Language in measure addressing attacks on law enforcement is almost identical to wording used in hate crime laws
US senators introduced a bill Tuesday that would in effect make certain kinds of violence against law enforcement officers qualify as hate crimes under federal law.
The Senate Protect and Serve Act would make it a crime “to knowingly cause bodily injury to any person, or attempt to do so, because of the actual or perceived status of the person as a law enforcement officer”, which is nearly identical to the language that accompanies hate crime laws.
Under the law, injuring or attempting to injure a law enforcement officer could be punishable by up to 10 years in prison.
Senator Orrin Hatch of Utah, lead sponsor of the Senate bill, said in a statement that the legislation “makes clear that no criminal will be able to escape justice when he singles out and assaults those who put on the badge every day to keep us safe”.
Critics say that the proposed new senate law is redundant and makes a mockery of the wrongs that hate crime legislation is meant to correct. Kanya Bennett, legislative counsel at the American Civil Liberties Union, called the Senate bill “nothing short of offensive to historically persecuted and marginalized communities across this country”.
Federal law already provides extremely severe penalties for crimes against law enforcement officers. Persons convicted of first-degree murder of federal employees or officers face a life sentence or the death penalty.
The proposed law follows in the footsteps of several states, including Louisiana, Texas, and Kentucky, that have passed similar bills in the last two years. Such legislation is sometimes referred to as “blue lives matter laws”. A handful of additional states have passed their own versions which do not use hate crime statutes, but do stiffen penalties for violence against police with harsher sentences or classify them as a separate class of crimes. More than 30 states have seen such laws proposed.
The House version of the bill, also introduced Tuesday, creates a new crime for offenses against law enforcement, which Bennett called “superfluous”, given the many existing federal and state laws that protect law enforcement officers specifically.
The popularity of the bills followed a small number of high-profile targeted killings of law enforcement. The incidents, in New York, Dallas and Baton Rouge, occurred as the police killings of Americans, especially unarmed black men, drew national focus.
In 2014, two NYPD officers were shot in their patrol car by a gunman who had made “very anti-police” remarks on social media, including saying that he was “putting wings on pigs today” .
In the summer of 2016, two shootings in
Dallas and
Baton Rouge killed five and three officers respectively. In both cases, the shooters left behind material suggesting they were spurred by animosity for police.
This is not the first time that federal lawmakers have proposed such a bill. A similar law, the Back the Blue Act of 2017, stalled in Congress last summer.
