The effect of racial threat on interracial and intraracial crimes.

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]