutinized in a Danish context. However, it also argues that such hate crime vulnerability is most productively addressed, at least prima facie, as a tangible and principal human rights issue (Brudholm 2016) rather than in the terms of human rights violations.
Environmental crimes threaten ecosystems, public health, and global economic stability, necessitating enhanced law enforcement strategies. This study critically examines the role of the criminal police in combating these crimes, focusing on evaluating the effectiveness of police interventions and identifying key factors influencing success. A mixed-methods approach was employed, incorporating a thematic analysis of investigative materials, a quantitative assessment of crime statistics, and qualitative interviews with law enforcement officers and environmental experts. Additionally, spatial analysis using Geographic Information Systems was utilized to identify crime hotspots. The study's findings reveal a clear negative correlation between enhanced policing efforts and environmental crime rates, with spatial analysis highlighting concentrated areas of illegal activity. Qualitative results indicate opportunities for refining enforcement strategies, particularly through technology integration and inter-agency collaboration. The study's contribution lies in its comprehensive approach, combining statistical, spatial, and qualitative data to assess the effectiveness of policing strategies. Future research should focus on long-term evaluations and cross-jurisdictional comparisons to optimize global enforcement practices.
Background
The difficulties in defining hate crime, hate incidents and hate speech, and in finding a common conceptual basis constitute a key barrier toward operationalisation in research, policy and programming. Definitions disagree about issues such as the identities that should be protected, the types of behaviours that should be referred to as hateful, and how the ‘hate element’ should be assessed. The lack of solid conceptual foundations is reflected in the absence of sound data. These issues have been raised since the early 1990s (Berk, 1990; Byers & Venturelli, 1994) but they proved to be an intractable problem that continues to affect this research and policy domain.
Objectives
Our systematic review has two objectives that are fundamentally connected: mapping (1) original definitions and (2) original measurement tools of hate crime, hate speech, hate incidents and surrogate terms, that is, alternative terms used for these concepts (e.g., prejudice‐motivated crime, bias crime, among many others).
Search Methods
We systematically searched over 19 databases to retrieve academic and grey literature, as well as legislation. In addition, we contacted 26 country experts and searched 211 websites, as well as bibliographies of published reviews of related literature, and scrutiny of annotated bibliographies of related literature.
Inclusion Criteria
This review included documents published after 1990 found in academic literature, grey literature and legislation. We included academic empirical articles with any study design, as well as theoretical articles that focused specifically on defining hate crime, hate speech, hate incidents or surrogate terms. We also reviewed current criminal or civil legislation that is intended to regulate forms of hate speech, hate incidents and hate crimes. Eligible countries included Canada, USA, UK, Ireland, Germany, France, Italy, Spain, Australia and New Zealand. For documents to be included in relation to research objective (1), they had to contain at least one original definition of hate speech, hate incidents or hate crimes, or any surrogate term. For documents to be included in relation to research objective (2), they had to contain at least one original measurement tool of hate speech, hate incidents or hate crimes, or any surrogate term. Documents could be included in relation to both research objectives.
Data Collection and Analysis
The systematic search covered 1 January 1990 to 31 December 2021, with searches of academic databases conducted between 8th March and 12th April 2022 yielding 35,191 references. We carried out country‐specific searches for grey literature published in the same time period between 27th August and 2nd December 2021. These searches yielded a total of 2748 results. We coded characteristics of the definitions and measurement tools, including the protected characteristics, the approaches to categorise the ‘hate element’ and other variables. We used univariate and bivariate statistical methods for data analysis. We also carried out a social network analysis.
Main Results
We provide as annex complete lists of the original definitions and measurement tools that met our inclusion criteria, for the use of researchers and policy makers worldwide. We included 423 definitions and 168 measurement tools in academic and grey literature, and 83 definitions found in legislation. To support future research and policy work in this area, we included a synthetic assessment of the (1) the operationalisability of each definition and (2) the theoretical robustness and transparency of each measurement tool. Our mapping of the definitions and measurement tools revealed numerous significant trends, clusters and differences between and within definitions and measurement tools focusing on hate crime, hate speech and hate incidents. For example, definitions and measurement tools tend to focus more on ethnic and religious identities (e.g., racism, antisemitism, Islamophobia) compared to sexual, gender and disability‐related identities. This gap is greater in the definitions and measurement tools of hate speech than hate crime. Our analysis showed geographical patterns: hate crime definitions and measurement tools are more likely to originate from Anglophonic countries, especially the USA, but hate speech definitions and measurement tools are more likely to originate from continental Europe. In terms of disciplinary fragmentation, our social network analysis revealed that the collaboration and exchange of conceptual frameworks and methodological tools between social sciences and computer science is limited, with most definitions and measurement tools clustering along disciplinary lines. More detailed findings are presented in the results section of the report.
