Hostname: page-component-cd9895bd7-8ctnn Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-12-23T07:01:54.722Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false
  • English
  • Français

“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
Rights & Permissions [Opens in a new window]

Abstract

Core share and HTML view are not available for this content. However, as you have access to this content, a full PDF is available via the ‘Save PDF’ action button.

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.

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

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.

References

References

Anti-Defamation League (1991) 1990 Audit of Anti-Semitic Incidents. New York: Anti-Defamation League.Google Scholar
Atkinson, J. M. (1978) Discovering Suicide: Studies in the Social Organization of Sudden Death. London: MacMillan.Google Scholar
Berk, Richard A. (1990) “Thinking about Hate-motivated Crimes,” 5 J. of Interpersonal Violence 334.Google Scholar
Berk, R., Boyd, E. A., & Hamner, K. M. (1992) “Thinking More Clearly about Hate-motivated Crimes,” in Herek & Berrill 1992.Google Scholar
California Department of Justice, Office of the Attorney General (1986) Attorney General Commission on Racial, Ethnic, Religious and Minority Violence. Sacramento, CA: State Department of Justice.Google Scholar
Cicourel, Aaron (1968) The Social Organization of Juvenile Justice. New York: John Wiley & Sons.Google Scholar
Cleary, Edward J. (1994) Beyond the Burning Cross: The First Amendment and the Landmark R.A.V. Case. New York: Random House.Google Scholar
Douglas, Jack (1967) The Social Meanings of Suicide. Princeton, NJ: Princeton Univ. Press.Google Scholar
Ericson, Richard V. (1981) Making Crime: A Study of Detective Work. Toronto: Butterworth & Co.Google Scholar
Finn, Peter (1988) “Bias Crime: Difficult to Define, Difficult to Prosecute New Laws and Techniques That Are Putting Violent Bigots behind Bars,” 19 Criminal Justice 20.Google Scholar
Finn, Peter, & McNeil, Taylor (1988) Bias Crime and the Criminal Justice Response: A Report Prepared for the National Criminal Justice Association. Boston: Abt Associates, Inc.Google Scholar
Garfinkel, Harold (1967) Studies in Ethnomethodology. Cambridge, Eng.: Polity Press.Google Scholar
Gasking, Douglas (1965) “Mathematics and the World,” in Flew, A., ed., Logic and Language. Garden City, NY: Doubleday.Google Scholar
Gellman, Susan (1991) “Sticks and Stones Can Put You in Jail, But Can Words Increase Your Sentence? Constitutional and Policy Dilemmas of Ethnic Intimidation Laws,” 39 UCLA Law Rev. 332.Google Scholar
Gerstenfeld, Phyllis B. (1992) “Smile When You Call Me That: The Problems with Punishing Hate Motivated Behavior,” 10 Behavioral Sciences & the Law 259.Google Scholar
Herek, Gregory, & Berrill, Kevin, eds. (1992) Hate Crimes: Confronting Violence against Lesbians and Gay Men. Newbury Park, CA: Sage Publications.Google Scholar
Jacobs, James B., & Eisler, Barry (1993) “The Hate Crime Statistics Act of 1990,” 29 Criminal Law Bull. 99.Google Scholar
Kitsuse, John and Cicourel, Aaron (1963) “A Note on the Uses of Official Statistics,” 11 Social Problems 131.Google Scholar
Los Angeles County Commission on Human Relations (1990) Hate Crime in Los Angeles County 1989. Los Angeles: The Commission.Google Scholar
Martin, Susan E. (1995) “‘A Cross-Burning is Not Just an Arson’: Police Social Construction of Hate Crimes in Baltimore County,” 33 Criminology 303.Google Scholar
Morsch, James (1991) “The Problem of Motive in Hate Crimes: The Argument against Presumptions of Racial Motivation,” 82 J. of Criminal Law & Criminology 659.Google Scholar
National Gay & Lesbian Task Force (1989) Anti-Gay Violence and Victimization in the United States: An Overview. Washington: National Gay & Lesbian Task Force.Google Scholar
O'Brien, Robert (1987) “The Interracial Nature of Violent Crimes: A Reexamination,” 92 American J. of Sociology 817.Google Scholar
Pollner, Melvin (1987) Mundane Reason. Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press.Google Scholar
Reuss-Ianni, Elizabeth (1983) Two Cultures of Policing: Street Cops and Management Cops. New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction Books.Google Scholar
Sacks, Harvey (1972) “On the Analyzability of Stories by Children,” in Gumperz, J. & Hymes, D., eds., Directions in Sociolinguistics: The Ethnography of Communication. New York: Holt, Rinehart & Winston.Google Scholar
Sanders, William (1977) Detective Work: A Study of Criminal Investigations. New York: Free Press.Google Scholar
Sudnow, David (1964) “Normal Crimes: Sociological Features of the Penal Code in a Public Defender Office,” 12 Social Problems 255.Google Scholar
U.S. Department of Commerce, Bureau of the Census (1993) 1990 Census of Population and Housing: Population and Housing Characteristics for Congressional Districts of the 103rd Congress. Washington DC: U.S. Department of Commerce.Google Scholar
U.S. Department of Justice, Federal Bureau of Investigation (1990) Uniform Crime Reporting: Hate Crime Data Collection Guidelines. Washington DC: U.S. Department of Justice.Google Scholar
Walker, Samuel, & Katz, Charles (forthcoming) “Less than Meets the Eye: Police Department Bias-Crime Units,” American Journal of Police.Google Scholar
Weiss, Joan, & Ephross, Paul (1986) “Group Approaches to ‘Hate Violence’ Incidents,” 31 Social Work 132.Google Scholar
Wexler, Chuck, & Marx, Gary T. (1986) “When Law and Order Works: Boston's Innovative Approach to the Problem of Racial Violence,” 32 Crime & Delinquency 205.Google Scholar

Statute

Hate Crimes Statistics Act, Pub. Law No. 101–275, 104 Stat. 140 (1991).Google Scholar