Hate Crime in the Wake of Terror Attacks
| Author | Stephen Machin,Emma Hanes |
| DOI | 10.1177/1043986214536665 |
| Published date | 01 August 2014 |
| Date | 01 August 2014 |
| Subject Matter | Articles |
research-article2014
Article
Journal of Contemporary Criminal Justice
2014, Vol. 30(3) 247 –267
Hate Crime in the Wake
© 2014 SAGE Publications
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DOI: 10.1177/1043986214536665
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From 7/7 and 9/11
Emma Hanes1 and Stephen Machin2
Abstract
This article asks what happened to racially motivated hate crimes in the wake of the
7/7 terror attack that hit London in July 2005 and the 9/11 terror attack that hit the
United States in September 2001. There is anecdotal and descriptive evidence of an
increase in bias-motivated crimes since the 9/11 terrorist attacks in the United States,
but little quantitative research on the issue. This study offers empirical evidence on
the effects of 7/7 and 9/11 on hate crime using rich data from four police force areas
in England with sizable Asian/Arab populations. We find significant increases in hate
crimes against Asians and Arabs that occurred almost immediately in the wake of
both terror attacks, which subsequently decayed, but remained at higher than pre-
attack levels a year later. We argue that this demonstrates a significant link between
terror attacks and subsequent increases in hate crime and hypothesize that attitudinal
changes resulting from media framing and coverage may act as a conduit linking terror
attacks and hate crimes.
Keywords
hate crimes, terror attacks
Introduction
A growing literature has studied empirical issues surrounding the economic and social
effects of terrorism. Attempts have been made to quantify the effects of terrorism on a
number of outcomes, including gross domestic product (GDP; Abadie & Gardeazabal,
1University College London, UK
2University College London and Centre for Economic Performance, London School of Economics, UK
Corresponding Author:
Stephen Machin, Department of Economics, University College London, and Centre for Economic
Performance, London School of Economics, UK.
Email: s.machin@ucl.ac.uk
248
Journal of Contemporary Criminal Justice 30(3)
2003; Bloom, 2009), financial markets (Chen & Siems, 2004), social attitudes or well-
being (Bozzoli & Mueller, 2009; Frey, Luechinger, & Stutzer, 2004), birth weight
(Eskenazi, Marks, Catalano, Bruckner, & Toniolo, 2007; Lauderdale, 2006; Smits,
Krabbendam, de Bie, Essed, & van Os, 2006), and mental health (Metcalfe, Powdthavee,
& Dolan, 2011). Perhaps surprisingly, the evidence seems to suggest that the total effect
on GDP and financial markets of a single terrorist incident is relatively short-lived,
while the effects on well-being and health outcomes are large and can be persistent.
In this article, we explore a different question, asking what happened to racially
motivated hate crimes in the wake of the 7/7 terror attack that hit London in July 2005
and the 9/11 terror attack that hit the United States in September 2001. This is a relevant
outcome to study if, for whatever reason, terror attacks alter individuals’ perceptions of
other groups in society. The article empirically models the impact of terror attacks on
hate crimes, in a setting with a credible research design where focus is placed on the
possible impact on a particular sub-group of society. To do so, we investigate what hap-
pened to hate crime against Asians and Arabs in four regions of England after the 9/11
attack in the United States in 2001 and the 7/7 attacks that hit London in 2005.
While there is anecdotal and descriptive evidence of an increase in hate crimes
against Muslims since the 9/11 terrorist attacks (which we review below), we are not
aware of much quantitative research that tries to accurately pin down the impact of
terror attacks on the incidence of hate crimes. This is what we offer in this article,
where we analyze detailed monthly administrative data before and after the terror
attacks in four English police force areas (PFAs) with a significantly sized Asian/Arab
(predominantly Muslim) population.
We quantify the increased number of hate crimes against U.K. Muslims that
occurred as a result of both the 9/11 attacks and the 7/7 bombings, using data that sub-
divide hate crimes by victim ethnicity. Thus, we can study hate crimes against Asians
and Arabs before and after the attacks, and generate credible estimates by using hate
crimes against Blacks and Whites as a control group.