Authors' Conclusions
There is an urgent need to close the research and policy gap between the protections of ‘ethnic and religious identities’ and other (less) protected characteristics such as gender and sexual identities, age and disability. There is also an urgent need to improve the quality of methodological and reporting standards in research examining hate behaviours, including transparency in methodology and data reporting, and discussion of limitations (e.g., bias in data). Many of the measurement tools found in the academic literature were excluded because they did not report transparently how they collected and analysed the data. Further, 41% of documents presenting research on hate behaviours did not provide a definition of what they were looking at. Given the importance of this policy domain, it is vital to raise the quality and trustworthiness of research in this area. This review found that researchers in different disciplinary areas (e.g., social sciences and computer science) rarely collaborate. Future research should attempt to build on existing definitions and measurement tools (instead of duplicating efforts), and engage in more interdisciplinary collaborations. It is our hope that that this review can provide a solid foundation for researchers, government, and other bodies to build cumulative knowledge and collaboration in this important field.
This research explored the content of hate crime prototypes in a North American context, with particular attention to how such prototypes might influence blame attributions. In Study 1a, participants were recruited from a blended sample of universities (n = 110) and community members (n = 102) and asked to report their thoughts about typical hate crime offenses, victims, and offenders. These open-ended responses were coded, and common themes were identified. In Study 1b, a new group of participants (n = 290) were presented with these themes and asked to rate each for their characteristics of hate crimes. Studies 1a and 1b confirmed the presence of a clear prototype of hate crimes, such that (a) perpetrators were believed to be lower status White men with clear expressions of bias, (b) hate crime offenses were believed to be acts of interpersonal violence accompanied by slurs or verbal abuse, and (c) hate crime victims were thought to be members of a marginalized group who remain passive during the offense. Study 2 explored the consequences of victim prototypes on assessments of victim blame. Participants (n = 296) were recruited from York University and presented with a case vignette that varied the prototypicality of a victim of hate, depicting him as either Black or White and either passive, verbally responsive, or physically confrontational in the context of an assault. Participants showed greatest sympathy for the Black victim who passively ignored verbal harassment but increasingly assigned blame when the Black victim spoke or reacted physically. When the victim was White, participants showed little variation in their assessment of blame as a function of the victim’s behavior. These results suggest that Black victims are subjected to greater behavioral scrutiny than White victims and that sympathy for victims of hate may be contingent on their passivity in the face of harassment.
Bias crime is crime that is motivated by prejudice or bias towards an attribute of the victim, such as race, religion or sexuality. Police have been criticised for failing to take bias crime seriously, and there is a pressing need to understand the reasons for this failure. This article aims to address this gap by presenting the results of the first empirical study of bias crime policing in the Australian state of New South Wales (NSW). Drawing on interviews with the NSW Police Force (NSWPF), the study found that sustainable reform in this domain has proven elusive. This can be attributed to a number of key challenges including reporting, recording, identification, framing, community engagement and leadership. The lessons that emerge from the findings have important ramifications for all police organisations.
Significance
Repeated instances of police violence against unarmed civilians have drawn worldwide attention to the contemporary crisis of police legitimacy. Community-oriented policing (COP), which encourages positive, nonenforcement contact between police officers and the public, has been widely promoted as a policy intervention for building public trust and enhancing police legitimacy. To date, however, there is little evidence that COP actually leads to changes in attitudes toward the police. We conducted a randomized trial with a large urban police department. We found that positive contact with police—delivered via brief door-to-door nonenforcement community policing visits—substantially improved residents’ attitudes toward police, including legitimacy and willingness to cooperate. These effects remained large in a 21-d follow-up and were largest among nonwhite respondents.
The theme of the Third International Conference on Hate Studies, The Pursuit of Justice: Understanding Hatred, Confronting Intolerance, Eliminating Inequality, took me immediately to the subject matter of this article: Who is meant to be served by the subthemes of this conference, if not the targets or potential targets of hate crime? An equally important set of questions would ask: What justice looks like from the perspectives of those individuals and groups? What do hate crime victims want, and what do they need? And, what do vulnerable communities want and need?
The history of policing minority populations has been fraught with persecution and prejudice, which has led to an ingrained mistrust of police forces amongst lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender (LGBT+) people. This study uses interview and survey data from LGBT+ participants in the North East of England, to examine perceptions of the police and explore LGBT+ interactions with police officers. Additionally, it draws on interviews taken with criminal justice workers, including LGB&T liaison officers, to scrutinise the effectiveness of efforts made by the police to build trusting relationships. Liaison strategies have been effective in building relationships with LGBT+ community workers. LGBT+ people generally have little to no awareness of the LGB&T liaison role, minimising the roles overall effectiveness and demonstrating a lack of engagement to the wider community.
This article examines the importance of perceptions of police legitimacy in the decision to report hate crime incidents in Australia. It addresses an identified gap in the literature by analysing the 2011-2012 National Security and Preparedness Survey (NSPS) results to not only explore differences between hate crime and non-hate crime reporting but also how individual characteristics and perceptions of legitimacy influence decisions about reporting crime to police. Using the NSPS survey data, we created three Generalised Linear Latent and Mixed Models (Gllamm), which explore the influence of individual characteristics and potential barriers on the decision to report crime/hate crime incidents to police. Our results suggest that hate crimes are less likely to be reported to police in comparison to non-hate crime incidents, and that more positive perceptions of police legitimacy and police cooperation are associated with the victim’s decision to report hate crime victimisation.
