The Difference “Hate” Makes in Clearing Crime

DOI10.1177/1043986214536663
Published date01 August 2014
AuthorAki Roberts,Christopher J. Lyons
Date01 August 2014
Subject MatterArticles
Journal of Contemporary Criminal Justice
2014, Vol. 30(3) 268 –289
© 2014 SAGE Publications
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DOI: 10.1177/1043986214536663
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Article
The Difference “Hate”
Makes in Clearing Crime:
An Event History Analysis
of Incident Factors
Christopher J. Lyons1 and Aki Roberts2
Abstract
Studying hate crime clearance rates provides an opportunity to uncover the factors
that influence police effectiveness for a relatively new legal category—one that was
designed ostensibly to protect minorities, and that may pose unique challenges for
police reporting, defining, and investigation. Using multiple years (2005-2010) of data
from the National Incident-Based Reporting System (NIBRS), we estimate event
history models to compare the incident-level predictors and relative probability of
arrest for hate and nonbias crimes. As an aggregate category, we find hate crimes
are less likely to clear than nonbias crimes. However, the most prototypical hate
crimes—White-on-non-White incidents motivated by racial and ethnic bias—are as
likely to clear as the most successfully cleared nonbias crimes. Our results suggest
that only hate crimes that fit popular constructions of “normal victims and offenders”
receive investigative outcomes comparable with otherwise similar nonbias offenses.
Keywords
hate crime, clearance, law enforcement
Since the term hate crime first appeared in the legal arena in the late 1970s and early
1980s (Grattet, Jenness, & Curry, 1998), hate or bias crimes1 have come to refer to
criminal offenses motivated at least partially by offender prejudice against a victim’s
putative group membership. As a legal concept, hate crime distinguishes between
1University of New Mexico, Albuquerque, USA
2University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee, USA
Corresponding Author:
Christopher J. Lyons, Department of Sociology, University of New Mexico, MSC05 3080, 1 Albuquerque,
NM 87131-0001, USA.
Email: clyons@unm.edu
536663CCJXXX10.1177/1043986214536663Journal of Contemporary Criminal JusticeLyons and Roberts
research-article2014
Lyons and Roberts 269
crime motivated by bias and otherwise similar crime. The majority of U.S. states have
enacted some version of hate crime legislation, including laws that explicitly penalize
bias-motivated crimes, laws that increase civil liability for hate crime offenders, and
laws that require officials to collect hate crime statistics (Grattet et al., 1998; Soule &
Earl, 2001). In addition to state law, the U.S. Congress passed the federal Hate Crime
Statistics Act in 1990, mandating the Attorney General to collect data on crimes moti-
vated by animus (King, 2009; Nolan, Akiyama, & Berhanu, 2002).
At one level, the rapid diffusion of hate crime legislation in the last three decades
indicates widespread success of the antiviolence movement. Via lobbying and political
consciousness-raising efforts and sponsoring hate crime legislation, groups such as the
Anti-Defamation League of B’nai Birth, the Southern Poverty Law Center, and the
National Gay and Lesbian Task Force “collectively redefined age-old conduct and
constructed new portraits of victimization” (Jenness & Broad, 1997, p. 31). However,
official recognition from the state in the form of social policy is not the only goal of
social movements. The antiviolence movement also seeks the proper mobilization and
enforcement of the law—including the allocation of police effort to investigate and
clear reported hate crime incidents by arrest. Modern hate crime policy represents an
attempt to engage the legal system in combating criminal acts motivated by prejudice
(Grattet et al., 1998; Levin, 1999), yet we are only beginning to explore the effective-
ness of police responses to reported hate crimes.
Clearance refers to the investigation of an incident resulting in the arrest of a sus-
pect, and as such, is often used as a measure of law enforcement effectiveness (Paré,
Felson, & Ouimet, 2007; Riedel, 2008).2 Social scientists recognize that low or declin-
ing clearance rates, especially for serious crimes, may have deleterious consequences
for law and society more broadly. Poor clearance rates may reduce the deterrent effect
of the criminal justice system, public trust in the police, and morale among police
officers, and may also traumatize victim’s families or increase fears of victimization
(Riedel & Jarvis, 1998). Studying hate crime clearance rates provides an opportunity
to uncover the factors that influence police effectiveness in responding to a relatively
new legal category—one designed ostensibly to protect minorities, and that, as many
have noted, may pose unique challenges for police reporting, defining, and investiga-
tion (Berk, Boyd, & Hamner, 1992; Cronin, McDevitt, Farrell, & Nolan, 2007; Jacobs
& Potter, 1998; Martin, 1995, 1996). Given the conceptual ambiguities and controver-
sies facing this relatively new legal category of crime, clearance rates offer some indi-
cation of the institutionalization and “settling” (Phillips & Grattet, 2000) of the concept
in law enforcement.
Some work has begun to examine law enforcement responses to hate crimes (e.g.,
Cronin et al., 2007; Garofalo & Martin, 1993; Grattet & Jenness, 2008; King, 2007,
2008; Martin, 1995, 1996; Wilson & Ruback, 2003), yet researchers have rarely stud-
ied the factors leading to hate crime clearance by arrest (see Stacey, 2008, for an
exception). Furthermore, researchers have yet to explore the relative likelihood of
clearance for both bias and nonbias crimes across multiple jurisdictions and states.
Most research on conventional crime conceptualizes clearance as a function of (a) the
quality or quantity of evidence produced by a case above and beyond police control

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