by Matt Agorist
Baton Rouge, LA — Last year, in an outburst of pure insanity, the
National Fraternal Order of Police, a union representing over 300,000
officers, called for cops to be included under Congress’s hate crimes
statute. This demand has now materialized into actual legislation about
to be signed into law in Louisiana.
Bill
HB 953,
which passed the legislature this week, is going to change the state’s
hate crime law to include law enforcement and firefighters.
A hate crime is defined by Congress as a
“criminal offense
against a person or property motivated in whole or in part by an
offender’s bias against a race, religion, disability, ethnic origin or
sexual orientation.”
The bill, which is based solely on appeal to emotion, and not in fact, changes the state’s hate crime provision to say:
It shall be unlawful for any person to select the victim
of the following offenses against person and property because of actual
or perceived race, age, gender, religion, color, creed, disability,
sexual orientation, national origin, or ancestry of that person or the
owner or occupant of that property or because of actual or perceived
membership or service in, or employment with, an organization, or because of actual or perceived employment as a law enforcement officer or firefighter …
Speaking out in support of this type of legislation last year, Chuck Canterbury, the national president of the union, said-
“Nine deliberate murders of law enforcement officers in space of a single year also deserves Congressional attention!”
While we certainly aren’t discounting the police officers killed
while on duty, the sheer pompousness it takes to assume such a higher
than thou attitude is stunning. The last few years have been the safest
years on record
since the days of alcohol prohibition for police officers.
In fact, last year happened to one of the safest years on record for
law enforcement according to the FBI’s own data.
Consequently, 2015 was one of the
deadliest years on record for citizens being killed by police. What about those lives? Do any of those lives matter?
Rep. Lance Harris advocated for the bill by falsely claiming that
police are under attack. Drawing short on evidence for his assertion,
Harris referenced the two tragic deaths of NYPD officers Wenjian Liu and
Rafael Ramos.
It is undeniable that police officers have been killed in the line of
duty, some of them ambush style, but adding some arbitrary law to the
books to define this killing as an act of hate, won’t change anything.
In fact, it would likely add to the divide by showing the citizens that
the state now actually considers that police lives matter
more.
This legislation will treat any perceived ‘crime’ against police
officers as an act of hate and add another 5 years to a person’s
sentence because of it.
Police officer is a job, an occupation. Hate crimes are in place to
protect race, gender, religion and sexual orientation, not occupations.
What this law will eventually do is make police officers an elite
protected class for no other reason than their choice to become a police
officer. By this logic, private security officers should also be
protected under hate crime laws as they are the targets of murder far
more often than police officers.
Pandora’s box has already been opened.
“Hate crime legislation was created because certain crimes – beating
someone for being openly gay or wearing a turban … – are meant to strike
fear in the heart of a community,”
Anna Merlan writes for Jezebel.
“[But] being a law enforcement officer is a job, not a fixed, immutable
identity like race, gender or sexual orientation: the things at the
center of actual hate crimes.”
Aside from the glaring special privilege this law grants to police,
it will also serve to undermine the protections for those who actually
endure ethnic, racial, and gender-based violence because of who they
are.
Laws with the intention of granting special privilege to the
enforcement class in American are already taking hold. For example,
a newly enacted Oklahoma statute makes any “assault” on an off-duty law enforcement officer a felony even
if acting in self-defense against a drunken off-duty cop in a bar
fight. Any physical contact with the anointed law enforcement officer
can now be considered a felony.
What does it say to the mother of a physically abused 4-year-old
boy who watches someone who assaults a cop get a harsher sentence than
the person who assaulted her son because of the mere fact that the
person they assaulted carries a badge?
Aside from the horribly flawed logic behind granting a privileged
class status to public servants, the idea of treating assault on a
police officer as a hate crime has frightening implications considering
how often people are charged with assault on a police officer.
When someone, guilty or innocent, attempts to pull away from cops
trying to arrest them, or protect themselves from a police assault, they
are almost alway charged with resisting arrest often followed by
assault on an officer.
The officer need only state in his report that the subject resisted
because he didn’t like cops — now a hate crime has been committed and
the person is facing an additional 5-year sentence.
By calling this legislation the
“Blue Lives Matter” bill, police
are revealing their hand and the real impetus behind such an offensive
act. They are apparently seeing the calls for greater police
accountability, increasingly spawning across the nation, as attacks on
the police in general.
As a defensive mechanism, the ruling class is seeking to establish a clear
blue line in
the sand that cannot be crossed without it being interpreted as an
attack on the very fabric of the status quo. Logic and reason — be
damned.