The German Hate Crime Concept: an Account of the Classifiction and Registration of Bias-motivated Offences and the Implementation of the Hate Crime Model into Germany’s Law Enforcement System

In the United States, hate crime has been on the criminological agenda since the 1980s. In 2001, Germany also made an attempt to adopt a similar concept as part of a reformed police registration system for so-called ‘politically motivated offences’, focusing predominantly on right-wing extremist crime. However, hate crime is a category which is open to selective interpretations and subjective judgments and to date there are still large empirical deficiencies regarding the identification and classification processes applied by the German police. High levels of ambiguity, uncertainty and arbitrariness initiate a debate surrounding the validity of official hate crime statistics in Germany and reveal a large potential for conflict when it comes to the definition and registration of xenophobic violence and other forms of hate-motivated crime. In this respect, it seems indispensible to carefully evaluate the implementation of the hate crime concept into Germany’s law enforcement system and to analyze current trends and developments, in order to provide valid data on the qualitative and quantitative nature of hate crime incidents in German society.