Policing Hate Crime

Understanding Communities and Prejudice

Gail Mason, JaneMaree Maher, Jude McCulloch, Sharon Pickering, Rebecca Wickes, Carolyn McKay

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2017
• Print ISBN: 9781138904248
• eBook ISBN: 9781317446125
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Criminology
• Index: Social Sciences

In a contemporary setting of increasing social division and marginalisation, Policing Hate Crime interrogates the complexities of prejudice motivated crime and effective policing practices. Hate crime has become a barometer for contemporary police relations with vulnerable and marginalised communities. But how do police effectively lead conversations with such communities about problems arising from prejudice?

Contemporary police are expected to be active agents in the pursuit of social justice and human rights by stamping out prejudice and group-based animosity. At the same time, police have been criticised in over-policing targeted communities as potential perpetrators, as well as under-policing these same communities as victims of crime. Despite this history, the demand for impartial law enforcement requires police to change their engagement with targeted communities and kindle trust as priorities in strengthening their response to hate crime.

Drawing upon a research partnership between police and academics, this book entwines current law enforcement responses with key debates on the meaning of hate crime to explore the potential for misunderstandings of hate crime between police and communities, and illuminates ways to overcome communication difficulties. This book will be important reading for students taking courses in hate crime, as well as victimology, policing, and crime and community.

Part I
Introduction

1
Introduction

A prejudice motivated crime is a criminal act which is motivated (wholly or partly) by hatred for or prejudice against a group of people with common characteristics with which the victim was associated or with which the offender believed the victim was associated.

(Victoria Police 2010)

I think it’s just a word that is only made for those people who can understand it, so the community wouldn’t understand what it actually means.

(Focus group participant)

Every nation has a story to tell about the vexed and sometimes violent relations between the police who uphold its authority and the minority communities who, in different ways, live in its margins. In recent decades, law enforcement agencies in many Western countries have sought to rewrite the ending to this predictably gloomy narrative by introducing policies to promote trust and confidence amongst diverse communities. Hate crime initiatives are part of this larger community policing trend. In an environment where some forms of social division and marginalisation seem to be intensifying rather than diminishing, hate crime has become a barometer for contemporary police relations with minority communities. But how do police effectively lead conversations about the problems experienced by vulnerable and marginalised communities arising from prejudice? The proposition at the heart of this book is that successful dialogue between police and diverse victim groups depends upon the will to negotiate common understandings of the injustice, harm and human rights violations that are implicit to hate crime. While such dialogue has its roots in long-standing debates about the terminology and language that we use to talk about hate crime, it ultimately calls for a symbiotic relationship that encourages the attribution of shared and negotiated meaning around the nature and significance of hate crime. Such dialogue is central to the legitimacy of policing in this domain.

Policing has always been a core driver of the hate crime movement. As demonstrated by the Stephen Lawrence Inquiry in the UK (Macpherson 1999), inadequate operational and institutional responses from policing agencies both to crime committed against minority communities and complaints from those communities about prejudice-fuelled crime have provided much of the impetus for hate crime policy and law reform since the 1980s. In the context of larger concerns about the over-criminalisation and under-protection of vulnerable populations, hate crime now represents a highly charged interface between policing agencies and their communities. In Policing Hate Crime: Understanding Communities and Prejudice, we aim to interrogate the complexities of effective policing practices and prejudice motivated crime. We consider the value of different language and terminology around hate crime. A common vocabulary to identify, talk about and respond to hate crime provides an opportunity to address sometimes fractured lines of communication between police and those communities experiencing hate crime. While such language is valuable, it is only the first step in the larger goal of achieving a congruent understanding through which to confront prejudice and hate. When different actors construct diverging meanings of hate crime, these definitional mismatches undermine community trust and confidence in policing. Such divergences in narrative create fundamental challenges for police organisations and the pursuit of social justice.

In this book, we explore the potential for misunderstandings of hate crime between police and community and illuminate ways to overcome communication difficulties. Contemporary police are expected to be active agents in the pursuit of social justice and human rights by stamping out prejudice and group-based animosity. At the same time, police themselves have been the vectors of such animosity and violence, reflecting entrenched attitudes and underpinning over-policing of targeted communities as potential perpetrators, as well as under-policing of these same communities as victims of crime. Despite this history, the demand for impartial and democratic forms of law enforcement requires police to challenge prejudice in their own practices and simultaneously respond effectively to hate crime in vulnerable communities.

What is hate crime?

