Extreme Hatred: When Hate Crime Becomes Terrorism

• In Event: Hate Crime and Radical Groups

Abstract

Existing literature demonstrates disagreement over the relationship between hate crimes and terrorism with some calling them “close cousins,” while other declare them “distant relatives.” Deloughery, King, Asal (2012) come to the conclusion that the two phenomena are more like the latter in their study, finding that hate crimes are not indicative of future right-wing terrorism; however, they are more often a response to terrorism with anti-minority hate crimes proving especially prevalent after non-right-wing terrorist attacks. The authors note however that their data fails to discern between hate crimes committed by ideological and non-ideological offenders. Therefore, this paper revisits their conclusions about the hate crime-terrorism relationship by replicating and extending their study by utilizing data from the Extremist Crime Database, which provides data on fatal anti-government and bias-motivated attacks by far-rightists. Examining data on hate crimes, far-right extremist attacks, and terrorist attacks from 1990 to 2012, this paper will use times series analysis and negative binomial regression to investigate the relationship between hate crimes and terrorism, testing whether increases in non-fatal anti-minority hate crimes, fatal far-right bias attacks, non-right wing terrorist attacks are associated with increases in fatal far-right bias attacks, far-right terrorist attacks, and fatal far-right bias attacks respectively.

Authors

• Colleen Elizabeth Mills, John Jay College of Criminal Justice / CUNY Graduate Center

• Joshua D. Freilich, John Jay College of Criminal Justice / CUNY Graduate Center

• Jeff Gruenewald, University of Arkansas

• Steven M. Chermak, Michigan State University