One clear advantage of studying hate crimes as recorded by the English police is
that they are explicitly defined and quantifiable. Standardized information is collected
by police forces with clear definitions on victims of hate crimes contained in the
National Crime Recording Standard (NCRS), which was instituted in April 2002.
These well-defined victim data therefore facilitate accurate study of time trends in a
way that is not possible with the kind of opinion survey attitudinal, self-reported well-
being, or newspaper coverage data that have been more commonly studied in the ter-
rorism literature. Moreover, actual hate crimes have greater implications—there is a
direct cost to the victim, which may not be the case with attitudinal changes.
To preview our main findings, we report sizable increases in hate crimes against
Asians and Arabs—of the order of 25% to 30%—that occurred almost immediately in
the wake of the two terror attacks. Moreover, while subsequently the increase did not
stay as high as the initial impact, in both cases, it persisted and was still significantly
higher sometime after the terrorist events occurred. In the case of the 7/7 attacks in
Britain, where we have better data to estimate duration effects, cumulative increases
remained significantly higher a year after the attacks.
Hanes and Machin
249
The structure of the rest of the article is as follows. In the section “Theoretical
Background and Existing Evidence,” we consider some theoretical background moti-
vations of our questions of interest and discuss relevant existing evidence. In the sec-
tion “Data and Descriptive Analysis,” we describe the data we use and offer some
initial descriptive analyses. The section “Modeling Approach and Statistical Results”
explains the modeling approach and presents statistical estimates of the impact of the
9/11 and 7/7 terror attacks on hate crime. The final section is the “Conclusion.”
Theoretical Background and Existing Evidence
Hate Crimes in the Economics of Crime
Becker’s (1968) seminal article was the first to consider crime in the economic frame-
work of rational behavior. As with other economic activities, in this approach, crime
results from a simple cost–benefit choice under uncertainty, and the Becker model
generates clear empirical predictions about incentive and deterrence effects on crime.
It is not so clear how useful this approach is for studying hate crime as, in the original
Becker model, harm or loss to the individual is considered an externality, essentially
an unintentional side effect of the offender’s actions. In the case of a hate crime, how-
ever, it has been suggested that loss to the victim is the intention of the crime (Craig,
2002; Gale, Heath, & Ressler, 2002). As well as causing harm to the victim, a hate
crime is often intended to convey a message to the wider group to which the victim
belongs (or is perceived to belong).
Gale et al. (2002) and Medoff (1999) have extended the individual economics of
the crime model to consider hate crime as a consumption good that generates utility,
but at the same time incurs some kind of cost.1 In this utility setting, hate crimes can
be thought of as being driven by factors that alter preferences and they arise, for exam-
ple, if the propensity to commit hate crimes is affected by some kind of shock. One can
ask what kinds of shocks may occur that could make an individual choose to dislike a
hated group more or less at different times. At the micro level, this may be about per-
sonal experiences, education, culture, and environmental changes. At the macro level,
however, we might expect the biggest driver to be current affairs. So in the specific
context of the hate crimes we study, namely, those targeting Muslims, the media fram-
ing and coverage of news events that some individuals may interpret as showing
Muslims in an unfavorable light could be expected to increase the incidence of hate
crime. We could plausibly consider the 9/11 and 7/7 terrorist attacks we study as fea-
turing an extreme form of this media exposure.
Hate Crimes in a Behavioral Approach
In the economist’s rational decision-making framework, an individual decides to com-
mit a hate crime because the expected utility from the action is positive. An alternative
view, which is maybe more applicable to the context we study, is offered by contribu-
tions from behavioral economics. Particularly relevant are those areas that try to
250
Journal of Contemporary Criminal Justice 30(3)
understand why agents make seemingly irrational decisions, even once factors such as
limited information and limited decision-making time have been taken into account.
It seems reasonable to think of hate crimes in a behavioral context in that, while the
prospective gains from acquisitive crime are self-evident, the potential “gains” from
committing a pure act of violence against others are less clear (unless people have a
taste for discrimination of this sort, though ultimately this is a theoretical proposition
...
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