This article details an NIJ-supported study by the START Consortium that details a need for flexible approaches to monitoring and rehabilitating those that commit hate crimes.
Individuals who commit hate crimes do so out of a variety of motivations, and the demographic and other characteristics of those individuals can vary widely depending on the type of hate crime committed. A National Institute of Justice-funded study by the National Consortium for the Study of Terrorism and Responses to Terrorism on what drives people who perpetrate hate crimes found that, in light of those diverse motivations and traits, the tools needed to monitor and rehabilitate those individuals must be flexible and capable of addressing risks in heterogeneous populations. It advanced research on hate crime by equipping researchers, practitioners, and policymakers with the first-ever dataset of a national sample of hate crime perpetrators, assembling data from the period 1990 to 2018. The database, known as the Bias Incidents and Actors Study, or BIAS, analyzed information on 966 adults who had been arrested or indicted for violent or non-violent hate crimes.