Dissecting the Link Between Racial Segregation and Hate Crimes: An Analysis of U.S. Metropolitan Areas

• In Event: Patterns of Prejudice: Modeling and Analyzing Hate Crime Distribution in American Cities

Abstract

Racial segregation has remained a persistent and central feature of American society, despite ongoing efforts over centuries to address racial inequities, violence, and hatred. While emerging literature has explored the effects of residential segregation on various criminological issues, previous studies have not sufficiently examined how multiple dimensions of segregation may relate to racially motivated crimes. Despite a growing body of research, much of the existing analysis of segregation and hate crimes has relied on the dissimilarity index, an aspatial methodology that is limited by its lack of spatial measures and distributions for racial groups. This study addresses this gap by utilizing the National Crime Victimization Survey: Metropolitan Statistical Area (MSA) Public-Use Data (2000–2015), which we combine with multiple dimensions of racial segregation. We identify these dimensions through factor analysis of several measures of racial residential segregation that capture distinct aspects of segregation: evenness, exposure, concentration, centralization, and clustering, for a sample of MSAs in 2000 and 2010. The findings from the regression models highlight the crucial role of spatial distributions of racial groups in understanding hate crimes driven by racial bias across MSAs.

Authors

• Sylwia Janina Piatkowska, Florida State University

• Whitney Whittington, Independent Researcher

• Cecilia Chouhy, Florida State University