Hate crime has emerged globally as a significant social, political and legal concern. Despite much ambiguity, the concept loosely signifies crime that is motivated or otherwise fuelled by bigotry, bias, hostility, prejudice or hatred towards members of particular groups and communities. For better or worse, it has come to encompass a myriad of prejudice against: racial and ethnic minorities, including black, Asian, Indigenous, Latino/a and Roma communities (Alfieri 2013; Hall et al. 2015; James 2015; Johnson and Cuevas Ingram 2012); disabled people (Hamilton and Trickett 2015; Sin 2015); lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, and gender non-conforming people (Moran 2015; Woods and Herman 2015); religious minorities, including Jewish (Rich 2015) and Muslim people (Chakraborti and Zempi 2012; Noble 2009) and sectarianism in Northern Ireland (Duggan 2015). While some forms of group hostility, such as racism, have received recognition as hate crime from the very beginning, others, such as gender-based animosity towards women, have come up against much more resistance (Hodge 2011).

Victims of hate crime report significant psychological and emotional harm (Barnes and Ephross 1994; Boeckmann and Turpin-Petrosino 2002; Herek et al. 1999; Iganksi 2008), and there is some, albeit contested, research to suggest that they experience more extreme levels of violence compared with non-hate crime victims (VEOHRC 2010). Hate crime sends a ‘powerful message of intolerance and discrimination’ that can have a ‘general terrorizing effect on all members of the target group’ (Sentencing Advisory Council 2009). As an extreme manifestation of a larger continuum of discriminatory and bigoted behaviour, hate crime can attack the security and confidence of entire communities, undermining multiculturalism, equality and harmony (Boyd et al. 1996; Finn 1988; VEOHRC 2010) and tearing at the fabric of democracy (Lawrence 1999).

In effect, hate crime is a human rights concept (Chakraborti 2015) constructed around hierarchies of difference and otherness (Garland 2014; Iganski 2008; Perry 2010a) and largely geared towards acts of violence and intimidation against minority communities (Perry 2001). It is a concept that has become institutionalised in the criminal justice systems of many liberal democracies. The creation of new hate crime offences, the development of policing and prosecutorial policy and the emergence of treatment interventions have all changed the landscape for responding to offenders who are motivated by group-based hostility. This new legislative and policy terrain means that responsibility for hate crime offences is now core business for law enforcement. While ideally the adoption of principles of human rights and procedural justice can help support police in meeting this responsibility (Weber et al. 2014), embedding such principles into prejudice-sensitive policing for vulnerable and marginalised communities has proven more elusive.

Since its inception in the 1980s, and as we explore in more detail in the next chapter, there has been considerable debate about the utility of the concept of hate crime, with many law enforcement agencies favouring less emotive terms, such as bias crime, targeted crime or prejudice motivated crime. To take one example, Stanko (2004) has cogently argued that the most conceptually useful way to consider criminal and other anti-social incidents motivated by racial, religious, sexual or gendered prejudice is through its denotation as ‘targeted crime and incidents’. This allows more effective government and non-government responses to assist a range of vulnerable groups without singling them out as specific targets. These debates are about more than the merits of competing terminology. They embody beliefs about the aetiology of the problem, the way it should be represented and constructed, and how the criminal justice system should respond. While the terminology used to label such forms of crime and violence is central to this book, language is ever only a conceptual scaffold or practical instrument that facilitates, and hopefully enhances, the real work of negotiating common ground and meaning between law enforcement and a diverse body of marginal and vulnerable communities. This is our principal concern in this book.

An international snapshot of hate crime victimisation

Hate crime is conceptually ambiguous. It has no singular, historical or universal definition, much less an agreed-upon mode of measurement. In the absence of a mutual framework, the meaning of hate crime depends on how it is defined, interpreted and construed by different communities and authorities, and in different criminal justice domains (Iganksi 2008; Perry 2010a). Divisions between hate crime scholars, policy makers, practitioners and the public result in competing narratives, which impact on a synthesised approach to policy and practice (Chakraborti and Garland 2014; Perry 2016b). As well as definitional variances, there are qualitative distinctions between jurisdictions in how hate crime is recorded, generating statistical inconsistencies. This makes it difficult to form a comprehensive, quantifiable and ‘real’ picture of the problem or to make meaningful international comparisons (Chakraborti 2015). With these qualifications in mind, we offer a snapshot of hate crime victimisation in a number of broad geographical regions.