The current study reflects a narrative mega-review of confidence in the police by race. This review has led to two conclusions. First, blacks and whites have different levels of confidence in the police, but the difference between races is a matter of degrees. Second, race is not the strongest predictor of confidence in the police in most multivariate analyses. When variables, such as police contacts and concentrated disadvantage, are controlled for, the effect of race tends to be attenuated and/or sometimes disappear. These results prompt us to urge scholars to chart new directions for future research: fairness and its flip side – injustice – rather than race should be the focus of empirical and analytical gaze. The practical implications derived from this review are twofold. First, central to improving minority confidence in the police is to treat people of all racial groups fairly and equitably. Second, the police and the policed must come to terms and have faith in our democratic system and reform. This review is the first of its kind. We conclude by proposing a template of explaining confidence in the police by race with fairness as the tying knot.
In recent years, policing scholars have increasingly used survey methods to gain insight into officers’ attitudes and behaviors. Yet, surprisingly, methodological research analyzing surveys of police officers is rare. We analyzed the extent and correlates of response rates in police surveys, providing insights about the survey design features and study characteristics associated with higher rates of officer participation. We examined the response rates to 497 police surveys reported in 390 articles published in 15 journals from 2008 to 2017. Findings included the following: (1) the average response rate was 64%, but there was a great deal of variation, (2) in-person surveys achieved substantially higher response rates, (3) inviting a greater number of officers to participate in surveys was associated with lower response rates, and (4) response rates have declined over time (though primarily among surveys not administered in-person). We recommend minimally acceptable reporting standards and discuss avenues for future research.
Prejudice motivated crime (PMC) is defined as crimes motivated by bias, prejudice or hatred towards members of particular groups, communities and individuals. To understand how police awareness training facilitates or constrains the capacity of police officers to appropriately classify and respond to PMC, data were collected from a population of Police Recruits (PRs) and Protective Service Officers (PSOs) (N = 1609) to ascertain their perceptions of PMC pre- and post-PMC awareness training. These were used in a logistic regression model to identify factors explaining whether PRs and PSOs would identify a vignette/scenario as a PMC. We found PRs and PSOs were more likely to correctly identify a PMC scenario than a control scenario, but only 61% as likely to identify an incident as PMC post-PMC awareness training after accounting for other variables. We argue that awareness training programmes need to be more aligned to the specific needs of policing in diverse societies.
Scholars are only beginning to take account of how trans people experience violence motivated by their gender identity and expression. Based on a series of focus groups and interviews across Canada, this article aims to further this area of inquiry. The fear of victimization, and thus hyper-vigilance, seems to be particularly acute among trans women. Many of them spoke of the multiple and complex layers through which they defined “safety” and lack thereof. We share their experiences and perceptions of the threat of hate motivated violence, and their subsequent reactions.
This study examines whether the presence of Latino police officers reduces the racial disparity in traffic stops in divisions in which they work. Specifically, the link between passive and active representation for ethnicity in the context of racial profiling is tested. This context allows one to examine this link within an organization that relies heavily on socialization. It is found that the presence of Latino police officers increases the racial disparity within the division in which they work. This finding seems to suggest that the pressure to “represent blue” weighs heavily on Latino officers and may affect their professional attitudes and behaviors.
In the USA, rising concern about ethnic conflict has led to the creation of special bias crime units (BCUs) in a number of police departments. The vast majority of states have some form of hate crime legislation against crimes motivated by race, religion, gender, etc. Criticisms have been leveled against this legislation, among them the claim that it could be a tool for discrimination against minorities or that the laws are largely a symbolic response to ethnic conflict. Records an exploratory study of BCUs in 16 small to medium police departments in central USA. Notes that an officer who is prejudiced against a group may fail to apply the law. Details the variety among the departments surveyed, of which only 25 per cent had established a BCU. Concludes that departments' commitment to BCUs is weak in general. Also finds that Law Enforcement Management Administrative Statistics (LEMAS) data, although widely used, is often inaccurate, due to the inherent limitations of mail surveys.
The passage of the Hate Crime Statistics Act of 1990 resulted in the creation of a new crime category within law enforcement. Linking the collection of national hate crime data to the FBI's Uniform Crime Reporting (UCR) Program required changes in policy and action within thousands of police organizations throughout the United States. The commitment to make these changes and the speed to which one might expect them to occur are a function of the forces, both internal and external, that affect attitudes and behaviors relative to this change. A survey instrument was developed to examine these forces and the extent to which they exist in four police jurisidictions from different regions of the country. Two of these organizations collect hate crime data and two do not. We found that each of the four agencies had its own unique "field of forces" affecting attitudes and behaviors regarding hate crime. The study provides both a method of inquiry and important direction to justice professionals who seek to facilitate organizational change within law enforcement toward more active involvement in hate crime data collection.
Ironically, while scholars and policy-makers have long referred to hate crime as a ‘message crime’, the assumption that those beyond the immediate victim are likewise intimidated by the violence has gone untested. Grounded in a recent study of the community impacts of hate crime, we offer some insights into these in terrorem effects of hate crime. We present here some of our qualitative findings. Interestingly, our findings suggest that, in many ways, awareness of violence directed toward another within an identifiable target group yields strikingly similar patterns of emotional and behavioural responses among vicarious victims. They, too, note a complex syndrome of reactions, including shock, anger, fear/vulnerability, inferiority, and a sense of the normativity of violence. And, like the proximal victim, the distal victims often engage in subsequent behavioural shifts, such as changing patterns of social interaction. On a positive note, there is also some evidence that these reactions can culminate not in withdrawal, but in the potential for community mobilization.
