Hate in the Machine: Anti-Black and Anti-Muslim Social Media Posts as Predictors of Offline Racially and Religiously Aggravated Crime

National governments now recognize online hate speech as a pernicious social problem. In the wake of political votes and terror attacks, hate incidents online and offline are known to peak in tandem. This article examines whether an association exists between both forms of hate, independent of ‘trigger’ events. Using Computational Criminology that draws on data science methods, we link police crime, census and Twitter data to establish a temporal and spatial association between online hate speech that targets race and religion, and offline racially and religiously aggravated crimes in London over an eight-month period. The findings renew our understanding of hate crime as a process, rather than as a discrete event, for the digital age.

Mastermind

Pattern and routine activities theories suggest that through a combination of decisions and innate understandings of environmental cues, likely offenders are able to separate good criminal opportunities from bad risks. The nature of this process is highly structured and allows researchers to anticipate likely concentrations for a variety of regular, daily activities, including criminal offences. This chapter sets out to model and test these theoretical principles. Mastermind represents an interdisciplinary research project in computational criminology jointly managed by ICURS and the Software Technology Lab at Simon Fraser University. Using the abstract state machine (ASM) formalism in combination with a multiagent based modeling paradigm, we devise a formal framework for semantic modeling and systematic integration of the theories for crime analysis and understanding crime patterns. We focus on crime in urban areas and model spatial and temporal aspects of crime potentially involving multiple offenders and multiple targets. Mastermind is used in a hypothetical analysis of motor vehicle theft.