Hate Crime Policing as an Indicator of Structural Racism and Inequality: Bridging Disciplines, Theories, and Methods

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Abstract

A recent criminological development has uncovered an alarming institutional bias in how hate crime incidents have been handled across 22,450 American police departments. Mills, Lantz, and Wenger (2024) found that more than half of American police departments reported zero hate crimes in their jurisdictions when submitting data to the FBI, despite the improbability of hate crimes being entirely absent from these communities—especially after several consecutive years. Over time, this pattern suggests that compliance with hate crime reporting programs—encouraged by the federal government—may serve more as a bureaucratic formality than a genuine commitment to protecting marginalized communities from targeted violence. To describe this phenomenon, Mills and colleagues introduced the concept of “ceremonious compliance”—a term that highlights how institutions formally adhere to reporting guidelines while substantively failing to actually protect marginalized populations. Their findings demonstrate that ceremonious compliance is more common in political, social, and historical contexts marked by persistent disparities. While criminologists are increasingly examining police bias, we argue that ceremonious compliance offers a novel metric for capturing structural racism. Sociologists have long sought effective ways to measure racial stratification and institutional discrimination. By analyzing variations in hate crime reporting practices, we demonstrate how policing behaviors reinforce broader systems of racialized social control. Specifically, we assess statistical associations between ceremonious compliance and structural racism across four domains: employment and income, educational attainment, health and healthcare, and neighborhood segregation. This research encourages sociologists to integrate this criminological context into assessments of racial stratification, inequalities, and disparities.

Authors

• Jack M Mills, Florida State University

• Brendan Lantz, Florida State University

• Marin R Wenger, Florida State University