Accomplishing Difference: How Do Anti-race/Ethnicity Bias Homicides Compare to Average Homicides in the United States?

Scientists under Surveillance: The FBI Files

<i>The First Counterspy: Larry Haas, Bell Aircraft, and the FBI’s Attempt to Capture a Soviet Mole</i> by Kay Haas and Walter W. Pickut

This study took advantage of the new open-source Extremist Crime Database (ECDB) to overcome obstacles to studying domestic far-right terrorism from a criminological perspective. In the past, exclusive definitions and inclusion criteria have limited available data on violent crimes committed by domestic far-right terrorists, and official data on violent crimes fail to capture offenders’ links to domestic far-right terrorism and ideological motivation (e.g., anti-government, anti-abortion, anti-religion). Therefore, little is known about the nature of far-right terrorist violence and how such violence is similar to and different from routine or more common forms of violence. Focusing on homicides, this study addressed why and how open-source terrorism data and official crime data can be comparatively analyzed. In doing so, we also demonstrate the utility of synthesizing terrorism and official crime data sources. Data on 108 far-right terrorist homicides were taken from the ECDB. Data on 540 common homicides (five comparison homicides for each far-right terrorist homicide) were randomly sampled from the 2000 Supplementary Homicide Reports. Using multiple imputation by chained equations and logistic regression, we imputed missing values and estimated models to compare the two homicide types on 12 different victim, offender, and event characteristics. Relative to common homicides, we found that far-right terrorist homicides were significantly more likely to have white offenders, multiple victims, multiple offenders, and to occur between strangers, and they were significantly less likely to have white victims, to be carried out with a firearm, and to occur in cities with more than 100,000 residents.

Jews and Jewish institutions have suffered the majority of reported religion-motivated hate crimes in the United States for nearly two decades. According to the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI), in 2014 the 609 reported anti-Semitic incidents made up 59% of all religious bias hate crimes alone. Rates of reported anti-Semitic hate crimes vary considerably over the course of a year. Yet, little scholarly attention has been given to what factors cause reported anti-Semitic hate crimes to fluctuate so substantially in the United States. This paper hypothesizes that violent Israeli military engagements are critical in explaining weekly surges of reported anti-Semitic hate crimes. Utilizing FBI hate crime data from 2001 to 2014 and fixed effects negative binomial regression models, consistent findings underscore that violent Israeli military engagements significantly increase the likelihood of a state reporting anti-Semitic hate crime. Most dramatically, their occurrence increases the likelihood of reported hate crime intimidating individuals or characterized as violent by nearly 35%. This paper underscores that homeland perpetrated violence can directly impact the security of diaspora communities.

The high incidence of violence between family members has become increasingly well documented in the last decade so that it is now generally recognized that large number of individuals in the United States will experience some sort of violence at the hands of family members at some time in their lives (see, for example, Straus & Gelles, 1986; Straus, Gelles, & Steinmetz, 1980). At the most extreme end of the continuum of this violence, the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) reported that 14% of the 20,045 homicide victims in the United States in 1990 were murdered by members of their own families (FBI, 1990). As is the case with all types of homicide, African Americans are victimized by lethal violence at the hands of family members at rates that are many times higher than those for other racial groups in the United States (Mercy & Salzman, 1989; Plass & Straus, 1987). This article will present descriptive analysis of this special subset of family murders, namely, those that occurred among African Americans. There are number of reasons for an examination of family homicides occurring specifically among African Americans. First, although the inordinately high rate of homicide among African Americans has been observed and documented for many decades (Hackney, 1969; Hawkins, 1986a; Lottier, 1938; Shannon, 1954; Silberman, 1978), there has been what criminologist Darnell Hawkins (1986b) calls a lack of systematic detailed analysis of the phenomena, including attention to intra-group distribution and patterning

<i>F. B. Eyes: How J. Edgar Hoover’s Ghostreaders Framed African American Literature</i>. William J. Maxwell. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2015. Pp. x+367.

