A Geographical Analysis of Socioeconomic and Ideological Drivers of Hate Crime in the United States

Abstract

Criminal activities motivated by hate are the most extreme form of bias against people. While hating a class of people and organizing in hate groups to express feelings against those people are not illegal, hate crimes, violent and non-violent, are illegal. However, there remains much to be learned about geographic patterns of hate crimes and facilitating environments. This exploratory research examines hate crime occurrences aggregated to counties in the conterminous United States and attempts to explain resulting patterns using socioeconomic and ideological correlates with traditional and spatial statistics. Geographical patterns of hate crimes in the Unites States are found to be a complicated phenomenon.