Problematizing Hate Crime-Related Data to Examine Systemic Issues in the Reporting, Prosecution, and Conceptualization of Hate Crime

This dissertation project problematizes several hate crime-related data sets, to examine systemic issues in the reporting, prosecution, and conceptualization of hate crime. For the past 30 years, US federal data on hate crime reporting have shaped policy addressing violence against racialized minorities, and hate crime prosecutions have been spotlighted as symbolic gestures of the state's intolerance of such violence. Yet geographic and racial disparities within police reporting of hate crimes and court prosecutions reflect systemic issues with hate crime laws and their application. This project utilizes quantitative methods and critical theory to evaluate and conceptualize how disparities in hate crime-related data are related to other systemic inequities indicative of structural racism. Leveraging methods from public health scholars' measurement of structural racism, I first examine whether lack of hate crime reporting, and racial disparities in police reports of hate crime offenders, are associated with indicators of structural racism across other areas of society. Next, I evaluate whether racial disparities in hate crime sentencing are connected to indicators of structural racism in Colorado and New York. Connecting literature from abolition geography, critical data studies, and studies of hate crime data, I then illustrate how quantitative study designs can be used to more clearly reveal the workings of structural racism in the context of hate crime data. My study addresses the fraught space between contemporary abolitionist thought and hate crime laws, raising questions about the implications of geographic and racial disparities in hate crime-related data for designing solutions to racialized vigilante violence.