Public cooperation with police is essential for the control of crime and disorder. Hence, understanding factors that shape public cooperation with the police is important. However, Australian and international studies show that police find it difficult to elicit cooperation from ethnic communities, this made difficult by the fact that ethnic groups display low levels of trust and confidence in the police. This study examines the role that procedural justice plays in fostering minority group perceptions of police legitimacy and their willingness to cooperate with police. Using survey data collected from 1204 Australian citizens, this study tests whether procedurally fair policing can enhance perceptions of police legitimacy and nurture cooperation among ethnic minorities in Australia. Findings reveal that procedural justice predicts views of police legitimacy more so than instrumental factors for both minority and majority group members. The results also suggest that ethnicity moderates the effect of procedural justice on cooperation; specifically, procedural justice is shown to be less effective for nurturing cooperation among ethnic minorities than majority group members. A group identity perspective is used to explain these findings. The findings also have implications for how the police can foster better relationships with ethnically diverse communities.
For decades sociologists, criminologists, political scientists and socio-legal scholars alike have focused on the symbolic and instrumental dimensions of law in examinations of the effects of social reform and policy implementation. Following in this tradition, we focus on the relationship between hate crime policy and hate crime reporting to identify the conditions under which a symbolic law is accompanied by instrumental effects at the initial phase of the law enforcement process —the official recording of a hate crime event. Using data on California police and sheriff's agencies we estimate hierarchical Poisson models to determine how agency-level enforcement efforts, chiefly the creation of a formal policy on hate crime, affect official hate crime reporting. We also examine how community and agency attributes influence the effects of policy on the reporting of hate crime. We find that agency characteristics, in this case measures of the integration of the local agency within the community, shape the degree to which agency policies affect the official reporting of hate crime. Our findings reveal that while symbolic law is not intrinsically incapable of producing changes in enforcement patterns, such effects are contingent upon agency and community processes. Thus, we conclude by conceptualizing the varied enforcement contexts within which a body of symbolic law is rendered instrumental.
This paper examines attitudes toward punishment among a purposive sample of college students in the Northeast. The hypothesis that attitudes toward criminal sanctioning held by criminal justice majors are more punitive than those held by other majors was supported. Evidence of the effect of education as a tempering agent was found among grade levels. A multiple regression analysis revealed significant predictors of increased punitiveness among the entire sample. Possible reasons for differences in punitiveness among majors are offered and the practical and pedagogical implications of the findings are discussed.
A handful of researchers examined the activities of law enforcement in rural areas. Much of the research on rural policing activities involved well-constructed ethnographic methodologies including observational studies, case studies, and in-depth interviews. These studies demonstrated that rural police officers faced a number of problems that their urban counterparts did not. Building on this past research, this article reports the results of a content analysis of law enforcement activity in one rural community over a two-year timeframe. In all, 948 police calls as described in one community's published media crime reports were analyzed. Results of the analysis suggested that rural policing requires officers who are trained as generalists and able to respond to an assortment of departmental and social/community needs. Implications are provided.
One of the most consistent findings in empirical studies using victimization data is that the decision to report victimization to the police is determined in large part by the seriousness of the crime. The police will be notified more often of crimes that involve more serious injury or greater monetary loss. These findings, however, may be due to the fact that most studies on reporting have been conducted using victimization surveys that devote a great deal of attention to the crime event and victim characteristics and much less to the social context of that event. As a result, influences on reporting operating at the neighborhood, jurisdiction, or nation level have been neglected. The aim of this paper is to bring social context into the discourse on reporting to the police by presenting a much more inclusive model of crime reporting. In addition, the influence of four aspects of macro-level social context on reporting are tested—the perceived competence of the police, institutionalization of insurance business, norm of conformity, and level of individualism—by merging incident-level data from the International Crime Victims Survey (ICVS) for 16 Western industrialized countries with nation-level data from various sources. Hierarchical logistic modeling is used to analyze the nested data. The perceived competence of the police has a positive effect on whether property crimes are reported.
Hate crimes are notoriously under-reported, and the present research explores possible etiological factors for this phenomenon in a national Canadian sample. Controlling for demographic and offence characteristics, the research shows that victims who had prior experiences with police discrimination were significantly less likely to report hate crimes to police compared to victims of non-hate-based crimes. Additionally, victims experienced hate crimes in a more intersectional way than is typically reflected in police reports, as victims tended to interpret the offence as targeting multiple overlapping identities rather than a solitary hate motivation. These findings reflect the unique nature of hate-motivated offences, whose victims may find it futile to report bias-motivated offences to a police force whom they believe is itself biased. These results suggest possible opportunities to improve reporting of offences and relations between police and marginalized communities.
