Hate crime in the United States

This chapter provides an overview of hate crime in the United States. It focuses on two main topics: hate crime legislation and hate crime statistics. The chapter discusses that dozens of hate crime laws have been enacted across the United States at the federal and state levels. Although hate crime statistics are more comprehensive in the United States than in many other countries, the data likely fail to capture the true extent of the problem because of methodological shortcomings. Moreover, existing empirical studies on hate crime in the United States focus primarily on hate crime victimisation, resulting in limited information about hate crime offending, policing, and prosecution. As a consequence of the broad police powers that the United States Constitution vests in the states, most hate crime laws – and criminal laws generally – derive from state codes created by state legislatures. In addition to official statistics and victimisation surveys, several researchers have studied hate crime in the United States.