The Protect and Serve Act is a new hate crime bill aimed at protecting police and law enforemcent. It was passed by the House of Representatives yesterday, May 16th 2018, with bi-partisan majority support. 200 Republicans and 162 Democrats voted in favor, with 11 Republicans and 24 Democrats being against it. That's 94% of Republicans and 83% of Democrats in favor, with an 89% majority overall. Talk about a united boot-licking effort from the rulers in government to make it harder for the rest of us to deal with police abuses.
Police Car
This bill portrayed as being a way to protect police as a group that can be the target of hate crimes. But it's a monumental failure to protect citizens and the Constitution of the U.S.A. If you injure a police officer, it's now a federal crime, whether intentional or not. On top of that, if you don't injure them but "attempt to injure" them, then it's also a federal crime.
Think about that. Police can already make false claims against people for resisting arrest, as there are plenty of videos online that show this. Claims of assault on police can be used to prevent people from filing legitimate claims of police brutality and abuse of power. But police could make even more false claims against people they are trying to dominate and control. Even if they aren't injured, they can claim someone "attempted" to injure them and charge them with a federal crime. It's their word against yours.
In the Constitution, the 10th Amendment allows for the prosecution of offenses against state and local police to the states themselves, not within the larger federal criminal law. The FBI, Homeland Security and immigration as federal agencies can now be involved with federally prosecuting crimes against citizens for perceived attempts or intent to harm the "identity group" called police.
The clever rulers and manipulators are justifying this "law" through the Commerce Clause to magically overcome the Constitution. The Liberty Caucus had this to say:
A tenuous connection to economic activity cannot transform a criminal law that has nothing to do with economic activity—and that is is explicitly for the purpose of public safety—into a regulation of interstate commerce. If it could, the Commerce Clause would destroy the Constitution's design for a very limited federal role in criminal law enforcement, covering only a few crimes that are clearly federal in nature.
A previous ruling by the Supreme Court in 2000 stated that the Constitution doesn't give the federal government authority to criminalize local violent crime. It was being applied to gender group bias at the time, but still applies to cases of bias directed towards police officers. The same arguments involving the Commerce Clause were used, but it was rejected as it "would allow Congress to regulate any crime as long as the nationwide, aggregated impact of that crime has substantial effects on employment, production, transit, or consumption. Indeed, if Congress may regulate gender-motivated violence, it would be able to regulate murder or any other type of violence since gender-motivated violence, as a subset of all violent crime, is certain to have lesser economic impacts than the larger class of which it is a part."
This act is unnecessary and only adds further prosecution, as violence against police officers is at record lows:
USA Today
Both Republican and Democrats are selling out to gain favor with all the police-loving order-following supporters for the upcoming 2018 election. Proponents of the bill pull statistics about how a certain number of police were killed, but fail to recognize how many police are killing people by contrast. House Representative Bob Goodlatte (R-VA) argued for the bill saying 21 officers were killed in the first 17 weeks of 2018, but there were 356 people killed by police, of which 17 were unarmed and 10 with toy weapons.
How's that for a stark contrast? 27 unarmed people killed by armed police. It would seem the rest of us non-police also need a bill to be protected from the group of authoritarian controllers known as police. They again get to have special rights the rest of us don't, by being essentially a new "minority" group protected under the veil of "law" akin to "hate crimes".
References:
https://www.teenvogue.com/story/house-of-representatives-passed-controversial-protect-and-serve-act
https://www.hrw.org/news/2018/05/14/coalition-letter-urging-us-congress-oppose-hr-5698/s-2794-protect-and-serve-act-2018
https://www.pastemagazine.com/articles/2018/05/the-protect-and-serve-act-could-make-the-fight-aga.html
https://www.theroot.com/protect-and-serve-act-makes-police-a-protected-class-1825871459
https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-watch/wp/2018/05/11/the-protect-and-serve-act-is-political-grandstanding-over-a-nonexistent-problem-and-it-could-cause-real-harm/?utm_term=.89cfbc8ea001
https://reason.com/blog/2018/05/17/new-hate-crime-bill-passes-house
https://reason.com/volokh/2018/05/12/the-protect-and-serve-act-is-both-unnece
https://www.congress.gov/bill/115th-congress/senate-bill/2794?r=59
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only if by "deal with police abuses" you mean "murder police officers"
What I find offensive about these sorts of efforts is the implication that police officers lives are more valuable than anyone else's.