Background
Police–academic partnerships have developed significantly over the past decade or so, spurred on by the expansion of the evidence-based policing movement, the increasing value attached to impactful research in the academy, the ascendance of the professionalisation agenda in the police, and the growing necessity of cross-sectoral collaborations under conditions of post-financial crisis austerity. This trend has given rise to a burgeoning literature in the discipline of criminology which is concerned with charting the progress of these partnerships and setting out the ideal conditions for their future expansion.
Aims and objectives
we advance a sympathetic critique of this literature, adding a note of caution to its largely optimistic outlook.
Methods
we do this by combining a narrative review of the literature on police–academic partnerships with insights from elsewhere in the social sciences and observations from our experience of running the International Strand of the N8 Policing Research Partnership.
Findings and discussion
while we recognise that police–academic partnerships have certainly come a long way, and have the capacity to make important contributions to police work, we argue that they remain ‘fragile’ alliances, beset with fractious occupational cultures, unreliable funding streams and unsustainable inter-institutional relationships. We also reason that the structures underpinning this ‘fragility’ do not represent problems to be overcome, for they help to protect the integrity of the two professions.
Conclusion
we conclude by offering pragmatic measures for sustaining police–academic partnerships during those difficult periods characterised by cultural dissonance, a paucity of funding and the turnover of key personnel.
This book comprehensively examines right-wing extremism (RWE) in Canada, discussing the lengthy history of violence and distribution, ideological bases, actions, organizational capacity and connectivity of these extremist groups. It explores the current landscape, the factors that give rise to and minimise these extremist groups, strategies for countering these groups, and the emergence of the ‘Alt-Right’. It draws on interviews with law enforcement officials, community activists, and current and former right-wing activists to inform and offer practical advice, paired with analyses of open source intelligence on the state of the RWE movement in Canada. The historical and contemporary contours of right-wing extremism in Canada are situated within the social, political, and cultural landscape that has shaped the movement. It will be of particular interest to students and researchers of criminology, sociology, social justice, terrorism and political violence.
Hate crimes are notoriously underestimated evident by significant differences reported between the Uniform Crime Report (UCR) and the National Crime Victimization Survey (NCVS). Between 2004 and 2012, an average of 269,000 victimizations were reported by the NCVS; simultaneously, UCR hate crime statistics reported an average of 8,770 incidents (FBI UCR Hate Crime Statistics, 2004-2012) implicating sizable hate crime underreporting. We present two hypotheses to explain the dark figure of hate crime reporting. First, we hypothesize that bias crime victims, relative to nonbias crime victims, are less likely to report their victimization to police. Second, we hypothesized that misperceptions of police legitimacy by groups with strained relations with police who are also at risk for hate victimization explain declinations to report. Using stepwise logistic regression, controlling in subsequent models with victim, offender, and situational factors previously found to increase nonbias crime victim reporting, we detected an increasingly stronger propensity for bias crime victims to not report their victimization. We also found that victim misperception of police legitimacy evident by the absence of confidence (29.2%) and victim decisions to report to different official (22.3%) largely explain underreporting. Implications for victim perceptions of police legitimacy and their ability to discharge procedural justice are discussed. Improved public relations with communities who sustain a strained relationship with police in conjunction with proactive, clear enforcement policies, and practices are suggested.
In a contemporary setting of increasing social division and marginalisation, Policing Hate Crime interrogates the complexities of prejudice motivated crime and effective policing practices. Hate crime has become a barometer for contemporary police relations with vulnerable and marginalised communities. But how do police effectively lead conversations with such communities about problems arising from prejudice? Contemporary police are expected to be active agents in the pursuit of social justice and human rights by stamping out prejudice and group-based animosity. At the same time, police have been criticised in over-policing targeted communities as potential perpetrators, as well as under-policing these same communities as victims of crime. Despite this history, the demand for impartial law enforcement requires police to change their engagement with targeted communities and kindle trust as priorities in strengthening their response to hate crime. Drawing upon a research partnership between police and academics, this book entwines current law enforcement responses with key debates on the meaning of hate crime to explore the potential for misunderstandings of hate crime between police and communities, and illuminates ways to overcome communication difficulties. This book will be important reading for students taking courses in hate crime, as well as victimology, policing, and crime and community. © 2017 Gail Mason, JaneMaree Maher, Jude McCulloch, Sharon Pickering, Rebecca Wickes and Carolyn McKay.
Even though the term ‘hate crime’ has caught on in some quarters, it is a rather slippery concept. Varying interpretations have been provided in the scholarly and policy literature, but they do have one thing in common: curiously the word ‘hate’ appears infrequently. Instead, terms such as ‘bias’, ‘prejudice’, ‘difference’ and ‘hostility’ feature prominently. This chapter explores the conceptual disarray of the notion of ‘hate crime’ and explains why and how the concept is to be utilised in the book. It makes a case for the victim's experience to be placed at the centre of the conceptualisation of ‘hate crime’. A victim-centred approach recognises the salience of the particular harms inflicted by ‘hate crimes’ compared with parallel crimes. The experiences of victims also show that, contrary to media depictions of the problem, many incidents of ‘hate crime’ are committed by ‘ordinary’ people in the context of their ‘everyday’ lives.
