Researchers from Florida State University’s College of Criminology and Criminal Justice have earned lead-article honors in Criminology, the top journal in the field, for their work investigating how hate crimes are reported by law enforcement agencies.
The study, Understanding Community Hate Crimes as an Incorrigible Proposition: Local Political Attitudes, Path Dependence, and the Ceremonious Reporting of Hate Crime Statistics, explores ceremonious compliance, a source of sociocultural bias in the reporting of hate crimes that undercounts or wholly dismisses their existence. Criminology is the flagship journal of the American Society of Criminology.
Doctoral student Jack Mills served as the article’s lead author while Associate Professors Brendan Lantz and Marin Wenger co-authored the paper. The paper demonstrated that, while local law enforcement agencies might file hate crimes statistics for inclusion at the federal level, their participation is often ceremonious.
Mills, a fifth-year doctoral student, said the study reveals a bias by many local law enforcement agencies which leads them to report no actual hate crimes in their area, despite evidence to the contrary. The study found instances of ceremonious compliance concentrated among law enforcement agencies in the south and explores its broader implications.
“Your findings demonstrate empirically that such bias is systematically driven by numerous social and historical factors, with implications (in our view) for the adjudication of justice, particularly at the local level,” the editors of Criminology said in an announcement.
“I feel extremely proud and also very thankful that the faculty here are so willing to work on research with students,” Mills said. “This paper began in a graduate course taught by Dr. Lantz and was greatly elevated by my coauthors.”
Lantz commended Mills’ years-long work on ceremonious compliance and noted that the problem is one that permeates the areas in which it occurs.
“If an agency is ceremoniously compliant and reporting zero hate crimes year after year, it facilitates a culture that trickles down to the individual level,” he said.
For their part Lantz and Wenger said Mills’ work will spark continued exploration of ceremonious compliance.
The paper is now eligible to be selected as Criminology’s article of the year.
“It’s rare for a student to get published in Criminology and super rare to earn the lead article,” Wenger said. “It can be great for a student’s confidence and, for Brendan and myself being his mentors, it’s special for us as well.”
Wenger added: “This also shows that we have the training for students here in the College, to be able to produce this sort of research.”
For more information visit the Hate Crime Research & Policy Institute.