In an ideal world, all hate crimes would be correctly identified by police authorities. However, this is not always the case. Rather, some hate crimes are not identified by the police, and some non-hate crimes are identified as potential hate motivated crimes. Previous research has focused primarily on reporting of hate crimes, the perception of reported cases and clearance. However, not much has been done in terms of understanding police officer’s identification of these cases. This thesis investigates the accuracy and factors influencing officers identifying bias motivated crimes. By using data of identified potential hate crimes identified by police officers among reported crimes and identified hate crimes by the Swedish council for crime prevention (BRÅ) this thesis generated an analysis of factors influencing identification of both bias and non-bias crime. Furthermore, an estimation of police officer’s accuracy in identifying hate crimes has been calculated. Results suggest that hate crimes are more likely to be identified if they are fitting a more stereotypical hate crime profile and if they are perceived as more ideal cases. Furthermore, among all identified hate crimes, the ones that are falsely identified as hate crime are often perceived as more ideal cases. In addition, cases with more stereotypical characteristics seems to be more often identified as a hate crime. This do suggest that some ideal characteristics are highly influential in identification. Among identified cases, around half of the cases had a true bias motive, indicating that accuracy of identification in biased motivated cases is around fifty percent.
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:UPSALLA1/oai:DiVA.org:mau-67946 |
| Date | January 2024 |
| Creators | Dahlin, Svante |
| Publisher | Malmö universitet, Fakulteten för hälsa och samhälle (HS) |
| Source Sets | DiVA Archive at Upsalla University |
| Language | English |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | Student thesis, info:eu-repo/semantics/bachelorThesis, text |
| Format | application/pdf |
| Rights | info:eu-repo/semantics/openAccess |
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