From New York to Los Angeles, police departments across the country are consistently accused of racism. Although historically white police precincts have been slowly integrating over the past few decades, African-American officers still encounter racism on the job. Bolton and Feagin have interviewed fifty veteran African-American police officers to provide real-life and vivid examples of the difficulties and discrimination these officers face everyday inside and outside the police station from barriers in hiring and getting promoted to lack of trust from citizens and members of black community.
The police service is facing a crisis of public confidence amidst a range of current challenges. The service is being faced, not only, with political and fiscal challenges, but cultural, structural, and societal issues have threatened the principles of policing by consent and legitimacy. The crisis can be seen to be the result of failed leadership and policing strategies over decades, and the danger is that there will be more of the same. A new model of policing that recognises the value of engaging communities to re-build confidence and assist in the single mission of reducing crime is called for. Community engagement depends on leadership in the police service being driven down, and on relationship building leveraging social capital based on ‘trust, norms and networks’. This chapter examines the challenges and explores what needs to be done to make this happen.
Despite recent progress, our collective responses to hate crime have been undermined by a disconnected approach to scholarship and policy. This article focuses on a series of problems that are created and reinforced through such an approach. This includes the limited reach of hate crime theorizing and specifically the perception that academic work is often too detached from the everyday realities confronting those who respond to—or live with—the consequences of hate crime in the “real world.” Equally problematic is policy that is not empirically driven or linked to academic knowledge, or which is based on tokenistic, cynical or “tick-box” foundations. The article draws from these fault lines to underline the symbiotic relationship between hate crime scholarship and policy formation: one where policy formation needs academic substance to be fit for purpose and where scholarship needs to inform policy to have lasting “real-world” value.
Official definitions of hate crime are viewed as overly narrow and unnecessarily exclusive. To enable more inclusive practices,
many jurisdictions have embraced alternative terminologies such as bias crime, targeted crime and prejudice motivated crime.
In this article, we examine how police agencies in Victoria, Australia, are grappling with incidents and responses to hate
crime. Drawing on the accounts of high priority victim groups, we illustrate how victims and victim advocates make sense of
new hate crime terminologies and whether these terminologies facilitate hate crime incident reporting. Our findings speak
to the importance of shared understanding and vocabularies; however, police responses to prejudice motivated crime incidents
and police interactions with victims remain a significant barrier to reporting behaviour.
In this paper, we outline findings from an innovative action research project in an English police force that aimed to enhance community engagement in four neighbourhood policing teams. We describe the principles that lie at the heart of neighbourhood policing and how, for a variety of reasons, these were often seen to be peripheral rather than essential to the teams’ activities. We describe how a lack of understanding about the role of neighbourhood policing, limited knowledge about communities and their differing needs, narrow methods of engagement and consultation, as well as the perception that community engagement was ‘nice to do but not essential’ all reduced the potential benefits of neighbourhood policing. We then discuss the ways we sought to tackle these issues using action research.
Due to sporadic and often perfunctory compliance with the Hate Crime Statistics Act of 1990, official data on hate crime currently tell us little about the prevalence of hate crime nationally. Reasons for this include lack of departmental infrastructure to support accurate reporting, lack of training, officer disincentives to accurately report, and, perhaps most importantly, hesitation on the part of victims to involve law enforcement in these matters. Using a survey of law enforcement officers from a stratified national sample, as well as interviews with advocacy and human rights professionals, this article will discuss all of these factors and their impact on hate crime reporting. Suggestions for improvement involve working on police/minority group relations, as well as building appropriate departmental infrastructure.
The findings draw on independent research conducted in the aftermath of the Macpherson Report of 1999 and are based on in-depth interviews with African Caribbean and South Asian officers in five British police services. Serving officers offer their frequently contrasting views on the underrecruitment of ethnic minority officers and their experiences in the police force and beyond. While many question whether increasing the recruitment of ethnic minority officers would make the widely-assumed positive impact in reducing racism, others maintain that it would; but they believe persistent habitual racist practices by white officers serves as the most formidable impediment to recruitment. Reasons are offered for this persistent racism. It is proposed that the trend towards assessing occupational performance in the police has had the unintended consequence of promoting racial profiling, or selecting ethnic minority groups for unfair treatment. Ethnic minority police officers are subject to racist abuse as a way of 'testing' them. They believe that, if they protest against either their own treatment or that of ethnic minority civilians, they may damage their careers. This perception acts as a deterrent to challenging racism in police work and contributes towards its continuation.
This paper examines empathy among a purposive sample (N = 633) of college and university students in the northeastern United States. Mehrabian’s Balanced Emotional Empathy Scale (BEES) was used to measure empathy levels among criminal justice (CJ) and other majors. Descriptive and inferential statistics are used to compare scale and item means across gender, school size and type, grade level, age, and other variables. The authors also examine the relationship in the sample between empathy and attitudes toward punitiveness. Results indicate that male CJ majors possess the lowest levels of empathy, followed by males of other majors, female CJ majors and females majoring in other disciplines. Gender, major, and grade/class level were found to be important in predicting or influencing empathy. Possible explanations for these differences in empathy are offered and the pedagogical implications of the findings are discussed.
