A Model of Minority Victim Devaluation: Racialized Violent Crime Statistics and Differential Hate Crime Policing Practices

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  In Refereed Roundtable (90 minute): Table 7: Crime, Criminalization, and the Carceral State

Abstract

The central premise of the current study is that police agencies differentially construct hate crime statistics as a function of racialized ecological conditions. Drawing upon racialized organization theory (Ray 2019), the social construction of crime statistics (Kitsuse and Cicourel 1963), and institutional signaling frameworks (Espeland and Stevens 2008), we argue that when law enforcement agencies construct minority groups as disorder-producing within their jurisdictional contexts, officials can effectively revoke the institutional protections associated with victimhood status for crime victims belonging to such groups.
To examine this notion, the current study uses official crime statistics as the disorder-producing mechanism and differential hate crime compliance as the protection-withdrawal mechanism. To measure protection-withdrawal processes, we examine differential hate crime reporting compliance. Specifically, we assess whether agencies in counties with more Black and non-White violent crime and homicide arrest rates are more likely to engage in differential hate crime policing practices. Building upon recent research that explicitly distinguishes between agencies that submit nonzero hate crime reports and those that submit zero-sum reports over consecutive reporting years, we argue that this distinction can provide a critical window into institutional signals of victim devaluation.
We expect to find that agencies operating in counties with elevated non-White and Black violent and homicide rates are systematically less likely to submit nonzero hate crime reports, and that this pattern is strongest for anti-Black hate crime compliance specifically. If supported, these findings would suggest that the institutional production of victim worthiness is not merely a function of individual officer discretion but is embedded in the racialized ecological conditions that shape organizational priorities more broadly, with implications for how scholars understand the relationship between racial hierarchy, bureaucratic governance, and the distribution of state protection.

Authors

• Jack M Mills, Florida State University

• Brendan Lantz, Florida State University

• Kyle G. Knapp, Florida State University

• Marin R Wenger, Florida State University

• Maeve E. Donnelly, Florida State University