Hate Crime And The City

The impression often conveyed by the media about hate crime offenders is that they are hate-fuelled individuals who, in acting out their extremely bigoted views, target their victims in premeditated violent attacks. Scholarly research on the perpetrators of hate crime has begun to provide a more nuanced picture. But the preoccupation of researchers with convicted offenders neglects the vast majority of hate crime offenders that do not come into contact with the criminal justice system. This book, from a leading author in the field, widens understanding of hate crime by demonstrating that many offenders are ordinary people who offend in the context of their everyday lives. Written in a lively and accessible style, the book takes a victim-centred approach to explore and analyse hate crime as a social problem, providing an empirically informed and scholarly perspective. Aimed at academics and students of criminology, sociology and socio-legal studies, the book draws out the connections between the individual agency of offenders and the background structural context for their actions. It adds a new dimension to the debate about criminalising hate in light of concerns about the rise of punitive and expressive justice, scrutinizing the balance struck by hate crime laws between the rights of offenders and the rights of victims.

This title widens understanding by demonstrating that many offenders are just ordinary people who offend in the context of their everyday lives.

Using data from the Uniform Crime Reporting Hate Crime Statistics Program and the National Crime Victimization Survey, this brief highlights the uniqueness of hate or bias crime victimization. It compares these to non-bias crimes and delineates the situational circumstances that distinguish bias from non-bias offending. The nuances of under-reporting shed light on bias-group and victim reasons for not reporting. By examining measurement issues associated with data collection systems, this brief helps explain why eighty-nine percent of participating law enforcement agencies report zero hate crimes each year. It describes patterns and trends in reporting the volume of general bias motivations and specific bias types, as the most prevalent hate crime offense types and most likely victims and offenders. With recommendations to address issues in measurement and under-reporting, including an action plan by the Enhance the Response to Hate Crimes Advisory Committee and the International Association of Chiefs of Police, a best practice model by the Oak Creek Police Department, and other promising law enforcement reporting models, this brief provides an increasingly critical resource for law enforcement practitioners and researchers dealing with hate crimes.

This book investigates perceptions against the people of north-east India, and why such prejudicial attitude exists. It subsequently quantifies and develops measures to counter such stereotypes and affiliated violence. This research examines the north-east Indian population’s and the general Indian population’s understanding of hate crime against the north-eastern population in metropolitan cities of India, both in concept and in perpetration. Further, it evaluates the existing constitutional and statutory provisions in India to determine if the proposed legislation and provisions are sufficient with regards to hate crime against north-eastern people of India. Drawing on empirical research addressing racial hate crimes in Delhi, Mumbai, Bengaluru, Chennai, Hyderabad and Pune, this book’s case studies provide a qualitative dive to the problem and offer experiential analysis in order to curate preventive measures. This book is ideal for scholars, researchers, teachers and students interested in hate crime, racial violence, minority struggles, victimology, and law.

​​​​​​This Brief provides a clearly outlined and accessible overview of the challenges in creating and enforcing hate crime legislation in the United States. As the author explains, while it is generally not controversial that hate crime behavior should be stopped, the question of how to do so effectively is complex. This volume begins with an introduction about defining hate crimes, and the history of hate crimes and hate crime legislation in the United States. The author shows arguments in favor of hate crime statutes, for example: hate crimes reach beyond their victims to members of the victims’ protected group and cohesion of society at large, and should therefore carry higher penalties.The author also shows arguments against hate crime statutes, for example that they sometimes contain enhanced penalties for certain specially protected groups and not others, and have a high potential for ambiguity and uneven enforcement. From a law enforcement perspective, the author explores the practical challenges in enforcing these statutes, and solutions to address them. Investigative techniques and resources vary significantly across police departments, as does training to identify and distinguish hate crimes from ordinary crimes. There is high potential for law enforcement and prosecutors’ personal biases to effect the classification of crimes as hate crimes. Law enforcement organizations are constantly faced with the dilemma of what and how to enforce legislation. This brief will be relevant for researchers in criminology and criminal justice, policy makers involved in hate crime legislation, social justice, and police-community relations, as well as related fields such as sociology, public policy and demography.​

Policing Hatred explores the intersection of race and law enforcement in the controversial area of hate crime. The nation’s attention has recently been focused on high-profile hate crimes such as the dragging death of James Byrd and the torture-murder of Matthew Shepard. This book calls attention to the thousands of other individuals who each year are attacked because of their race, religion, or sexual orientation. The study of hate crimes challenges common assumptions regarding perpetrators and victims: most of the accused tend to be white, while most of their victims are not. Policing Hatred is an in-depth ethnographic study of how hate crime law works in practice, from the perspective of those enforcing it. It examines the ways in which the police handle bias crimes, and the social impact of those efforts. Bell exposes the power that law enforcement personnel have to influence the social environment by showing how they determine whether an incident will be charged as a bias crime. Drawing on her unprecedented access to a police hate crime unit, Bell’s work brings to life the stories of female, Black, Latino, and Asian American detectives, in addition to those of their white male counterparts. Policing Hatred also explores the impact of victim’s identity on each officers handling of bias crimes and addresses how the police treat defendants’ First Amendment rights. Bell’s vivid evidence from the field argues persuasively for the need to have the police diligently address even low-level offenses, such as vandalism, given their devastating cumulative effects on society.

Violence motivated by racism, anti-Semitism, misogyny, and homophobia weaves a tragic pattern throughout American history. Fueled by recent high-profile cases, hate crimes have achieved an unprecedented visibility. Only in the past twenty years, however, has this kind of violence—itself as old as humankind—been specifically categorized and labeled as hate crime. Making Hate a Crime is the first book to trace the emergence and development of hate crime as a concept, illustrating how it has become institutionalized as a social fact and analyzing its policy implications. In Making Hate a Crime Valerie Jenness and Ryken Grattet show how the concept of hate crime emerged and evolved over time, as it traversed the arenas of American politics, legislatures, courts, and law enforcement. In the process, violence against people of color, immigrants, Jews, gays and lesbians, women, and persons with disabilities has come to be understood as hate crime, while violence against other vulnerable victims-octogenarians, union members, the elderly, and police officers, for example-has not. The authors reveal the crucial role social movements played in the early formulation of hate crime policy, as well as the way state and federal politicians defined the content of hate crime statutes, how judges determined the constitutional validity of those statutes, and how law enforcement has begun to distinguish between hate crime and other crime. Hate crime took on different meanings as it moved from social movement concept to law enforcement practice. As a result, it not only acquired a deeper jurisprudential foundation but its scope of application has been restricted in some ways and broadened in others. Making Hate a Crime reveals how our current understanding of hate crime is a mix of political and legal interpretations at work in the American policymaking process. Jenness and Grattet provide an insightful examination of the birth of a new category in criminal justice: hate crime. Their findings have implications for emerging social problems such as school violence, television-induced violence, elder-abuse, as well as older ones like drunk driving, stalking, and sexual harassment. Making Hate a Crime presents a fresh perspective on how social problems and the policies devised in response develop over time. A Volume in the American Sociological Association's Rose Series in Sociology

Considering a broad range of issues from a variety of perspectives, this multidisciplinary text includes the latest legal developments and cutting-edge social research.