Like most racialised minority groups, Native Americans have long experienced disparate policing, both in the form of over- and under-policing their communities. Inevitably, the interactions between police and Native Americans shape the latter's perceptions of the brand of justice they can expect. Cumulatively, over- and under-policing reinforce the antipathy if not outright hostility towards police. They compound the historically strained relationship between Native Americans and the western criminal justice system. Yet the impacts of disparate policing also have broader community and political effects, including over-representation in the justice system, disempowerment, segregation and enhanced risk of victimisation.
The discussion contained within this article is derived from empirical research that explored the policing of hate crime in London and New York City. Through an examination of a range of policies, practices and experiences of those involved in the policing of hate crime, the article argues that this aspect of law enforcement and service provision is shaped by a complex relationship between a number of interdependent variables, which it is suggested can be broadly grouped into four categories: law, the police, the public and social context. The underlying message is that hate crime in particular is a social construct over which the police and public (most notably victims) have differing degrees of control, and that in turn this will inevitably impact upon the extent and nature of the hate crime ‘problem’, the way in which the ‘problem’ is responded to, and the effectiveness of these responses. In turn these inevitably have important implications for victims and communities and their experiences and perceptions of police service provision, and the wider social context in which the policing of hate crime takes place.
Informed by the experiential-racism theoretical approach, which maintains that racism must be analyzed as a process that is manifested in multiple relations and situations in everyday life, interviews with 50 male and female black police officers in a southern state are drawn upon to analyze the impact race has on policing. Accounts demonstrate in considerable detail a shared perception of the continuing attitudinal and institutional dimensions of racism that impedes full participation in law enforcement agencies. Training, evaluation, discipline, assignment and promotion are discussed as processes within police agencies felt to be impacted by race. The conclusion is promoted that racism is persistent in agencies to the extent that white officers disproportionately occupy positions of authority with unfettered subjective discretion and to the extent there are few black officers relative to white officers. As an exploratory examination of the shared experiences and perceptions of black officers, findings should be further tested empirically.
Bedrock assumptions about the benefits of recruiting more ethnic minority police officers and enhancing cultural diversity training for police are critically evaluated by black and Asian police officers in Britain. Neither policy finds favour among groups which articulate a previously concealed interpretation of such aims: that their value lies in presenting an outward image of action rather than furthering the public good. The research reported in this paper – the first to have gained the cooperation of British police services – involved unstructured interviews with officers from African Caribbean and South Asian backgrounds. The interviews took place in the 18 months following the publication of the Macpherson Report in February 1999 and reflected some of the policy recommendations made by the report, which was based on the inquiry into the death of Stephen Lawrence. Interviewees analyse the two central policy directives advanced by both the Macpherson Report and the Scarman Report, which had been published 18 years before. Both policies concern the enhancement of cultural diversity as a way of combating racism. Cynically regarded in some quarters as 'window dressing', the policies are not seen as helpful, nor even harmless, but as pernicious in that they contrive to give the appearance of progress, while actually achieving little. Interviews were subject to strict confidentiality and conducted in circumstances of the officers' choice in the effort to minimise any inhibitions about expressing views candidly. The officers' perspective is revealed by extensive use of verbatim quotations which drive the narrative of the article. They indicate how far the viewpoints of ethnic minority officers contrast with official policy.
Authoritarianism has been an influential concept in social science research. Furthermore, researchers have long been concerned about the potential dangers of authoritarianism within the criminal justice system. The current study uses Altemeyer’s RWA Scale to measure and compare levels of authoritarianism between criminal justice majors and non‐criminal justice majors in a sample of undergraduate students. Results indicate that criminal justice majors, males, and lower‐division students have higher mean RWA scores than non‐criminal justice majors, females, and upper‐division students. However, it is male criminal justice majors who demonstrate the highest levels of authoritarianism. Theoretical and practical implications are discussed.
Growing public concern over racial and ethnic conflict and a perceived increase in hate crimes during the 1980s have led to legislation expanding the scope of the law and the severity of punishment for such offenses and to police-initiated efforts to focus attention on hate crimes. Although a number of critiques have examined the legislative approach, little attention has been devoted to the police response. This article examines the rationale for a police initiative in addressing hate crimes; the characteristics of incidents labeled as such in one jurisdiction, Baltimore County, Maryland; and some of the problems in defining, identifying, and verifying bias motivation. Because about 40% of the offenses initially considered by the Baltimore County Police Department to be motivated by racial, religious, or ethnic (RRE) prejudice subsequently are not verified as RRE motivated, a closer examination of all such cases permits insight into the social construction of “bias motivation” and related issues raised by a police hate-crime program. These include determining what forms of bias are eligible for special responses; identifying bias motivation; weighing the victim's perception of the event; determining the line between criminal and non-criminal incidents; and adopting consistent standards for verifying ambiguous events.
