Hate Crime: Developing a Research Agenda

NIJ is developing a research agenda in this area. An NIJ-commissioned report reviewing hate crime literature and legislation was completed in 2005 (Shively, 2005). The report, along with a followup meeting of experts in the field, helped identify key gaps in research. Some of these include—

• Estimating the prevalence of hate crime accurately.
• Evaluating the impact of hate crime legislation on deterrence, punishment, enforcement, training, and reporting.
• Understanding the varied motivations behind hate crimes, and developing empirically based offender typologies.
• Exploring the effects of hate group membership, affiliation with hate groups, and reading materials produced by hate groups on the commission of hate crime acts.
• Learning how hate crime incidents affect victims and their communities.
• Evaluating programs designed to prevent hate crime or assist hate crime victims.

The report further called for the development of a central Federal repository of hate crime information to better address the inconsistencies among groups in defining hate crime and in data collection, measurement, and analysis.