“Motivated by Hatred or Prejudice”: Categorization of Hate-motivated Crimes in Two Police Divisions

Recent legislative responses to a perceived increase in hate crimes have resulted in efforts to quantify the rates of occurrence of such crimes. However, there remains little understanding of the processes by which statutory requirements are implemented at the level of front-line personnel like the police. This article examines the situated decisionmaking practices of police detectives in two divisions of a large urban police department charged with collecting official hate crime data. The authors argue that police detectives engage in certain routine practices in order to determine the hate-related status of an incident and that these practices are inflected by the particular institutional arrangements of the divisions and the department in which they operate. They describe in detail the various categorization practices employed in these two divisions and the ways that a seemingly common orientation to the prevalence of hate crimes have differential consequences for the reporting of hate crimes in each division.