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A wealth of research suggests a direct association between minority group size and government social control, such as arrest or imprisonment rates. Prior work in this vein, however, gives scant attention to (1) types of law that explicitly address intergroup conflict and (2) regional variation in the salience of minority group threat. At the same time, research on organizational responses to law indicates that institutional linkages to legal environments dictate policy innovation and compliance, yet the relevance of such linkages for law enforcement agencies is less clear. The present research investigates these themes by focusing on law enforcement responses to hate crime in the United States. Data from a sample of large municipal and county policing agencies and their degree of compliance with the federal Hate Crimes Statistics Act are analyzed. Main effects models show that compliance with federal hate crime law is less likely in places with larger black populations, an intriguing finding in light of extant work suggesting that both formal social control and race-based hate crime offending are typically more prevalent where more blacks reside. This effect of black population size on compliance with hate crime law, however, is contingent on region. A positive correlation in the Northeast contrasts with an inverse association in the South. The findings also suggest that organizational facets of law enforcement agencies, notably their engagement in community policing, are associated with compliance. The results elaborate and qualify group threat explanations of government social control and contribute to a burgeoning literature on the utility of organizational theory in the realm of law enforcement.
Most states and the federal government have enacted some form of hate crimes legislation (Jenness & Grattet 2001), yet there exists significant variation in the degree to which local law enforcement agencies enforce and comply with these laws. Participation in the federal Hate Crimes Statistics Act (HCSA, 1990), for instance, is considerably higher among policing agencies in the Northeast and the West relative to the South and Midwest (McVeigh et al. 2003). Hate crime reporting appears particularly scant in the historic "Black Belt" states. For example, only one law enforcement agency in Alabama and Mississippi combined submitted a hate crime incident report in 2000 (U.S. Department of Justice 2000: Table 12). But to what...