The Reconstitution of Law in Local Settings: Agency Discretion, Ambiguity, and a Surplus of Law in the Policing of Hate Crime

An important yet poorly understood function of law enforcement organiza-tions is the role they play in distilling and transmitting the meaning of legal rules to frontline law enforcement officers and their local communities. In this study, we examine how police and sheriff ’s agencies in California collectively make sense of state hate crime laws. To do so, we gathered formal policy documents called ‘‘hate crime general orders’ ’ from all 397 police and sher-iff ’s departments in the state and conducted interviews with law enforcement officials to determine the aggregate patterns of local agencies ’ responses to higher law. We also construct a ‘‘genealogy of law’ ’ to locate the sources of the definitions of hate crime used in agency policies. Despite a common set of state criminal laws, we find significant variation in how hate crime is defined in these documents, which we attribute to the discretion local law enforcement agencies possess, the ambiguity of law, and the surplus of legal definitions of hate crime available in the larger environment to which law enforcement must respond. Some law enforcement agencies take their cue from other agencies