Socio-Economic Structural Conditions and Hate Crimes

This dissertation is an explorative study that utilized Social Network theory (SNT) that examined interracial demographic relationships and community characteristics that affect bias or hate crimes in Los Angeles County. In evaluating the relationships among racial groups of White, Latino, and Black in 84 cities, two arguments are proposed and tested. First, bias crimes are a unique social construct and phenomenon that occurs as a defensive mechanism to an in-migration of racial or ethnic “others” supported by the defended neighborhood arguments. Second, bias crimes comparatively are similar to other deviant behaviors and that it is more likely to occur in communities where experiences of concentrated socioeconomic disadvantages are prevalent. The results confirm and are consistent with other research findings that anti-Black hate crimes are closely associated with changes in the communities where incoming Black demographic shifts are visible. A similar outcome was expected but did not support the Latino in-migration demographic population shift. The findings also demonstrate that the Black race is the most targeted victim group of hate crimes, followed by White and Latino racial, ethnic groups. The interpretation is that social processes mediating prejudicial behavior from developing are independent phenomenon distinctly operate by perceived or real embedded historical and contemporary narratives about a target racial group. Consistent with scholarly research, the study did find support for unemployment and poverty linked to hate crimes. On the other hand, the remaining variables for education, median income, housing price, divorce, separation, homeownership, and rental occupancy demonstrated murky results.