New Report: Investigating the Logic of Hate Crime 

With bias serving as only one factor in the profile of hate criminals, bias reduction is an ineffective prevention method 

NEW YORK, NY — Hate crime is a pressing concern in the United States. Yet the debate about what causes hate crime, and how best to control it, is underinformed. Discussions often take for granted that hate crimes are always manifestations of pure and undeterrable bigotry, as the public and many policymakers repeatedly take the most severe hate-crime offenders as typical of the group more generally.  

In a new report, Manhattan Institute fellow Charles Fain Lehman investigates two new sources of data on hate crimes from New York State and the borough of Manhattan and draws a provocative but important conclusion: hate-crime offenders often resemble other criminals, particularly in their criminal histories. This implies, he argues, that most hate-crime offenders are not exclusively or even always primarily motivated by hatred. Additional factors like criminal entitlement or serious mental illness are also common motivations for committing hate crimes.   This does not mean that the “hate” in hate crimes doesn’t matter, Lehman argues, nor that hate crimes should not be separately recognized. But it does suggest something about how to address them. If people commit hate crimes for the same reasons they commit non-hate crimes, both can be properly controlled by the traditional criminal justice system. Likewise, efforts to remediate other pathologies associated with such offenses (mental illness, homelessness, and drug use) are also useful. Efforts to reduce hate crime through so-called bias reduction, education, or social-media content moderation, however, are unlikely to meaningfully affect hate-crime offending. Given hate crime prevention’s finite resources, policymakers should focus on deterring and incapacitating criminals, rather than changing the hearts and minds of the peaceful bulk of the public.

Click here to view the full report.