Separating Truth from Alternative Facts: 37 Years of Guns, Murder, and Violence Across the US

Hate crimes increased in 2015, according to a report released by the Federal Bureau of Investigation. The report, 2015 Hate Crime Statistics, found a 6.8 percent increase in hate crimes in the United States in 2015. The 5,859 hate crime incidents reported in 2015 show an increase from 5,479 hate crimes reported in 2014. The demographic that faced the greatest increase in reported hate crimes was Muslims, who saw a 67 percent increase in reported hate crimes from 2014 to 2015. According to Mark Potok from the Southern Poverty Law Center, this is the highest number of hate crimes directed toward Muslims in America since 2001 with the al‐Qaida attacks on New York.

This article addresses hate crime against African Americans in the United States. The author looks at the data that the Federal Bureau of Investigation has gathered from 1990 to 1996 regarding hate crime against African Americans. Based on Uniform Crime Report (UCR) data on hate crimes, African Americans are most often the victims of race-motivated crimes. The data reflect that from 1992 to 1996 there has been a 52% increase in the number of hate crimes reported against African Americans. Addressed in this article are African American hate crime victimization trends since the passage of the Hate Crime Statistics Act of 1990, the factors that contribute to hate crimes against African Americans, and some of the recommendations that have been put forth for dealing with this growing problem. The study concludes that there is a climate of increasing intolerance, and a growing acceptability of racial prejudice in the United States.

Established in 1908 as the investigative division of the Department of Justice, the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) soon moved beyond law enforcement to include monitoring of radical activists and organizations and then after 1936 to conducting “intelligence” investigations. The purpose of the latter was not simply to anticipate planned espionage and sabotage threats but also to monitor those who could influence the political culture. The targets included Hollywood producers, directors, writers, and actors; German émigré writers and playwrights; prominent writers (including prominent sociologists); and liberal and radical journals of opinion (The Nation; I. F. Stone's Weekly). In 1960, FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover authorized a special index, the Reserve Index, to list for possible detention any individuals who “are in a position to influence others against the national interest or are likely to furnish financial or other material aid to subversive elements due to their subversive associations or ideology.” Hoover specified that the Index should include “writers, lecturers, news men and others in the mass media field,” and, as one example, he cited the author Norman Mailer. Two responses by senior FBI officials highlight the capriciousness of the FBI's surveillance operations. First, after Hoover learned that he himself was allegedly the model for one of the characters in Walt Kelley's comic strip Pogo, her ordered his aides to conduct a content analysis of the strip to ascertain whether the portrayal was positive or negative. Second, after learning that Hollywood actor Rock Hudson was gay, FBI officials worried that Hudson might play an FBI agent in a movie.In this vein, William Maxwell's recently published monograph F. B. Eyes offers the promise of expanding our understanding of FBI surveillance operations and the role that race played in determining the targets of FBI investigations. To research this issue, Maxwell filed Freedom of Information Act requests seeking all FBI files on “Afro-modernist writers” (his characterization) listed in the Norton Anthology of African American Literature. He eventually obtained 51 files while discovering that the FBI had no records on 53 other writers and that the records on an additional six either had been destroyed or were “missing” when transferred to the National Archives. In the introduction, Maxwell posits that during the years 1919 through 1972 “a who's who of black protest was spied on, often infiltrated, and sometimes formally indicted by Hoover's FBI” (p. 3).As it turns out, Maxwell's principal contribution to FBI scholarship is his decision to post 49 of the accessible FBI files online at http://digital.wustl.edu/fbeyes. Unfortunately, his own analysis of these files is disappointingly thin. For one, his cursory account of the contents of the FBI files on these 51 African American writers resembles the contents of FBI files on other writers and political activists: namely, information on their personal conduct and political beliefs and associations and at times a close analysis of their published writing. Second, these files confirm that they were compiled because of FBI officials’ ideological conviction that “subversive” writers could possibly influence their readers and not because the writer violated federal laws (including espionage and sabotage). Maxwell, however, does not fully develop this theme, which is not the central focus of his at times rambling, impressionistic assessment of African-American literature and the FBI's response.

