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87 Soc. F. 501 (2008-2009)
Transforming Symbolic Law into Organizational Action: Hate Crime Policy and Law Enforcement Practice

handle is hein.journals/josf87 and id is 511 raw text is: Transforming Symbolic Law into Organizational Action: Hate Crime Policy and Law Enforcement Practice Ryken Grattet, University of California, Davis Valerie Jenness, University of California, Irvine For decades sociologists, criminologists, political scientists and socio-legal scholars alike have focused on the symbolic and instrumental dimensions of law in examinations of the effects of social reform and policy implementation. Following in this tradition, we focus on the relationship between hate crime policy and hate crime reporting to identify the conditions under which a symbolic law is accompanied by instrumental effects at the initial phase of the law enforcement process - the official recording of a hate crime event. Using data on California police and sherif's agencies we estimate hierarchical Poisson models to determine how agency-level enforcement efforts, chiefly the creation of a formal policy on hate crime, affect official hate crime reporting. We also examine how community and agency attributes influence the effects of policy on the reporting of hate crime. We find that agency characteristics, in this case measures of the integration of the local agency within the community, shape the degree to which agency policies affect the official reporting of hate crime. Our findings reveal that while symbolic law is not intrinsically incapable of producing changes in enforcement patterns, such effects are contingent upon agency and community processes. Thus, we conclude by conceptualizing the varied enforcement contexts within which a body of symbolic law is rendered instrumental. The characterization of law as symbolic is a recurring theme in American political discourse and scholarship on law and public policy (Calavita 1983, 1996; Edelman 1964; Gusfield 1963; Jenness 2004). Court cases are cast as symbolic victories when plaintiffs receive only minimal This research was funded by the California Policy Research Center and the School of Social Ecology at the University of California, Irvine. We would like to thank Ursula Abels Castellano, Julie Abril, Susan Bennett, Blaine Bridenball, Kimberly Richman, Michael Smyth and Jennifer Sumner for assistance with data collection. In addition, we would like to thank Eric Grodsky, Richard McCleary, Xiaoling Shu, George Tita and especially Elaine Vaughan for advice on the data analysis and Victoria Basolo, Kitty Calavita, Martha Feldman, Helen Ingram, Paul Jesilow, Cheryl Maxson, Calvin Morrill and Carroll Seron for useful comments on previous versions of this article. Direct correspondence to Ryken Grattet, Department of Sociology, University of California, One Shields Avenue, Davis, CA 95616. E-mail: rtgrattet@ucdavis.edu. C The University of North Carolina Press Social Forces 87(1 )

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