An important yet poorly understood function of law enforcement organizations is the role they play in distilling and transmitting the meaning of legal rules to frontline law enforcement officers and their local communities. In this study, we examine how police and sheriff's agencies in California collectively make sense of state hate crime laws. To do so, we gathered formal policy documents called “hate crime general orders” from all 397 police and sheriff's departments in the state and conducted interviews with law enforcement officials to determine the aggregate patterns of local agencies' responses to higher law. We also construct a “genealogy of law” to locate the sources of the definitions of hate crime used in agency policies. Despite a common set of state criminal laws, we find significant variation in how hate crime is defined in these documents, which we attribute to the discretion local law enforcement agencies possess, the ambiguity of law, and the surplus of legal definitions of hate crime available in the larger environment to which law enforcement must respond. Some law enforcement agencies take their cue from other agencies, some follow statewide guidelines, and others are oriented toward gaining legitimacy from national professional bodies or groups within their own community. The social mechanisms that produce the observed clustering patterns in terms of approach to hate crime law are mimetic (copying another department), normative (driven by professional standards about training and community social movement pressure), and actuarial (affected by the demands of the crime data collection system). Together these findings paint a picture of policing organizations as mediators between law-on-the-books and law-in-action that are embedded in interorganizational networks with other departments, state and federal agencies, professional bodies, national social movement organizations, and local community groups. The implications of an interorganizational field perspective on law enforcement and implementation are discussed in relation to existing sociolegal research on policing, regulation, and recent neo-institutional scholarship on law.
Federal Bureau of Investigation data for the last 10years have tracked sexual orientation-based hate crimes on university
and college campuses. Many states have passed hate crime laws that include sexual orientation and laws that mandate law enforcement
hate crime training. At the same time, many campuses have amended their institutional antidiscrimination policies to include
sexual orientation. This article reports on a study that examined the impact of these three types of policies and how they
affect hate crime reporting rates. Results indicated that institutions located in states with hate crime laws that include
hate crimes, with mandated law enforcement training that includes hate crime content, and with their own institutional policy,
report the highest rates of sexual orientation-based hate crimes. Given prior research findings that hate crimes are severely
underreported, the author discusses the implications for state and institutional commitment on hate crime reporting rates.
Key wordsBias crimes-Campus safety-LGBT students-Antidiscrimination policies-Underreporting
Interviews with 278 Native Americans from seven states, and representing eight American Indian nations have revealed startling patterns of racial violence against this community. In part, this may be accounted for by the enabling climate created by law enforcement in these communities. Of particular concern in this paper are patterns of police activity, which simultaneously represent both the under-enforcement and over-enforcement of the law with respect to Native American communities. Participants have reported activities ranging from willful blindness toward Native American victimization at one extreme, to police brutality at the other.
While there are studies that focus specifically on hate crimes, especially anti-lesbian, gay, bisexual, and/or transgender
motivated violence, little research has been done to examine the role that law enforcement officials play in responding to
crimes related to the Gay/Lesbian/Bisexual/Transgender (GLBT) community. This study, therefore, attempts to do just that.
Using traditional content-analysis techniques, we examine 1,896 incident reports that were collected by a GLBT advocacy group
in Minnesota, between 1990 and 2000, to begin to understand the range of police responses in relation to the GLBT community.
Results indicate that while police conduct improved, negative responses and behaviors on the part of law enforcement officials
outnumbered positive responses. The most common complaint by Helpline callers was inadequate response by the police; there
were also numerous callers indicating that they were further victimized at the hands of the law enforcement officials. The
data suggest a continued need for the education of law enforcement officials regarding issues facing the GLBT community, advocacy
for victims of crime who are many times reluctant to report an incident to the police and increased attention to issues of
oversight and accountability for officers who are responding to calls for help from the GLBT community.
In this paper data from a research project about policy and practice for recruitment from ethnic minorities into the police are analysed. It is argued that a significant factor affecting recruitment from ethnic minorities and the work of black and Asian officers is race relations within the police. Many police forces have taken special initiatives to recruit black and Asian people into their ranks. Few forces, however, have taken steps, for example, to monitor their recruitment procedures for any racially discriminatory features; chief officers underestimate the extent and effects of racialist language on serving black and Asian officers. Race relations is not perceived as a key feature of recruitment. By not responding to Home Office and other advice, chief constables have sustained the long-standing employment patterns of black and Asian people. It is argued that a policy of positive action will maximize opportunities to recruit people from these groups into the police.
Over the past 10–15 years Australian universities have established degrees for those who wish to work in the criminal justice system in areas such as policing, corrections, and crime prevention. This paper explores the sensitivity of undergraduates to issues of race and diversity. It investigates the beliefs that criminal justice students bring with them to university, their readiness for content that focuses on Aboriginality, and whether their views change in ways over time. The study finds that policing majors are more negative than other criminal justice students and that, in any case, there tends to be little change in attitudes over time for students as a whole. To explain these findings, the paper then looks at the teaching of indigenous issues in Australian criminal justice programs based on a survey of program convenors. The consensus is that pedagogy/curriculum in the area lacks thoroughness and rigour when confronting the complexities of the problem.
Police-reported hate crime in Canada
- Amelia Armstrong
Racist offences - How is the law working? The implementation of the legislation on racially aggravated offenses in the Crime and Disorder Act 1998. Home Office Research Study
- Elizabeth Burney
- Gerry Rose
Lifecycle of a hate crime: Country report for Ireland
- Amanda Haynes
- Jennifer Schweppe