The FBI's Obscene File: J. Edgar Hoover and the Bureau's Crusade against Smut. Douglas M. Charles. Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 2012. 200 pp. $24.95 hbk. plank: Current laws on all forms of pornography and obscenity need to be vigorously enforced. Indeed, in July of that year, the Daily Caller reported that a top adviser for Mitt Romney promised Patrick Trueman, current head of Morality in Media and former chief of the Justice Department's Child Exploitation and Obscenity Section, that if elected president, Romney would ramp up federal obscenity prosecutions after years of relaxed oversight.If Romney had prevailed and, in turn, made good on his promise, it certainly would not have been the first time that politicians, moralists, and federal law enforcement officials triangulated around sexually explicit expression during times of sociocultural shifts. Douglas M. Charles makes that abundantly clear in his fascinating and wellwritten new book, The FBI's Obscene File.Charles, assistant professor of history at Pennsylvania State University who describes himself in the preface as an FBI scholar, charts, in chronological fashion, a century of involvement and intervention by the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) with all varieties of sexual materials. These range from filthy images on playing cards to nudity in plays like Oh! Calcutta to sexual acts in movies like Deep Throat and even to the generally unintelligible lyrics of the Kingsman's song Louie Louie. Some of the more notable public figures who play prominent roles in The FBI's Obscene File include J. Edgar Hoover, Richard Nixon, and Charles Keating, the last of whom gained widespread attention in the 1980s not for his assault on sexual content, but for his role in the Lincoln Savings and Loan Association scandal.The centerpiece of the documentation from which Charles draws much of his material is the administrative portion of the FBI's Obscene File, which Charles obtained in redacted form via a Freedom of Information Act request. The other portion of the Obscene File, which was created in 1942 and eventually abandoned during the administration of President Bill Clinton and FBI head Louis Freeh, consisted of a vast library of sexually explicit material housed in the FBI's vaunted crime laboratory. The fact that the FBI possessed its very own large collection of pornography-it was so large that, on several occasions, parts of it had to be incinerated to make way for newer material-was always a source of potential embarrassment for the Bureau. One of the primary purposes of this collection of content was as a reference point against which to compare new specimens of obscene material to identify their sources.But the Obscene File was often misused and abused over the years by the FBI, from cracking down on the of African Americans during the 1940s-so-called race music featuring suggestive lyrics-to ferreting out gays in government service. …

Following the passage of the Hate Crimes Statistics Act of 1990, hate crime research grew with the ability to use data collected by the Federal Bureau of Investigation. Nevertheless, limitations in the data collection led to a dramatic decline in research by the end of the 20th century. This review provides an overview on the development of the hate crime legislation and data collection in order to address and understand the prevalence of hate crimes in the United States. Despite the limitations found in the national hate crime data collected by federal, state, and local law enforcement agencies, a rise in the level of hate crimes against immigrants has renewed scholarly interest in identifying the causes and effects of hate crimes. Recent studies have taken a different approach to explain the rise in the level of hate crimes against immigrants given the passage of anti‐immigrant legislation and inflammatory rhetoric against immigrants. By examining the link between hate crimes against immigrant groups and the demographic, economic, and political changes within the local context, researchers can begin to explain the variation in hate crimes and inform future research as well as local policies and practices to prevent these crimes from occurring.

PurposeThe purpose of this paper is to compare the role honor and shame play in honor killings and anti-LGBTQ homicides by identifying similarities and differences across these two homicide types.Design/methodology/approachThis study uses data from the US Extremist Crime Database (ECDB). Data for each of the incidents included in the ECDB are gathered from various open sources through a multi-stage process. A total of 16 honor killings and 21 anti-LGBTQ cases (i.e. the universe for both groups) are examined in this analysis. A closed-coded analysis technique is utilized to assess each case for evidence of shame and honor as well as an iterative coding process to identify sub-categories within these broader themes.FindingsResults indicate that shame and honor play important roles in both honor killings and anti-LGBTQ homicides, although their influence manifests differently across these two types of homicide. Perceived shame to the family is most closely related to honor killings, while suppressing homosexual urges underlines anti-LGBTQ homicides. Violations of religious tenets, protection of masculinity, and protection of honor are evidenced in both types of homicide.Originality/valueThis study uses a unique database to examine the ideological motivations of individuals who perpetrate extremist crimes in comparison to those who commit honor killings. Findings may inform forensic practices, including rehabilitation and prevention programs.

