Willingness to report hate crimes: How attitudes, police perceptions, and sexual orientation shape bystander response

Purpose

While hate crime underreporting is associated with perceptions of police and attitudes toward minorities, less is known about factors that shape bystanders' willingness to report hate crimes. This study focuses on sexual orientation-motivated hate crimes in the US context. Utilizing a social identity theory framework, we examined the interactions of bystanders' sexual orientation, pre-existing attitudes toward sexual minorities, and perceptions of police on their reporting willingness.

Methods

We used a factorial survey experiment with random assignments (n = 2094) to estimate a set of binary logistic regressions with robust standard errors. We compared models with and without two-way and three-way interaction terms and further estimated predicted margins.

Results

Although we do not detect the effect of sexual orientation on willingness to report hate crimes, the three-way interaction reveals that attitudes toward sexual minorities and perceptions of police influence bystander reporting willingness across sexual orientation groups differently. Specifically, heterosexual respondents show a decreased reporting willingness as police perceptions become more positive, while non-heterosexual respondents demonstrate a more complex pattern where reporting willingness is contingent on the interaction between their attitudes and perceptions of police.

Conclusions

More positive perceptions of the police can affect the willingness to report sexual orientation-motivated hate crimes differently across groups and may help reduce existing biases toward sexual minorities.