December 2009
Valerie Jenness, Interim Dean of the School of Social Ecology and Professor of Criminology, Law & Society and Sociology, is quoted by ABC News regarding hate crimes in the U.S.
From ABC News:
The slight improvement – reports of hate crimes went from 5,011 in 2007 to 4,911 in 2008 – may seem a bit of a surprise at a time when the national discourse has included news about gun-buying sprees after Mr. [Barack] Obama's election, militias and hate groups on the rise, and a "toxic atmosphere of rage in America," as the Anti-Defamation League (ADL) puts it in a new report. "People are unhappy; it's the downfall of civilization. I get it," says Valerie Jenness, a criminologist at the University of California at Irvine and author of "Hate Crimes: New Social Movements & the Politics of Violence." "But I don't think there's a lot of empirical evidence that we have a massive insurgence [of violence] going on. The level of discourse, after all, is different than the level of mobilizing and actual behavior."