The United Kingdom

In 2000, the Association of Chief Police Officers (now the College of Policing) began to refer to hate crime as ‘a crime where the perpetrator’s prejudice against any identifiable group of people is a factor in determining who is victimised’ (ACPO Guide 2000). The perception of the victim or any other person became a core ingredient in this definition (ACPO Guide 2005). Thus, in 2005, a hate crime was defined as ‘[a]ny hate incident, which constitutes a criminal offence, perceived by the victim or any other person, as being motivated by prejudice or hate’ (ibid.). A hate incident has the same characteristics except that it may or may not constitute a criminal offence. More specifically, a racist incident for example is ‘any incident which is perceived to be racist by the victim or any other person’ (ACPO Guide 2000). In 2007, criminal justice agencies in England and Wales adopted a comparably broad, operational definition of hate crime, applying it to five recognised strands of hate crime. Under this definition, a hate crime is any criminal offence which is perceived by the victim or any other person to be motivated by a hostility or prejudice based on a person’s race, religion, sexual orientation, disability or transgender identity (or their perceived status as such) (College of Policing 2014). This definition, which is used primarily for recording purposes by police and the Crown Prosecution Service, is not an exact replica of the legislative definitions of hate crime in England and Wales, but its use of the phrase ‘hostility’ rather than ‘hatred’ does make it more consistent with these statutes. Although these definitions have remained fairly constant, it can be seen that the 2014 Association of Chief Police Officers (ACPO) guide now favours concepts of ‘hostility and prejudice’ over ‘prejudice or hate’ (Chakraborti and Garland 2015). It continues to use the language of hate crime, hate incident and hate motivation, rather than other concepts such as targeted violence (ACPO Guide 2014).

In 2013–2014, there were 44,480 hate crimes recorded by the police in England and Wales, an increase of 5 per cent compared with 2012–2013 (Office for National Statistics 2014). These official hate crimes comprise the five monitored strands, of which 84 per cent (37,484) were based on race, 10 per cent (4,462) on sexual orientation, 5 per cent (2,273) on religion, 4 per cent (1,985) on disability and 1 per cent (555) on transgender (Home Office 2013–2014). Discrepancies between the hate crime figures recorded by police and the results from victim surveys make it difficult to be certain about the size of the problem. For example, Giannasi (2015b) compares data from the 2011–2012 British Crime Survey, which shows that there were 260,000 actual hate crimes, with the official police records of only 43,000. Giannasi notes similar disparities with the US Bureau of Justice figures and argues that data from these two states is compelling evidence as to why under-recording should be considered to be one of the greatest operational challenges for police. He claims that the closing of the gap between these two sets of data is the clearest indication of state progress (ibid.).

While racial (Phillips and Bowling 2012) and homophobic victimisation (Beyond Barriers 2003; Robinson and Williams 2003; Williams and Robinson 2004, 2007) have long been recognised in the UK, the problem of religious hate crime, particularly Islamophobia, is increasingly documented (Chakraborti and Zempi 2012; Taras 2013). Recent large studies of hate crime victimisation, such as the All Wales Hate Crime Project and the Leicester Hate Crime Project, have also recognised the traumatic impact of targeted violence on the basis of other victim characteristics (Williams and Tregidga 2014; see also Milne et al. 2013). For example, the Leicester Hate Crime Project reported on hundreds of victims who referred to being routinely ignored, stared at, abused, threatened and spoken to in a belittling and derogatory manner on the basis of their identity or perceived ‘difference’. For many, these experiences formed a routine feature of their daily lives and had a profound emotional and psychological impact upon them (University of Leicester 2014). Victims made reference to a wide range of identity characteristics with race and ethnicity being the most frequently cited, at 33 per cent (ibid.). However, 21 per cent felt that they were targeted because of their dress and appearance, 17 per cent cited their religion, 14 per cent their gender, 10 per cent their age, 9 per cent their learning disability, 8 per cent their physical disability and 7 per cent their sexual orientation (ibid.). A small but significant proportion of the survey sample (13 per cent) considered they were targeted for ‘other’ reasons (ibid.). Within this group many aspects of ‘difference’ were identified such as having a distinctive or strong accent, a lack of religion, body shape or weight, education status, homelessness, immigration status and social status (ibid.). The question of which victim attributes warrant recognition in the criminal justice system has garnered considerable controversy in the UK (Ashworth 2013, 2014; Heard 2013, 2014; Law Commission 2014), contributing to the devolution of greater discretion to local policing authorities to make decisions about appropriate recording categories for hate crime victimisation (HM Government 2012).

The United States

In the US, for the purposes of collecting statistics, Congress has defined a hate crime as a ‘criminal offense against a person or property motivated in whole or in part by an offender’s bias against a race, religion, disability, ethnic origin or sexual orientation’ (FBI 2015). Hate crime laws have taken many forms throughout the US, with statutes proscribing criminal penalties for civil rights violations, ‘ethnic intimidation’ and ‘malicious harassment’ offences, and enhanced penalties if an extant crime is committed for bias or prejudicial reasons (Grattet and Jenness 2008). Hate crime laws in the US also vary in terms of the groups that are protected, covering race, religion, colour, ethnicity, ancestry, national origin, sexual orientation, gender, age, disability, creed, marital status, political affiliation, involvement in civil or human rights, and armed service personnel (ibid.). Some states also require authorities to collect data on hate or bias motivated crime, implement law enforcement training and provide for victim compensation (ibid.). The statutory ‘mandate to enforce hate crime law’ brings with it definitional ambiguities (particularly in establishing motive), political controversy and criticism of ‘political correctness’ and, for law enforcement, ‘organizational dilemmas connected to agency structures, resource allocation decisions, and workplace culture’ (ibid.). All of these dynamics have been influential in the policing and prosecution of hate crime in the US (Grattet and Jenness 2005, 2008).

