Context of Minority Group Threat: Race, Institutions, and Complying with Hate Crime Law, The

Law & Society Review, Mar 2007 by King, Ryan D

A wealth of research suggests a direct association between minority group size and government social control, such as arrest or imprisonment rates. Prior work in this vein, however, gives scant attention to (1) types of law that explicitly address intergroup conflict and (2) regional variation in the salience of minority group threat. At the same time, research on organizational responses to law indicates that institutional linkages to legal environments dictate policy innovation and compliance, yet the relevance of such linkages for law enforcement agencies is less clear. The present research investigates these themes by focusing on law enforcement responses to hate crime in the United States. Data from a sample of large municipal and county policing agencies and their degree of compliance with the federal Hate Crimes Statistics Act are analyzed. Main effects models show that compliance with federal hate crime law is less likely in places with larger black populations, an intriguing finding in light of extant work suggesting that both formal social control and race-based hate crime offending are typically more prevalent where more blacks reside. This effect of black population size on compliance with hate crime law, however, is contingent on region. A positive correlation in the Northeast contrasts with an inverse association in the South. The findings also suggest that organizational facets of law enforcement agencies, notably their engagement in community policing, are associated with compliance. The results elaborate and qualify group threat explanations of government social control and contribute to a burgeoning literature on the utility of organizational theory in the realm of law enforcement.

Most states and the federal government have enacted some form of hate crimes legislation (Jenness & Grattet 2001), yet there exists significant variation in the degree to which local law enforcement agencies enforce and comply with these laws. Participation in the federal Hate Crimes Statistics Act (HCSA, 1990), for instance, is considerably higher among policing agencies in the Northeast and the West relative to the South and Midwest (McVeigh et al. 2003). Hate crime reporting appears particularly scant in the historic "Black Belt" states. For example, only one law enforcement agency in Alabama and Mississippi combined submitted a hate crime incident report in 2000 (U.S. Department of Justice 2000: Table 12). But to what extent police compliance with hate crime law departs from compliance with general crime reporting mandates, and whether variation in compliance is at all attributable to minority group size, remains unknown. The task of the present research is to exploit jurisdictional variation in police compliance with the HCSA to investigate the impact of minority group size on an understudied and arguably undertheorized facet of social control-the formal social control of intergroup conflict.

Prior research demonstrates a robust association between minority group size in a geographic area and levels of government social control. The size of the black population, in particular, is positively associated with arrest rates (Liska, Chamlin et al. 1985), incarceration rates (Myers 1990), police force size (Kent & Jacobs 2005), police mobilization (Earl et al. 2003) and expenditures (Jackson & Carroll 1987), legalization of capital punishment (Jacobs & Carmichael 2002), and support for punitive policies (Baumer et al. 2003). This association between minority group size and criminal law is most frequently interpreted through the lens of group threat theory (Blalock 1967), which posits that large minority populations threaten the majority group's hold on power, and thus state sanctions are employed to obviate such threats (Liska 1992).

Despite extensive research in this theoretical tradition, at least two questions concerning the breadth and context of group threat theory persist. First, research almost exclusively employs minority group threat to explain types of social control that disproportionately affect racial minorities, such as incarceration rates (Greenberg & West 2001), felon disenfranchisement laws (Behrens et al. 2003), or minority arrest rates (Eitle et al. 2002). Less research, however, investigates the association between minority group threat and facets of social control designed to protect minority populations, such as hate crime laws. Disputes that largely entail majority group offenders and minority group victims, such as hate crimes (Messner et al. 2004), constitute "upward law" (Black 1976:21-2) and may thus elicit minimal law enforcement. The present research builds on Black's insight in conjunction with the group threat thesis as advanced in the areas of law enforcement (Jackson 1989), civil rights law (Vines 1964), and prejudice (Taylor 1998; Quillian 1996) to suggest that minority group size increases the use of law that adversely impacts minority groups but decreases the use of law aimed at protecting minorities. Law enforcement compliance with hate crime law is a useful venue for empirically investigating that proposition.