Hate Crimes

U.S. Response

Although crimes motivated by hatred have existed for centuries, there was no push in the United States to distinguish them as a special type of criminal offense until the early 1980s. Advocates from several special interest groups argued, using three general reasons, that hate crimes needed special attention from law enforcement agencies. First, because hate crime offenders target innate characteristics of a group, victims may have greater difficulty in coming to terms with their victimization. Second, some hate crimes appear to have contagious effects on the victim's community that could lead to a backlash against the offender's community. Third, although racially motivated crimes occasionally receive national media attention, most hate crimes are not serious in terms of the penal law and, therefore, will receive only modest police attention. Accordingly, many have argued that, without special law enforcement programs and laws, these incidents will not receive the resources necessary to sanction offenders proportional to the harm they caused to their victims, nor will they significantly deter future perpetrators or satisfactorily address community fears and victim needs.

To address concerns raised by advocates and others, nearly every U.S. state and the federal government have, over the past 30 years, formally addressed hate crimes in one way or another. Yet despite these widespread legislative activities, there is neither a consistent definition for what constitutes a hate crime nor a standard policy for how law enforcement should respond effectively. States legislatures and the federal government do not agree on which groups to include, what activities represent incidents, or what incident attributes are necessary to label a crime as hate motivated.