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Efforts to apply racial threat theory to explain interracial violence in America are restricted to historically dated events such as lynchings or to relatively infrequently occurring events such as race riots, hate crimes or interracial homicides. The present study extends extant research by using county-level data, drawn from South Carolina's National Incident-Based Reporting System (NIBRS), race-specific voting data, and demographic data to investigate the relationship between racial threat and interracial and intraracial violent crimes. Results from a pooled cross-sectional time-series analysis show that one dimension of racial threat, economic competition, has a modest substantive effect on interracial crimes involving white perpetrators and black victims--as economic competition increases between whites and blacks, whites commit more violent crimes against blacks. Political threat has no statistically discernable effect on the white-on-black crime rate. Further, neither measure of racial threat, economic competition nor political threat is associated with the black-on-white crime rate, the white-on-white crime rate or with the black-on-black crime rate. The implications of these findings for racial threat theory are discussed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The use of private police in our society has proliferated in recent years, but explanations of private police size remain underdeveloped. Why does one urban area have more private police than another? Using data drawn from 195 metropolitan areas, our study attempts to identify factors that are associated with private police size. Particular attention is given to disentangling the impact that three theories-public demand, racial threat, and economic inequality-exert on the private police rate. Results from an ordinary-least squares regression analysis show that as the relative size of the Black and Hispanic populations grow larger in a metropolitan area, the size of the private police force also increases controlling for other factors. In addition, we find an inverted U-shaped relationship between economic inequality and the private police rate. The serious crime rate while initially salient fails to show any predictive power in the fully saturated model. Overall, these findings support the view that racial threat and economic inequality are more central to understanding private police size than the serious crime rate. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]