The most common forms of targeted crimes reported in the United States have historically been harassment and/or intimidation (Byers and Zeller 1997). Racial violence and discrimination against African Americans and Latina/os has been a continuing problem, intimately linked with a volatile national debate on immigration policy (Alfieri 2013; Johnson and Cuevas Ingram 2012). Hate crime statistics from the Federal Bureau of Investigation for 2013 report 5,928 hate crime incidents involving 6,933 offences, 7,230 victims and 5,808 known offenders (FBI 2014). These statistics show that 49.2 per cent of hate crimes were racially motivated. The FBI figures evidence sexual-orientation bias as the second-most common form (20.3 per cent), followed by religious hate crime, particularly anti-Semitism (16.8 per cent), ethnicity (11.5 per cent, centred on Hispanics), disability (1.3 per cent), gender identity (0.5 per cent) and gender bias (0.4 per cent) (ibid.). Amongst the 6,933 hate crime offences reported, 63.9 per cent were crimes against persons, 35 per cent were crimes against property, and the remaining offences were crimes against society such as drug or narcotic offences or prostitution (ibid.). In terms of victim types, amongst the reported 6933 hate crime offences, 82 per cent were directed at individuals, 4.4 per cent were against businesses or financial institutions, 2.6 per cent were against government, 2.6 were against religious organisations and 1.1 per cent were against society or the public; the remaining 7.3 per cent were directed at other/unknown/multiple victim types (ibid.). As with the UK, a disparity between FBI figures and the USA Victimization Study has also been found (Martin 1999; Turpin-Petrosino 2015) and Meli argues that the FBI statistics do not reveal the full extent of the problem, which may be 19 to 31 times greater, according to Bureau of Justice Statistics (2014). Turpin-Petrosino points out the considerable difference in the statistics makes it clear that a single source of national data cannot be viewed as sufficient to gauge the true scope of hate crime prevalence (2015).

Europe

Although the harm caused by hate crime has a long history of recognition by some European governments (Whine 2015), the term ‘hate crime’ was used officially for the first time by the Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe (OSCE) in 2003. Chakraborti and Garland (2015) point out that the concept has struggled to establish itself in many of the EU nations, even though the ODIHR has developed a definition of hate crime for all of the 57 countries in the OSCE, including the 27 EU member states (ibid.). According to the ODIHR, hate crimes have two key aspects: they must constitute a criminal offence, and the victim must have been deliberately targeted ‘because of [their] ethnicity, “race”, religion or other status’ (ODIHR 2013). ODIHR also uses the term ‘bias’, rather than the more extreme concept of hate, and states that ‘bias’ does not need to be the primary motive for the offence (ODIHR 2013). Even in the face of concerted initiatives within the EU to harmonise hate crime laws, numerous approaches are evident in hate crime statutes (Chakraborti and Garland 2015; Whine 2015). For example, in Germany, an incident is a hate crime if either hate or bias is the primary motive of the offence (Chakraborti and Garland 2015). On the other hand, in Sweden, where the concept of hate crime is comparatively new, the National Council for Crime Prevention’s definition of hate crimes is that they are ‘motivated by fear of or hostility or hate towards the victim based on skin colour, nationality or ethnic background, religious belief, sexual orientation or transgender identity of expression’ (ibid.).

Data collection, capacity building, regulation and policy functions are performed by a number of European agencies including the European Commission Against Racism and Intolerance (Council of Europe), the ODIHR, the European Union Agency for Fundamental Rights (FRA) and the European Court of Human Rights, which has ruled that member states have an obligation to ‘unmask’ the motive behind racial and religious hate crime (Whine 2015). Despite significant effort, collecting hate crime data from a diverse range of countries, each with its own understandings of the term and different policy priorities, continues to prove problematic (ODIHR 2013; Whine 2015). Hence, the monitoring of hate crime and the collation of statistics are carried out in a far from uniform manner across Europe. For example, 25 EU states officially record racist/xenophobic crime; 12 states monitor anti-Semitic crime; eight monitor homophobic crime, and six monitor religiously motivated and Islamophobic crime, while only four monitor transphobic or disablist crime (Chakraborti and Garland 2015). This produces a bi...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of figures
• List of tables
• Notes on the authors
• Acknowledgements
• PART I Introduction
• PART II Context for policing hate crime in Victoria
• PART III The research
• PART IV Conclusion
• References
• Index