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Drawing on theories of intergroup conflict and research on political legitimization of prejudice and crime motivated by bias, this study examines the temporal clustering of hate crimes in the aftermath of triggering events in the UK. In addition to domestic and nondomestic terrorist attacks, we consider the effects of the EU referendum widely known as Brexit. Consistent with previous work, the results reveal sharp increases of hate crimes in the aftermath of the antecedent events. However, we found that the effects of the EU referendum were more prolonged and more intense than the effects of the other triggering events. Moreover, the effects of domestic events are generally significant and stronger in magnitude than nondomestic events. Finally, the results show that the duration and decay of the effects of terrorist attacks on hate crimes generally mirror the severity of the galvanizing event. Taken together, our findings underscore the role of the EU referendum in explaining dramatic increases in crime motivated by bias. Accordingly, they are of particular importance to politicians and policy makers and have implications that go beyond the case of Brexit.

This study examines the impact of macrolevel indicators of social environment on officially recorded crime motivated by racial bias and xenophobia across 44 regions in 7 European nations between 2002 and 2011. In doing so, we estimate multilevel Poisson regression growth models where time is nested within subnational units, which avoids direct comparison of biased crime across different nations. We test the utility of various theoretical frameworks that have proven to be of relevance in explaining crime motivated by bias. The results reveal that the role of a hostile social climate is of particular interest, as xenophobic and racially motivated crimes are higher in regions with higher levels of anti-immigrant sentiment and higher levels of ethnic discrimination, in line with the “Doing Difference” approach developed by Perry. Consistent with the Power-Differential Hypothesis and Group Contact Theory, xenophobic and racially motivated crime rates are negatively associated with the percentage of the foreign-born population. Finally, the results reveal that xenophobic and racially motivated crime rates are higher in regions with lower levels of social integration, which is congruent with social disorganization theory. We conclude with a discussion of the effects of social climate on crime motivated by bias.