Tackling hate crime in Los Angeles

Experts from Cardiff University are developing a statistical tool that uses social media to make real-time predictions of where hate crimes may occur. The team, from the University's Social Data Science Lab, will be using Los Angeles County as a test bed for their study, thanks to over $800,000 in funding from the US Department of Justice. It is the first time that social media has been used in the United States to create predictive policing models of hate crime. Over the next three years, the team will be closely scrutinising data taken from Twitter and cross-referencing this with reported hate crimes in Los Angeles to develop markers, or signatures, which could indicate if, and where, a hate crime is likely to take place at a certain point in time, and then enable police officers to intervene. The term hate crime is used to describe a prejudice-motivated crime, often violent, which occurs when a perpetrator targets a victim because of his or her affiliation to a social group, such as their sex, ethnicity, disability or religion. According to the US Bureau of Justice Statistics (BJS) , in 2012 an estimated 293,800 nonfatal violent and property hate crime victimizations occurred in the United States. UK official data shows that there were 52,528 hate crimes recorded by the police in England and Wales in 2014/15, an increase of 18 per cent compared with 2013/14.