Nor is someone's life that was taken by a police officer, cops already have "enhanced" punishments in jail or prison. The problem here is not that they want to expand who is covered by hate crime laws, the problem is having hate crime laws in the first place. If someone murders someone else it shouldn't really matter if they did it for this or that reason they should be dealt with in the harshest way the law allows.
Yes, hate crimes law are thought crime laws, used to imprison people for thinking or speaking differently :/
Police officers are less likely to be killed on the job than truckers, loggers, garbage collectors and roofers.
Yet somehow they need special protection against the onslaught of attacks on their lives and safety.
This is obviously nothing more than an attempt to further insulate the enforcer class from the consequences of their immoral actions.
Yup. Good point on insulation fro consequences to actions. Society is built that way. We are all insulated from our actions that produce negative effects into other regions of the world, at least for the time being. We pay taxes, that fund wars, that harm others, and we are all cushy and comfortable in our isolated geographical zones... for now...
Before passing this law, they should pass a law that would require police officers to wear body cameras with sound
This measure would prevent police officers from abusing their power, at the same time this would put additional pressure on people to respect police officer during the stop. Plus it will decrease all the ambiguous cases in courts
I agree. They turn off cameras and confiscate other people's videos to prevent their bad behavaior from being exposed :/
All of them should be obliged to have a functional camera of face some penalty for violation.
Most interesting fact it's not only to protect public from them, it's protect them from people too. It's going to decrease pressure on judicial system. I believe they just don't want to spend money on additional equipment and plus you need servers to keep all data from cameras. You need to hire additional IT specialists to manage this system. So they chose the cheapest way ( in their heads) just make harsher punishments for people. They don't see the long term consequences of their actions that we will have more riots and more people in prisons.
They don't want cameras because it hurts the police more than helps them. Plain and simple. Clearly, as you say, time and money is a factor as well. However, I think that if there was no such thing as corrupt police they would all wear cameras by now.
haha, "hate crime" was always such an absurd thing ... a crime is a crime, I don't care what thoughts are going on in your head if you throw a brick at me lol, treating it as "throwing a brick at me" is enough
I guess this is kind of blowback. If people want crimes to be different or special when it happens to your category of people, now everyone will try to get in on that, including apparently cops.
Agreed. Hate crime = thought crime. Why would I care if someone hurt or killed me because they wanted my stuff or because they hated me?
Yeah, doing harm to someone is harm. If it's motivated by hate of a group doesn't matter and shouldn't be a crime in itself. But "hate crime" laws target people who harm no one, just for speaking. Some validly question the "facts" of WWII and the "holocaust" and get put in hail for "hate crime" BS...
I expect this problem to get much worse, unfortunately. I won't even be surprised if they bring back internment camps for whoever they see fit.
Apparently there are FEMA camps built up in the USA... :/
Parliament is the representative of public and thus should make laws to protect the citizens.
It should be protecting people more than letting abuses get protected under the veil of "law" indeed :/
This is bad.
Even though I'm not a citizen of the US, I can feel the effect that this bill will have on the populace. It makes you wonder if these guys have the care of the people at heart
Some people, the police and the police lovers, but not the victims of police abuse :/
Yeah this bill is clearly racist because minorities bare the brunt of police brutality.
Yet another reason I am glad I am not living there, time for a uprising yet? or are people just going to accept this and keep voting?
I think it needs to get worse for people to be taught by chaos :/ Chaos and the negative is a teacher.
Such a shame, but it is what it is, also I left you a suggestion on the pay it forward post, not sure you read it? I know you have a lot of people contact you so maybe you missed it. I understand that.
Woops, yup still had the tab for the post open far down the line, didn't get through the last few comments. Will do that, thanks.
The establishment is very good at walking the fence so that never happens. They even did studies on civil unrest and disobedience on Facebook.
No surprise there then.
Politics everywhere, everyone want to prove that they are relevant, the taste of power await their tongues but the authority led in the hands of the people. Great post @krnel
I don't know there's such a rule. I guess I should know more about the law :)
Great article. Thank you
a crime must be punished equally because passing as a pass is something that harms a person or family affects it in a strong way and that nobody can cure or fix it, I do not believe in different crimes
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