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“Motivated by Hatred or Prejudice”: Categorization of Hate-motivated Crimes in Two Police Divisions

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  02 April 2024

Elizabeth A. Boyd ,
Richard A. Berk  and
Karl M. Hamner
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Abstract

Recent legislative responses to a perceived increase in hate crimes have resulted in efforts to quantify the rates of occurrence of such crimes. However, there remains little understanding of the processes by which statutory requirements are implemented at the level of front-line personnel like the police. This article examines the situated decisionmaking practices of police detectives in two divisions of a large urban police department charged with collecting official hate crime data. The authors argue that police detectives engage in certain routine practices in order to determine the hate-related status of an incident and that these practices are inflected by the particular institutional arrangements of the divisions and the department in which they operate. They describe in detail the various categorization practices employed in these two divisions and the ways that a seemingly common orientation to the prevalence of hate crimes have differential consequences for the reporting of hate crimes in each division.

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Articles
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Law & Society Review , Volume 30 , Issue 4 , 1996 , pp. 819 - 850
Copyright
Copyright © 1996 by The Law and Society Association

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Footnotes

This report is part of a larger project to study the conceptual and empirical foundations of hate-motivated crimes. The first author thanks Andrew Roth, John Heritage, Robert Emerson, Melvin Pollner, and Chris Santas for their support and valuable comments on earlier drafts. Research for this report was completed under grant No. 1 RO1 MH44704-01 from the Violence and Antisocial Behavior branch of the National Institute of Mental Health.

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Statute

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