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White supremacist groups and hate crime

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Abstract

Hate group activity may incite criminal behavior or serve as protection from bias-based violence. I find that the presence of one or more active white supremacist chapters is associated with higher hate crime rates. I reject the hypothesis that chapter presence and hate crimes are symptomatic of the overall level of bias-based violence. Moreover, I reject the hypothesis that white supremacist groups form in response to an increase in antiwhite hate crimes, particularly those perpetrated by nonwhites.

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Notes

  1. The SPLC tracks many types of hate groups. This analysis includes only white supremacist hate groups: the Ku Klux Klan, neo-Nazis, racist skinheads, and Christian Identity churches from 1997 to 2007.

  2. The concept of a hate crime, especially early on, was nebulous and had yet to be tested constitutionally. Between 1984 and 1999, the US appellate court considered the constitutionality of hate crime statutes 38 times, suggesting to Phillips and Grattet (2000) that the questions of constitutionality and rules had become settled by the late 1990s.

  3. Mancur Olson (1965) developed the idea that individual members of a group attempting collective action will often have the incentive to free-ride on benefits provided by other members. Often used as a call for government action (Hobbes 1955), small groups as diverse as sheep herders in the Alps (Ostrom 1990) and pirates in the Caribbean (Leeson 2007, 2009) have designed incentive structures to overcome the collective action problem.

  4. Iannaccone (1992) and Berman (2000, 2003) demonstrate why rational, utility-maximizing individuals voluntarily sacrifice to join religious organizations, fraternities and sororities, communes, and hate groups.

  5. Theoretical models of government formation out of anarchy are developed by Nozick (1974) and Buchanan (1975).

  6. There are a number of spontaneous, private enforcement mechanisms that can develop in the absence of formal government (Benson 1989; D’Amico 2010; Leeson 2007; Powell and Stringham 2009; and Schaeffer 2008).

  7. Christian Identity members are religious adherents. They believe that whites are the decedents of the lost tribes of Israel, that non-whites are soulless, and that Jews are the decedents of the Serpent from the Book of Genesis.

  8. A county may be home to a hate group even though none is reported as present for that calendar year; it is possible that the hate group chapters simply did not draw attention to themselves that calendar year. In order to determine the effects of this possibility, I constructed alternative measures assuming that a county was hate group free only if that county witnessed no hate group activity over multiple years. If an active hate group was present during any one of these years, I assumed that the hate group was simply silent during the others and continued to be present over the entire time period. Using this methodology, I constructed three alternative measures of white supremacist activity: one in which I considered a hate group to have been disbanded only if it had been silent for two years, one for three years, and one for four years. Repeating the estimation in Table 2 using these three alternative measures reveals qualitatively and quantitatively similar results. Results are available from the author upon request.

  9. I do not include real expenditures on police protection because data are available only for 1997 and 2002 at the county level from the Census Bureau’s Census of Governments. When including real police expenditures, the presence of an active white supremacist chapter is associated with a larger increase in all types of hate crimes than shown by the estimates presented in Table 2.

  10. The Hausman test value of 73.65 with 20 degrees of freedom results in a p-value of 0.00, thus rejecting the null that the more efficient random effects estimator returns the same estimates as the fixed effects estimator.

  11. Hate crime data reported by the FBI are “from all law enforcement agencies that submitted either of the following: (1) at least one National Incident-Based Reporting System Group A Incident Report, a Group B Arrest Report, or a Zero Report for at least 1 month of the calendar year; or (2) at least one Hate Crime Incident Report and/or a Quarterly Hate Crime Report” (http://www2.fbi.gov/ucr/hc2008/data/table_12_dd.html, Viewed 7/11/10).

  12. Agencies whose jurisdictions cover multiple counties do not identify the country in which the reported hate crime took place. Only 5.5 % of hate crime incidents are reported by agencies covering multiple counties. For agencies that cover more than one county jurisdiction, I assign the crimes to the first county listed for that agency in the Law Enforcement Agency Identifiers Crosswalk (US Dept. of Justice, Bureau of Justice Statistics 2000).

  13. Even though states such as Georgia, Alabama, and Mississippi have no state data collection statutes, some agencies voluntarily submit hate crime reports to the FBI.

  14. Most of this criticism is based on the incentives watchdog organizations have to exaggerate the number of hate group members and organizations. However, if the number of active white supremacist chapters is biased upward, the resulting estimated coefficients will be biased downward. Therefore, the potential bias of the SPLC works against finding a positive relationship between white supremacist activity and hate crime.

  15. Ideally, another source could verify the SPLC’s measures of white supremacist activity. Unfortunately, most organizations interested in hate crimes, such as the Stephen Roth Institute, are concerned only with certain types of hate crimes. Moreover, none of these organizations measure hate group activity at the local level on a nationwide basis.

  16. Although the SPLC reports hate group location by city or town, the analysis is performed at the county level for theoretical and empirical reasons. First, many hate groups chapters hold rallies and recruitment meetings outside their hometowns in nearby locations and thus include members from the surrounding towns and townships. Second, because many of these towns are not in MSAs, county-level data represent the least aggregated measures of crime, unemployment, poverty, and the like that are available.

  17. In 2000, the Southern Poverty Law Center began monitoring neo-Confederate organizations. This study does not include those organizations because of their initial omission by the Southern Poverty Law Center; nor does it include black separatists or the “Other” category.

  18. Not all active hate groups can be assigned to a single county. For instance, the SPLC reports an active North Carolina chapter of the Knights of the White Kamelia (Ku Klux Klan), but does not list a city; when no city is reported, the hate group is not included in the analysis. The percentage of omitted active groups ranges from 1.2 % in 1998 to 12.8 % in 2007.

