Out-group Threat and Xenophobic Hate Crimes: Evidence of Local Intergroup Conflict Dynamics between Immigrants and Natives

This study examines the relationship between crimes attributed to immigrants and hate crimes against refugees at the local level. We argue that local crime events can lead natives to engage in vicarious retribution against uninvolved outgroup members—refugees in our setting. Our empirical analysis relies on fine-grained geocoded data on more than 9,400 hate crimes and 17,600 immigrant-attributed crime events that occurred in Germany between 2015 and 2019. Using a regression discontinuity in time design, we show that the daily probability of a hate crime against refugees rises sharply in the immediate aftermath of an immigrant-attributed crime event in a local community. Additional analyses suggest that immigrant-attributed crime acts as an emotional “trigger,” particularly in areas with strong radical-right support and recent demographic change. Our findings imply that individual commonplace crime incidents can give rise to intergroup conflict dynamics at the local level.