Policing hate crime in New York and Philadelphia

As an academic my interest in hate crime has emerged from a specific interest in the policing of hate crime both in this country and in the United States. In late 1999, as a postgraduate student, I was invited by London’s Metropolitan Police Service to undertake a small-scale research project to assess the unfolding of new policies and practices for policing hate crime following the publication of the Stephen Lawrence Inquiry. The research subsequently expanded and continues to date. While my original focus was on the Metropolitan Police, in the summer of 2003 I began a comparative study of the policing of hate crime in New York and Philadelphia to see how policing practices in this field differed among the three cities. My interest in New York as a comparison with London, and Philadelphia as a comparison with both, arose primarily from my own curiosity in relation to some basic numbers which I have placed in Table 9.1 (Hall, 2004).