Checking Under the Hood: Hate Group Concentration, Affiliation, and Racial Disparities in Police Killings

• In Event: Racially-Motivated Extremism, Discrimination, and Other Bias Outcomes

Abstract

Post-Civil War narratives reveal the blurred lines between law enforcement and vigilante groups, with both overlapping in membership and exerting control over marginalized racial groups to retain authority. The gap between law enforcement and racially motivated hate groups has widened over time, yet racial tensions and injustice remain, highlighted by incidents like the murder of George Floyd , among many others. Following this, the current research assesses the relationship between the contextual presence of hate groups and policing, including the size of the local police force and police killings of different racial groups. Specifically, in multilevel models, we examine the relationship between hate groups in a county and local police force size. In county-level models, we also estimate the impact hate groups have on the number of police killings of Black people, and on racial group disparities (e.g., Black-White) of police killings. In additional analyses, we re-estimate these models using indicators of specific hate groups with particularly explicit racialized histories (e.g., white nationalists, neo-Confederates, KKK). Drawing from intergroup threat, social dominance, and postcolonialism frameworks, findings link the contextual presence of hate groups with police actions, guiding several policy recommendations and theoretical implications.

Authors

• Jack M. Mills, Florida State University

• Brendan Lantz, Florida State University

• Marin R. Wenger, Florida State University