Abstract

Significant variation among the legal and scholarly definitions of hate crimes impact how these crimes are measured. Although scholars tend to use the Uniform Crime Reports to understand the scope of hate crime in the United States, these data suffer from limitations due to this lack of conformity as well as the future of local agencies to submit hate crime statistics. Furthermore, a crime has to be reported to police to be counted in the UCR data. Using the National Crime Victimization Survey (NCVS) 1992-2005, this paper examines the factors related to police reporting behavior by violent hate crime through analyzing the demographic (gender, race, education, age, urban location) and the contextual characteristics of the incident (victim-offender relationship, severity: injury to victim, weapon used, multiple offenders). Particular attention was given to racial hate crimes to investigate differences within hate crime victimization categories. Understanding the mechanisms of police reporting behavior is important because the failure of victims to contact authorities undermines the ability of the criminal justice system to appropriately punish hate crime offenders and effectively deter future incidents. Supporting previous studies on victimization reporting, severity of the incident, gender and offenders unknown to the victim significantly and substantially increased reporting likelihood. Most interestingly, race did not dramatically impact reporting behavior for total hate crime, but had a significant and substantial effect on racial hate crime. Victimizations of Whites were more than 50 percent more likely to be reported than Non-White victimizations for racial hate crime.