Hate Crimes as Political Violence

• In Event: Domestic Political Violence, Arrests, and Public Attitudes

Abstract

Most explanations for racial violence emphasize local geographic indicators, such as economic or demographic shifts. This paper challenges that conventional wisdom by instead emphasizing the importance of national trends in driving White racist action in the form of hate crimes. First, I argue for the necessity of understanding hate crimes as a form of politically-relevant racial violence, and then I utilize a series of machine learning models to explore whether local factors consistently correlate with hate crime rates at the city level. These models undermine conventional wisdom by suggesting that hate crimes are only consistently correlated with high White populations and the presence of hate groups, the latter of which does not seem correlated with local factors. Traditional explanations such as economic instability or demographic shift are largely unreliable as predictors. Instead, by looking at ARIMA models of hate crimes over time, I argue that hate crime increases are most tied to national events, including 9/11 and Trump’s electoral victories, regardless of local demographic factors. I therefore urge a new understanding of racial violence that grounds the role of the broader political environment in driving hate.

Author

• Sean David Long, George Washington University