White College Students’ Racial Prejudice and Perceptions of Racial Hate Crime

This study investigated how racial prejudice influences White college students’ perceptions of hate crime. We also examined the moderating effects of the race of the victim of hate crimes and the absence of hate crime laws. Our sample included 581 White students in a predominantly White university located in a state that does not have a hate crime law. The study was set up in a 2 (race of the victim and the perpetrator) × 3 (level of assault) factorial design. Participants rated their perceptions of three scenarios (i.e., non-racially biased simple assault, racially biased simple assault, and racially biased aggravated assault). The dependent variables were perceptions of hate crime and willingness to report. The key independent variable was participants’ level of racial prejudice. The moderators included race of the victim in each scenario and whether participants’ state of origin has a hate crime law. Results suggest that higher levels of modern racism were associated with lower perceptions of hate crime and lower willingness to report racially biased simple and aggravated hate crime. When the victim was White, participants with higher levels of racial prejudice were more likely to perceive a hate crime and more willing to report it. The opposite was true when the victim was Black. The absence of state hate crime laws and race of victim were significant moderators. Our study suggests that racial prejudice is associated with lower perceptions of hate crime and willingness to report. Furthermore, the moderating effect of the race of victims provides insights on how racial prejudice can lead to a differential perception of hate crime, depending on whether one’s racial in-group is targeted. Our findings also highlight the importance of having state-level hate crime laws to mitigate the linkage between modern racism and perceptions of hate crime.

Ageism as a Hate Crime: The Case for Extending Aggravated Offences to Protect Age Groups

This article argues that hate crime laws in England and Wales should be extended to protect age groups by aggravating offences that are based on or motivated by hostility to age groups. I critically assess the following arguments for this: that age-related hate crime can impose greater psychological distress than equivalent non-hate crime and this justifies the increased punishments that aggravated offences offer; that hate crime laws can justifiably protect older people because older people are relatively vulnerable to crime; that extending aggravated offences to protect age groups can justifiably punish hate crime offenders for their increased culpability in contributing to marginalisation of age groups; and creating distinct aggravated offences for age-hostile crimes has symbolic value to reflect the grave moral wrong of these crimes and to communicate that the state is committed to eradicating discrimination against age groups.

Blue Lives Matter and Hate Crime Law

The Blue Lives Matter movement began in 2014 as a rejoinder to accusations of police racism in the United States. Blue Lives Matter advocates for the expansion of hate crime statutes to include police and other first responders as protected victim categories. Four US states have enacted such reforms: Louisiana, Kentucky, Mississippi and Texas. With some minor exceptions, this is the first time that hate crime laws have been extended to a victim category that represents an authoritative arm of the state. This article examines the social significance of these laws. Drawing on the results of a critical discourse analysis of legislative debates surrounding the enactment and attempted enactment of blue hate crime laws, the article argues that these laws pit police and Black citizens against each other. In situating new legal protections for police within hate crime statutes, blue reforms contain an implicit attempt to reframe the history of police brutality toward Black Americans by claiming that police are a subjugated and targeted minority at the hands of a Black community of dangerous and biased perpetrators: a new black/blue relation of power.

Hate Crime Policy in the United States

Hate crime policy has developed from the early legislation of the 1968 Civil Rights Act to the 2009 Matthew Shepard and James Byrd Jr. Hate Crime Prevention Act, to be increasingly inclusive in terms of identity and comprehensive in terms of ramifications. Hence a body of scholarship around the trajectory and implications of hate crime laws has developed, as has a robust discourse on the definitions of hate crime itself and theories on who perpetrates bias-motivated violence and why it occurs. Between definitions of hate crime, a tension exists between legal definitions and those of theorists who are attempting incorporate understanding of context into the definition. Similarly, the theories on who perpetrates hate crimes and why they occur exhibit tensions between strain-based theories. While some scholars have deployed Merton’s (1938) strain theory associated with societal anomie, others point to changing norms. As hate crime laws have become more inclusive of sexual orientation and gender identity/expression, avenues of research into the disparities in experience of bias-motivated crimes between enumerated categories has increased. Persistent in the research on hate crime is the deficiency of data on victimization and ramifications beyond direct victims. While data on the scope of the policies is clear, inconsistencies in data collection around victimization render available resources insufficient. Most recently, research on hate crime policy has intersected with queer theory to question whether hate crime laws are positive for the LGBTQ community or society at large. Organizations such as the Silvia Rivera Law Project, for example, have pushed back on calls for inclusive hate crime laws via challenging the propensity to provide additional resources to the prison-industrial complex. Furthermore, queer scholars of history find a disconnect between the origins of the LGBTI movement in resisting police powers to be antithetical to promoting increased police powers in the form of hate crime legislation.

