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Research consistently shows that minorities have less confidence in the police and perceive less procedural justice during encounters than Whites. This work generally concludes that the differences in perceptions by race are due to actual differences in attitudes, then proceeds to explore the origins of these differences. However, scholarly work has not yet explored the possibility that this finding is related to how members of different racial groups answer and interpret questions about the police; in other words, how measurement properties of scales may contribute to these differences. Using data from the National Police Research Platform's Police–Community Interaction Survey, we conduct analyses to assess the reliability and validity of two measures of attitudes toward the police and assess differential item functioning (DIF) by race using Rasch analysis. Our findings reveal that few items from the procedural justice scale indicated DIF. All other items comprising the confidence in the police and procedural justice scales exhibited no differential functioning by race, indicating that the historic finding of variation in attitudes toward police by race are likely due to real differences rather than measurement error.

There has been a great deal of scholarly and practical discussion regarding treating bias crimes as separate and distinct incidents. Critics assert that bias crimes are not inherently different from comparable nonbias offenses and that the consequences for victims are similar. This study presents findings from an analysis of survey data obtained from bias and nonbias assault victims from the city of Boston. Although there are several limitations to the authors' data, findings from the respondents replicate prior empirical research and indicate that bias crime victims experience more severe psychological sequelae, for a longer period of time, than victims of similar nonbias offenses. Specifically, the level of intrusive thoughts, feelings of safety, nervousness, and depression were all significantly higher for bias crime victims.

Over the past two decades, significant efforts have established categories of crimes motivated by bias and so enhanced the quality of information about the prevalence of such crimes in the United States. As part of a national reporting system established by the Hate Crime Statistics Act, local police agencies collect information about the prevalence and characteristics of bias-crime incidents. Although the quality of this program has improved since its inception, local police face several challenges to identifying and accurately classifying bias crimes, including the ambiguity of applying legal definitions to cases, uncertainty regarding bias motivation, and infrequency of reported events to law enforcement. Drawing on information from eight case studies, the article examines how local police identify and record bias crimes through various kinds of reporting procedures and organizational structures. The article concludes with best practice recommendations for bias-crime tracking and reporting of incidents of bias crime within local police agencies.