In a move that supports increased policing and the ever-expanding militarization of the police, Louisiana became the first state in the country to pass a law that now makes it a hate crime to resist arrest.
Under the new “Blue Lives Matter” law, resisting arrest can now be considered a serious felony which comes with harsh consequences and potential jail time.
Under the new law, Hebert says any offender who resists, or gets physical, with an officer can be charged with a felony hate crime.
For example, if someone who's arrested for petty theft, a misdemeanor, tries to assault an officer, that individual can be charged with a hate crime. A hate crime is considered a much more serious offense, with serious consequences.
This would seem to make sense but for the fact that data supports something entirely different. Yes, it is true that police face different levels of risk when they go out and do their jobs everyday. But facts show that cops are actually at less risk of harm on the job than ever before.
Data released by the FBI on Monday shows that 2015 was one of the safest years for U.S. law enforcement in recorded history, following a sustained trend of low numbers of on-duty deaths in recent decades.
But who cares about facts, right? In an environment where conservatives twist any calls for police accountability into a false war on cops and paint a lawless society that needs to be returned to order, making resisting arrest into a hate crime allows them to target protestors and police reform activists like those from the Black Lives Matter movement.
The data contrasts with the claims from some conservative media outlets and police union bosses who have continued to peddle the narrative that officers are under siege. The past two years have seen a surge in police reform activism in the wake of Michael Brown’s death in Ferguson, Missouri, and other high-profile instances of police killing civilians. But critics of this movement allege that groups like Black Lives Matter promote violence against officers, and have helped wage a “war on cops.”
That misinformation may have contributed to a skewed public perception of the issue. In a 2015 Rasmussen poll, 58 percent of voters said they believed there was a “war on police” in the United States.
And if the above weren’t reason enough not to stay away from this extreme measure, there is another serious issue with police being able to charge folks with a hate crime against them. As the BuzzFeed News report shows, there is a culture of lying within the law enforcement community that allows (and in some cases rewards) some officers to lie about what happens in their interactions with the public without consequence. Critiques of policing and police are so often met with the response, “it’s just a few bad apples.” So let’s ask this question. In a system in which we know that lying is embedded into the culture, do we have any proof that the “bad apples” won’t use this charge to intentionally ruin people’s lives?
Lastly, resisting arrest is incredibly ambiguous and up for interpretation. If a cop goes to arrest someone and they move too slow, is that a hate crime? What if they are elderly? Or disabled? If they are being arrested and are hard of hearing or speaking a language other than English and don’t immediately comply, is that a hate crime too? What about those who get arrested while engaging in acts of civil disobedience? What if they go limp or do other kinds of nonviolent protest as a form of noncompliance? Under this new law, all of these people would be felons.
With these kinds of laws, it’s no wonder we have the highest incarceration rates in the world. It’s clear that blue lives matter. It’s not so clear if the rest of our lives do.