Thoughts, Crimes, and Thought Crimes

Thought crimes are the stuff of dystopian fiction, not contemporary law. Or so we’re told. Yet our criminal legal system may in a sense punish thought regularly, even as our existing criminal theory lacks the resources to recognize this state of affairs for what it is—or to explain what might be wrong with it. The beginning of wisdom lies in the seeming rhetorical excesses of those who complain that certain terrorism and hate crime laws punish offenders for their malevolent intentions while purporting to punish them for their conduct. Behind this too-easily-written-off complaint is a half-buried precept of criminal jurisprudence, one that this Essay aims to excavate, elaborate, and defend: that the proper target of an offender’s punishment is always the criminal action itself, not the offender’s associated mental state conceived as a separate wrong. Taken seriously, this precept would change how we punish an assortment of criminal offenses, from attempts to hate crimes to terrorism. It also would change how we conceive the criminal law’s core axioms, especially the poorly understood but surprisingly important doctrine of concurrence.

Is There a Gap in Canada’s Hate Crime Laws? The Identification Of Soft Violence as a Tool for Current Right-Wing Extremist

Since the beginning of Donald Trump’s campaign for the United States’ presidency, the international community has arguably seen a significant uptick in hate-motivated right-wing extremist (RWE) violence. While this is not the first time that sentiments such as racism, anti- Semitism, and misogyny have gained widespread popularity, it could be argued that the means through which these ideas are being communicated and the ways in which they are being expressed have transformed. One aspect that has not changed is the presence of hate crime in the locations where RWE actors or sentiments are prevalent. These hate crimes can cause fear in the communities that are being targeted by RWE messengers, thereby disrupting community harmony and public safety as a whole.

Hate Crimes Hurt More, but so Do Co-Offenders: Separating the Influence of Co-Offending and Bias on Hate-Motivated Physical Injury

One of the primary motivations for hate crime laws is that hate crimes “hurt more.” But hate crimes are often committed by groups, and research indicates that crimes committed by groups are also more violent than other crimes. This research focuses on one type of harm, physical injury, asking, are hate crimes more violent because they involve co-offenders or because of the bias motivation behind the incident? Results using data from the National Incident-Based Reporting System (NIBRS) indicate that hate crimes are positively associated with serious injury, but that this association is partially driven by co-offenders. More importantly, co-offending moderates this relationship: Incidents involving bias and co-offending are especially violent. Anti-sexual orientation incidents were an exception to this pattern, however, and are likely to be violent regardless of co-offending. These results suggest that hate crimes do hurt more, but that this relationship is partially attributable to the influence of co-offenders.

The Need for New Tools to Break the Silos: Identity Categories in Hate Speech Legislation

The implications of specifying certain identity categories have been widely debated in the context of hate crime laws and policies. However, they have been less thoroughly examined in the particular contexts of hate speech. Although the majority of laws regulating speech do not differentiate between identity categories, the ‘stirring up’ offences of the United Kingdom Public Order Act 1986 are stratified along grounds of race, religion and sexual orientation. This article argues that, while the concerns raised about identity categories in relation to hate crime legislation are equally relevant to the stirring up provisions, the proposed solutions cannot automatically be transposed to hate speech offences. Accordingly, this article explores challenges that are encountered in attempts to make hate crime and hate speech legislation more inclusive before advancing some tentative suggestions for how hate speech laws might move beyond identity silos.