  19. Appendices A, B, C, and D report alternative specifications. Appendix A repeats Tables 2, 3, 4 and 6 but replaces the indicator variable, active it , with the number of active white supremacist chapters, number it . Appendix B excludes observations from 2001 to determine whether September 11th, 2001, affects the estimates. Appendix C estimates the effects of white supremacist chapters and hate crimes in neighboring counties. Appendix D reports whether spatial-autoregressive dependence is present in the hate crime rate or the error term when looking at the cross-sectional spatial estimations. All additional results are available at http://www.seanemulholland.com/newpage12/papers/hate_crime_appendices.pdf.

  20. Table A1 in the online Appendix A (see footnote 19) reports similar estimation results if the indicator variable is replaced by the number of white supremacist chapters. Table B1 repeats the estimation in Table 2 but excludes 2001 to find that there is no significant September 11 effect.

  21. Agencies covering multiple counties do not report the county in which a hate crime took place. Therefore, I also estimate Eq. (2) excluding the 5.5 % of hate crimes reported by agencies covering multiple counties. The estimated coefficient on active white supremacist chapters is 0.029 and significant at the 5 % level. This corresponds to a 20.0 % higher hate crime rate. It may also be the case that counties that report at least one hate crime differ systematically from those counties that never report a hate crime. Restricting the sample to only those counties that report hate crimes between 1997 and 2007 reveals that the presence of a chapter is associated with 331 more hate crimes per 10,000 residents, an increase of 13.8 %.

  22. I perform three tests for autocorrelation. The Wooldridge test for first-level autocorrelation returns an F(1,3101)=3.981 with a prob>F=0.05, just barely failing to reject the null of no autocorrelation. However, the modified Bhargava et al. (1982) Durbin-Watson statistic of 1.78 and the Baltagi-Wu (1999) LBI statistic of 1.93 both suggest the presence of first-order autocorrelation.

  23. The collapsed instruments used in the difference equation of the GMM estimation are hate crime t−r and crime rate t−r for t from 1997 to 2007 and r from 3 to 8. The collapsed instruments used in the levels equation of the GMM estimation are Δhate crime t−2 and Δcrime rate t−2 for t from 1997 to 2007. Given the number of instruments, I conduct a Hansen’s J-statistic overidentification test based on the weighted matrix. The resulting Hansen J value for the 38 instrumental variables used is 13.642. With a resulting p-value of 0.625, I fail to reject the null that these instruments are valid. Another overidentification test, the Sargan test, is more reliable but not appropriate if errors are heteroscedastic.

  24. The Arellano and Bond two-stage procedure generates estimates of the standard deviation that can be biased. For this reason, the estimated standard errors are reported using the Windmeijer (2005) correction.

  25. For only those counties that report one or more hate crimes, the relationship between hate crimes and white supremacist hate groups is imprecisely estimated when using the GMM estimator.

  26. The variable hate crime(excluding antiwhite) i,t is constructed using the entire county population in the denominator.

  27. The Wooldridge Test (F(1,3101)=4.467) fails to reject the null of no autocorrelation. The modified Bhargava et al. Durbin-Watson statistic of 1.74 and the Baltagi-Wu LBI statistic of 1.96 both suggest the presence of first-order autocorrelation.

  28. The variable hate crime(white-on-other) i,t uses the total population as its denominator because biased motivation can include racial as well as nonracial characteristics, such as gender, religion, and sexual identity

  29. The presence of autocorrelation in the restricted sample in column 3 of Table 3 is rejected by the Wooldridge Test (F(1,3101)=0.729) and the Baltagi-Wu LBI statistic of 2.07. I report the GMM estimator in column 4 in Table 3, however, because the modified Bhargava et al. Durbin-Watson statistic of 1.83 rejects the null of no autocorrelation.

  30. I thank an anonymous referee for suggesting this estimation strategy.

  31. All other independent variables from the earlier estimations are included. I do not report the estimated coefficients on the other independent variables for the sake of brevity.

  32. Potential white supremacist members may be more concerned over hate crimes by nonwhites that are listed as antiwhite. Replacing the change in hate crimes by nonwhites with the change in antiwhite hate crimes committed by nonwhites and reestimating Eqs. (4) and (6) results in no significant relationship.

  33. Included in the “Other” category are the Charles Darwin Research Institute (CDRI 2010), “a scientific and educational foundation established to honor and extend the scientific revolution inaugurated by one of the greatest figures in the history of human thought” (CDRI, http://www.charlesdarwinresearch.org), and the Family Research Institute (2010), whose goal is “to generate empirical research on issues that threaten the traditional family, particularly homosexuality, AIDS, sexual social policy, and drug abuse” (Family Research Institute, http://www.familyresearchinst.org).

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Acknowledgements

Beneficial suggestions were received from seminar participants at the College of the Holy Cross, Lebanon Valley College, Macon State College, Mercer University, Stonehill College, meetings of the Southern Economic Association, and meetings of the Association for Private Enterprise Education. I wish to extend my gratitude to Angela K. Dills, Rey Hernandez-Julian, Peter Leeson, Matt Ryan, Diana Weinert Thomas, Robert Tollison, two anonymous referees, and the editor for their valuable comments and suggestions. Errors or deficiencies that have to this point survived this counsel are most assuredly mine alone.

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    Sean E. Mulholland

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Mulholland, S.E. White supremacist groups and hate crime. Public Choice 157, 91–113 (2013). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11127-012-0045-7

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