William Albertson, who was executive secretary of the New York Communist Party and a member of the National Committee of the Communist Party USA (CPUSA), was framed as an informant for the U.S. Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) in 1964. Only in recent years have newly released FBI records enabled scholars to understand why the FBI undertook the operation and how much damage it did to the CPUSA. In 1964 two leaks from the FBI hinted that the bureau had a high-level informant in the CPUSA who was providing information about secret Soviet subsidies. The leaks were accurate and endangered one of the FBI's most successful intelligence operations, Operation Solo, which involved the use of two brothers, Morris Childs and Jack Childs, who were confidants of CPUSA General Secretary Gus Hall, as key informants. The framing of Albertson was intended to deflect CPUSA and Soviet attention from the real FBI informants to a bogus one. The ploy succeeded. The forged documents the FBI planted convinced Hall and other senior CPUSA officials that Albertson was the FBI informant. Despite Albertson's vehement denials and energetic defense, he was expelled. The CPUSA thought it had eliminated the informant, and the Childs brothers were able to continue in their role until old age forced their retirement in 1977.

Tough Guise 2: Violence, Manhood and American Culture explores the relationship between mainstream media content and the construction of violent masculine norms within contemporary United States society. Anti-violence educator Jackson Katz expands upon the themes of the original film, Tough Guise: Violence, Media and the Crisis in Masculinity, (Jhally et al. 1999) adding more in-depth analysis, updated exemplars, as well as new information to this second film. What has remained the same is that Katz asks the audience to challenge those aspects of media that he contends teach boys and men to use aggression and violent behavior as defining aspects of their identity. Also like the first film, Tough Guise 2 examines mass shootings, violence against women, homophobia, sexual violence, and redemptive violence to emphasize that violence is largely a taught behavior. According to Katz, boys andmen in the current U.S. culture must put up a front, a tough guise, which hides their vulnerabilities or those individual characteristics that are not considered masculine. Those who fall short of being considered masculine are at risk of being subjected to ridicule and shaming. The tough guise standard cuts across lines of race and class within the U.S. Gun violence, particularly male-initiated gun violence within in the U.S., is a major portion of both films. Data from the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) provides evidence of not only an increase in firearm-related violence in the U.S, but a clear gender disparity in the perpetration of these acts (FBI 2013; 2014a, b). Males commit the vast majority of these acts. However, as Katz illustrates, the media tends to present the information in a gender-neutral manner. Headlines use words such as shooter, teenager, suspect, kid, murderer or phrases such as kids killing kids or youth violence to describe the identity of the person committing the shooting. When girls or women commit violent acts, Katz points out that their gender becomes the story. According to the FBI, the estimated homicide rate in the U.S. has declined from 5.0 per 100,000 population in 2009 to 4.5 per 100,000 population in 2013 (FBI 2014b). However, over this same period of time, the proportion of homicides committed by firearm has increased from 66.9 to 69.0 % (FBI 2014a). Although gender was unknown for 28.0 % of the offenders, the majority of homicides were committed by male offenders (64.3 %) (FBI 2014a). In addition, according to the FBI’s study on active shooter incidents, 160 active shooter incidents have occurred resulting in 1043 casualties (486 deaths and 557 wounded). The data show not only an increase in incidents, from an annual average of 6.4 incidents in 2000– 2006 to an average of 16.4 incidents in 2007–2013, but also an increase in casualties (annual average of 35.3 casualties in 2000–2006 compared to an annual average of 113.7 casualties in 2007–2013). An overwhelming majority of these active shooter incidents were committed by male perpetrators (154/160; 96.2 %) (FBI 2013). How can this gender disparity in homicide and active shooter incidents be explained? Katz argues that this gender disparity is typically explained by focusing on evolutionary and biological underpinnings of violence. From an evolutionary perspective males have been programmed to be violent due to their identification as hunters and protectors. The biological perspective focuses on examining the role of * Melissa Bell mbell@chatham.edu