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

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

Organizational attributes may thus be associated with law enforcement responses to hate crime. In this case, I give particular attention to one element of law enforcement organization: the degree to which the law enforcement agency organizes around the concept of community policing. The degree of communication between law enforcement agencies and their communities is potentially salient for two reasons. First, departments engaging in community policing are generally more responsive to proactive initiatives (Kelling & Coles 1996; Friedmann 1992; Goldstein 1990; Kelling & Moore 1988; Fielding 1995; Eck 2003; National Research Council 2004; Greene 2000) such as identifying increases in specific types of crime. It follows that provisions of the HCSA would align with a policing philosophy that takes seriously the acquisition and analysis of crime information to identify hot spots. second, and of particular theoretical importance, just as personnel professionals in the private sector act as windows to the legal environment and help translate legal norms into organizational policies (Edelman 1990; Dobbin, Edelman, et al. 1988), community liaisons are similarly positioned to respond to the demands of their local environment. Elaborating networks and increasing connections among groups in an institutional environment, which is consonant with the community policing ideal, results in new organizational structures, procedures, or policies (Crank & Langworthy 1992). To this end, Jenness and Grattet (2005) expound the concept of organizational permeability, or the susceptibility of an organization to its social or legal environment. The authors specifically point to the community-organization nexus as a salient facet of permeability, largely because organizations with linkages to their community increase exposure to external demands. Jenness and Grattet (2005) find that hate crime policies, in turn, are positively associated with the level of police-community interaction. Building on this insight, I examine the influence of community policing on compliance with hate crime law independent of the department's propensity to comply with other federal crime reporting programs. The data for this analysis are presented in the following section, and the hypotheses are formally stated in Table 1.

Data

The primary data set for this analysis is the 2000 Law Enforcement Management Statistics Survey of Law Enforcement Agencies (LEMAS, hereafter),9 a mail survey of law enforcement agencies conducted in summer 2000 (U.S. Department of Justice 2001). The survey includes detailed organizational data on law enforcement agencies, including department staffing, various functions of the agency, police force demographics, and management and personnel.

The 2000 LEMAS survey is a stratified random sample of law enforcement agencies containing information on 2,985 agencies, including the respective state patrols, municipal and county police departments, sheriffs' departments, and special police such as campus departments and tribal police in Native American communities.10 A questionnaire was mailed to 3,132 policing agencies. Approximately 67 agencies were "out-of-scope"11 and a total of 2,985 agencies responded, for a response rate of 97.4 percent. Respondents included 1,925 municipal police departments, 36 county police agencies, 961 sheriffs' departments, 14 tribal police departments, and 49 state police departments. In this work I focus only on large municipal and county policing agencies. The analysis includes only large police departments because they deal with a sizeable proportion of interpersonal offenses in the United States (National Research Council 2004:49) and very small police departments may encounter few intergroup crimes, including hate crimes. Moreover, since organizational size is associated with organizational complexity (Langworthy 1986; Maguire 2003), the focus on community policing may have little relevance for very small departments.12 The LEMAS methodology divides the sample into "self-representing" and "non-self-representing" agencies, where the former consists of policing agencies with 100 or more sworn full-time equivalent employees.13 I include only these self-representing agencies (100 or more full-time equivalent officers) in this analysis.