UC Irvine

Scholarship on hate crime in U.S. neighborhoods has yet to learn from Los Angeles; this dissertation addresses that empirical gap and provides theoretical assessment of what hate crime law has wrought over the last three decades in California and the United States. The picture is generally of expansion and then decline in use, while the best evidence shows that rates of hate crime victimization remain unchanged. Originally conceived as a statistical monitoring system, hate crime law currently monitors its own infrequent use by police across the United States. The system appears broken; public interest in and law enforcement use of hate crime, while mixed, has been at historically low levels until recently. Regression analyses of hate crime in Los Angeles neighborhoods demonstrate the distinctive relationships between hate crime and changing racial composition and economic characteristics in Los Angeles neighborhoods when compared to other cities covered in the scholarly literature. My analysis of anti-black hate crime across Los Angeles from 2003-2014 provides evidence in favor of the argument that demographic change and economic inequality increase police reported hate crime. There are nuances to these relationships: neighborhoods with more black households moving into areas that are predominantly Latino or white neighborhood are associated with more hate crime, but only at certain tipping points for the percentage of households that are Latino or white. Income inequality makes a strong difference at moderately high levels, but models predict low numbers of anti-black hate crime at low inequality and very high inequality.