Hate Crimes, Law Enforcement Response To

Crimes motivated by one's hatred toward another's race, ethnicity, national origin, religion, sexual orientation, or other innate characteristics are unilaterally condemned by Western societies as unjustified attacks. Although such crimes have existed for centuries, it was not until the 1980s that they gained recognition as a special type of criminal offense. Today, these crimes are labeled in federal and state statutes, and in local law enforcement policies, as hate- or bias-motivated crimes. James Garofalo and Susan Martin identify three reasons that there is special focus on hate crimes. 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. Third, although several racially motivated crimes received national attention, most hate crimes are not serious in terms of penal law and therefore receive only modest police attention. Accordingly, without special law enforcement programs and laws, many believe that these crimes will not receive the resources necessary to adequately sanction offenders, significantly deter future perpetrators, or satisfactorily address community fears and victim needs.

In the early 1980s, many law enforcement agencies began to place greater importance on attaching hate as a motivation for criminal acts. By 1989, the Police Executive Research Forum, the Police Foundation, the National Black Police Association, and the National Association of Blacks in Criminal Justice all supported legislation mandating the collection of information on hate crimes. In turn, these national initiatives gave political impetus for expanding financial resources to local law enforcement agencies. For example, following the several crimes thought to be related to organized hate groups in the late 1970s, several large U.S. police departments, including Boston and New York City, established hate crime investigative units. These units were assigned the responsibility of investigating incidents that responding officers believed were motivated by hate. Often, these units were also given the responsibility of showing that the police gave high priority to these crimes by engaging populations at risk for hate crimes through periodic meetings and community activities. These units were also used to monitor racial tensions to try to address minor problems before they escalated. For instance, the Phoenix Police Department's Bias Related Crime Incident Unit formed a Hate Crimes Advisory Committee to foster better relationships between the police and various religious, racial, and ethnic groups so that victims would be more likely[Page 210] to report potential problems and crimes. Many small U.S. law enforcement agencies also expanded their resources to address hate crimes by training their officers to investigate these incidents, creating agency-wide policies detailing how officers and supervisors should respond to an incident, and creating accounting systems to track the number of hate-motivated crimes. In time, even some smaller departments, such as the New Haven Police Department in Connecticut, followed the lead of large metropolitan police agencies by creating special hate crime investigation units. Similarly, by 1995, 23% of law enforcement agencies on college campuses with 2,500 students had special hate crime programs or units.

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