Highlights
Many involved in hate crimes have histories of criminality/violence and mental health issues coupled with being under the influence at the time of the crime.
Some targeted victims with whom they had a pre-existing, seemingly amiable, relationship.
Some are younger, unemployed, and unmarried people. Some have deficient work performances. Some commit their crimes in groups. Many cases are simply escalations of routine disputes.
Author
Background-FBI Hate Crime Statistics
Of the 6,780 known offenders, 55.1% were white, and 21.2% were Black or African American. Other races accounted for the remaining known offenders: 1.1% were Asian, 1% were American Indian or Alaska Native, 0.5% were Native Hawaiian or Other Pacific Islander, and 5.4% were of a group of multiple races. The race was unknown for 15.7%, FBI.
Background-Mass Shooters
While not necessarily hate crimes, there are similarities between mass shooters and bias crimes. Persons who committed public mass shootings in the U.S. over the last half century were commonly troubled by personal trauma before their shooting incidents, nearly always in a state of crisis at the time, Crime Solutions.Gov
Article
The data below is from a National Institute of Justice-US Department of Justice funded study analyzing who commits hate crimes.
We all have friends and relatives who are gay or Jews or African Americans or Asian Americans or any group suffering from a legacy of profound hate or discrimination.
Many involved in hate crimes have histories of criminality/violence and mental health issues coupled with being under the influence at the time of the crime. Some targeted victims with whom they had a pre-existing, seemingly amiable, relationship. Some are younger, unemployed, and unmarried people. Some have deficient work performances. Some commit their crimes in groups. Many cases are simply escalations of routine disputes.
The challenge is that all of these variables are common characteristics of everyday criminality per USDOJ research. I assume that those associated with bigoted peers and groups coupled with the variables above are a cause for concern.
Asian Americans tell stories of being afraid to ride the New York City subway system and walk city streets because of violent victimization. I was in the parking lot of a synagogue school in an unmarked state vehicle (I parked far away from the facilities to take a phone call) when a member quickly approached me asking the reason for my presence. After explaining that I was the senior spokesperson for a state justice agency and showing identification, he explained that they were concerned about attacks on their children.
My African American friends and coworkers tell stories of scary confrontations and insults. Older African Americans (including people I reported to running major justice and law enforcement agencies) offered histories of discrimination.
African Americans and Jews have been attacked multiple times in synagogues and churches. I have Jewish friends who tell me that every time they enter a synagogue, they are concerned about the safety of their friends and families. To suggest that this is tragic is today’s understatement.
The disabled have much higher rates of violence. Gay individuals suffer from the same. Senior citizens have high rates of burglary and fraud. Hispanics have a long history of discrimination and criminal victimization (read any history of the American west).
Hate crimes destroy the peace and serenity of productive people valuable to any functioning society. The NIJ report is part of an ongoing effort to establish common characteristics and is useful from an investigative or preventive perspective.
National Institute of Justice-November 30, 2021
Individuals who commit hate crimes do so out of a variety of bias-based motivations, and the demographic and other characteristics of those individuals can vary widely depending on the type of hate crime committed.
A recent study of unprecedented scope on what drives people who perpetrate hate crimes found that, in light of those diverse motivations and traits, the tools needed to monitor and rehabilitate those individuals must be flexible and capable of addressing risks in heterogeneous populations.
Among other key findings in the study by the National Consortium for the Study of Terrorism and Responses to Terrorism (START) are:
- Those arrested or indicted for hate crimes motivated by the victims’ religious characteristics tend to be older, have more military experience, have higher rates of mental health concerns, and are more likely, compared to those who commit other types of hate crimes, to cause mass casualty events.
- Those motivated by bias on the basis of sexual orientation, gender, or gender identity are often younger, unemployed, and unmarried when they are arrested or charged with hate crimes. They are also more likely to commit hate crimes with peers and while under the influence of drugs or alcohol.
- Those who target others because of their race, ethnicity, or nationality have higher rates of previous criminal activity. They are most likely to belong to organized hate groups.
- Some who commit or are charged with hate crimes are fully engaged with the worlds of bigotry and hate, while others act upon common themes of prejudice in American communities.
- Those who commit mixed-motive crimes engage in spontaneous crimes at a higher rate and are more likely to act in a public setting.
- Some commit crimes of opportunity, and others premeditate their offenses.
Purpose: A First-Ever Dataset
The purpose of this study by START was to enhance understanding of characteristics of hate crime, also known as bias crime, in the United States. The study team defined a hate crime “as a criminal offense that is at least partially motivated by some form of identity-based prejudice,” according to START’s report resulting from the study.
