The geography of hate crime in California, 2015–18

Understanding hate crimes, and especially ideologically bias-motivated crimes has become an important research topic. Scholarly work focused on the geographic patterns of hate crimes has been produced in recent years. This study examines the spatial distribution of hate crimes in California, and addresses questions related to the locations of counties and communities reporting a high occurrence of bias-motivated crimes. In addition, we compare the regional patterns of these crimes’ occurrence during the 2015–2018 four-year period. The hate crime data used here has been obtained from California’s Department of Justice Statistics Center and the U.S. Department of Justice Information Services. The results of the spatial statistical analyses indicate a consistent tendency towards the clustering of bias-motivated offenses, and a high frequency of hate crime incidents in Southern California counties during the 2010s.