The study advanced research on hate crime by equipping researchers, practitioners, and policymakers with the first-ever dataset of a national sample of hate crime perpetrators, assembling data from the period 1990 to 2018. The database, known as the Bias Incidents and Actors Study, or BIAS, analyzed information on 966 adults who had been arrested or indicted for violent or non-violent hate crimes in any of the following categories:
- Race, ethnicity, or ancestry
- Religion
- Sexual orientation, gender, or gender identity
- Disability
- Age
The BIAS dataset employed more than 80 variables to pin down and collectively analyze factors associated with people who commit hate crimes, including:
- Demographic traits
- Education and employment histories
- Criminal records
- Peer associations
- Hate group affiliations
The BIAS database also incorporates details on the nature of the hate crimes covered.
More Key Findings
The BIAS study distinguished factors that apply to those who commit violent hate crimes from those who commit non-violent hate crimes.
When individuals commit violent hate crimes, they often do so with peers while under the influence of alcohol or drugs. Hate crimes are more likely to be violent when committed for reasons of sexual orientation or gender identity. And perpetrators of those acts are more likely to have a violent past.
Even among those who commit violent hate crimes, however, there is diversity in terms of behaviors and other attributes. For instance, those planning mass casualty events were significantly more likely, when acting alone, to target religious victims. That group also had high rates of deficient work performance and mental health issues.
The BIAS research also revealed that conventional attempts to capture traits of those who commit hate crimes often fail to capture the complexity of their motivations. The new research showed that:
- Many of those individuals had mixed motives, including financial and other material goals.
- Some targeted victims with whom they had a pre-existing, seemingly amiable, relationship or previous interactions.
- Some were motivated by national demographic changes and political rhetoric rather than local conditions. But the smaller number of individuals motivated by perceived local threats were more likely to join others in committing hate crimes (64.7%) than were those motivated by national conditions (37.4%).
Additional Implications
Needed flexibility in tools, policies, and programs for monitoring and rehabilitating people who engage in hate crimes would extend common risk assessment measures to cover prejudice type, levels of ideological commitment, and hate crime target selection, the START researchers concluded. In addition, risk assessments should be able to identify more concerning configurations of cognitive, social, and behavioral risk, such as some combination of criminal history, substance abuse, and association with bigoted peers, the START report said.
It was noted, however, that there may be no way to preemptively measure hate-crime risk in the many cases that are simply escalations of routine disputes.
Another implication of the study, the researchers reported, was that rehabilitation of individuals who commit hate crimes must address a wide array of possible concerns.
Study Design
The Bias Project followed the example of the NIJ-supported PIRUS database profiling political extremists by (a) building a large, open-source database to identify and code attributes of individuals who commit hate crimes, (b) using advanced analytical methods to make robust inferences about those individuals.
Of the individuals identified for inclusion, 93.5% were male and 80% were Caucasian.
To qualify for inclusion in the BIAS database, an individual must have met the following criteria:
- Arrested or indicted for a criminal offense from 1990 to 2018.
- Eighteen years old or older at the time of the act.
- Resided in the United States at the time of the act.
- Committed or escalated the criminal act because of bias against the victim or target’s actual or perceived identity characteristics, according to substantial evidence.
- Was the subject of sufficient information in open-source materials to code the details of their crimes and, at minimum, the majority of their demographic traits.
Individuals eligible to be included in the BIAS database were identified through:
- The PIRUS database, which yielded over 300 qualifying cases ultimately included in the BIAS database.
- Searches of news aggregating sites.
- Watchdog reports and other criminal databases
- Targeted searches to identify potential names for inclusion from small populations of hate crime perpetrators that do not normally garner as much public attention.
Limitations
The project’s reliance on open sources for data, as well as sensitive and private data, resulted in some gaps in data, but common statistical techniques were used to analyze data with a range of unknown values. Next, the START researchers noted potential limitations in the representativeness of the BIAS sample.
There was no national baseline of people who engaged in hate crimes, against which to measure the BIAS database. Further, substantially more data was available on cases from more recent years than cases in the 1990s. The team oversampled cases from 1990 to 1996 to compensate.
The START team cautioned that the BIAS hate crime database was not intended to be, and should not be used as a comprehensive source for reporting aggregate hate crime trends. Rather, the BIAS database is a sample to be examined to learn about traits of persons who commit hate crimes, key risk factors, and pathways to offending.
About This Article
The research described in this article was funded by NIJ award 2017-VF-GX-0003, awarded to the National Consortium for the Study of Terrorism and Responses to Terrorism. This article is based on the grantee report “A Pathway Approach to the Study of Bias Crime Offenders,” (2021), M. Jenkins, Principal Investigator, E. Yates, and S. Kane.
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An Overview Of Data On Mental Health at Mental Health And Crime.
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