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Louisiana passes "Blue Lives Matter" law

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(CNN)With the nationwide friction between the Black Lives Matter movement and supporters of law enforcement as a backdrop, Louisiana Gov. John Bel Edwards signed a bill Thursday expanding the state's hate crime statute to include the targeting of police officers, firefighters and EMS personnel.
"Coming from a family of law enforcement officers, I have great respect for the work that they do and the risks they take to ensure our safety," Edwards said Thursday, adding, "They deserve every protection that we can give them."
Traditionally, a crime is considered a hate crime if the victim is targeted because of identity-based characteristics such as their race, ethnicity, religion, gender, sexual orientation, etc.
If a defendant is convicted of a hate crime, additional penalties are tacked on to the sentence; in Louisiana, that could mean up to five more years in prison with hard labor and a $5,000 fine for felonies such as murder, assault and battery, rape, etc. For a misdemeanor, it could be another six months in prison and a $500 fine.
Louisiana becomes the first state to add one's chosen vocation to that list, something that has rankled opponents.
"Working in a profession is not a personal characteristic, and it is not immutable," said Allison Padilla-Goodman, a regional director at the Anti-Defamation League.
Padilla-Goodman said her organization supports enhanced penalties for crimes against law enforcement officers, but she said the law "weakens the impact of the Hate Crimes Act by adding more categories of people who are already better protected under other laws."
"We are not happy that it is being signed into law."

 

This is stupid, there are typically already enhancements in place for acts against law enforcement. I don't know Louisiana law well, but I know in Virginia while a simple assault is a class 1 misdemeanor (highest classification of misdemeanor) an assault on a law enforcement officer is a class 6 felony (lowest classification of felony). There are also separate charges like obstruction of justice and resisting arrest to give law enforcement added protections, not to mention officers basically choose what the initial charge is (in Virginia they do have to go through a magistrate, but that's largely a formality). So from the start this is unnecessary.

 

Second, the standard of proof is going to be weird. For a traditional hate crime, it's not enough to say that the defendant attacked a black person, the prosecution has to show that the defendant attacked the person because he or she was black. Now how does that translate for a police officer? If someone hits an officer in the act of resisting arrest, well there wouldn't be an arrest to resist if the victim wasn't a police officer so you could argue that the person hit the officer because he was an officer, now we've turned every resisting arrest into a hate crime. This is stupid.

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Can they pass a law punishing cops for murdering black people?

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Silly political statement to fire back at BLM. People are already punished more severely if they harm a police officer or emergency services personnel. It's trying to say "Oh let's shift the attention over here" instead of talking about the valid reasons BLM exists. I fucking hate BLM don't get me wrong but we need to root out troublemaker cops not make a "But Police Lives matter too!" BS policy.

Can they pass a law punishing cops for murdering black people?

How about passing a law punishing cops for murdering anyone? Police corruption is not limited to killing blacks.

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Maybe not, Cherry, but it is disproportionally the killing of blacks.

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Not the corruption to keep cops from facing trial. That's strictly a social class issue. The poor don't have the access to the proper lawyers and evidence to slam the officers like a rich person would.

 

Poor whites face the same judicial discrimination as blacks, but we lean towards seeing blacks as taking a rougher deal due to a higher rate of poverty.

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Not the corruption to keep cops from facing trial. That's strictly a social class issue. The poor don't have the access to the proper lawyers and evidence to slam the officers like a rich person would.

 

Poor whites face the same judicial discrimination as blacks, but we lean towards seeing blacks as taking a rougher deal due to a higher rate of poverty.

 

Frankly, I think you're living in fairy land if you don't think cops target blacks more than whites and that its *only* a social issue.

Edited by Thanatos
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Perhaps where there's more white people than black people, it might seem that way, but when you've got a bunch of lazy white folks addicted to meth and on welfare in rural areas in the Midwest...

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Frankly, I think you're living in fairy land if you don't think cops target blacks more than whites and that its *only* a social issue.

I think you're living in a fairy tale if you believe that the majority of cops prey on blacks more than poor people in general. Blacks have been systematically oppressed from an economic standpoint up until very recently and it has been a mess trying to break that cycle. People of poor areas are likely to commit crimes and do drugs. But the reason why blacks are targeted (See: Urban poverty) over whites (See: Rural poverty) are solely based around distribution of people not intentional targeting by a "racist" police force.

 

In the end the issue comes down to the fact that law enforcement is expected to meet a quota and bag as many people as possible, not actually do good for the local area.

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Chern you love using that "social class" tag to try and paint racism as something else. I actually got pretty furius just now reading your post about "poor white guys getting the same discrimination as blacks". And then I remembered this is the internet.

 

I'll just find the door and prevent myself from being "that black guy".

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Embrace your hatred, DMac, let it flow through you.

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If you look at the size of police forces in rural areas vs the size of police forces in urban areas it makes sense why more blacks are incarcerated than whites for drug crimes (Note: Drug crimes are rampant in both areas. One just has more people.)

 

If you want to be pissed off because I don't subscribe to the narrative that 90% of all cops are racist pigs who love shitting on blacks then by all means do it.

 

Now if you want to argue that blacks are more likely to be targeted by police in urban areas over whites, I won't disagree. Cops are far more likely to search blacks for drugs or illegal firearms than they are to search whites in urban areas. It's profiling with hopes to meet a quota. If you want to argue profiling is racism okay let's argue that. But there is a reason why they profile. They're more likely to find illegal drugs or firearms on blacks in an urban area. (And why are they more likely? It all goes back to... what's that? Poverty causing crime.)

 

Police in inner cities aren't inherently racist or hate black people. Most white people don't. The issue stems from the government demanding arrests and officers having to make it to a certain milestone of arrests for a good paycheck. It's part of the failed war on drugs and a broken system of detaining and searching people and their property.

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Poverty does indeed cause crime, but what causes poverty, especially for minorities?

 

You guessed it. Racism.

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"Racism isn't a problem" said the white guy.

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Blacks being targeted by the police has always been a huge problem in the country. It's nowhere near as bad as it was, but trying to make it a class issue is just deflecting blame rather than just owning up to the fact this country and government have contiously mistreated black people for a long, long time. Blacks aren't the only ones being singled out by any means, but let's not act like they have it as bad as anyone else.

​Also, fuck any state or law that wants to continue to pump more tax payer dollars into police. There is a growing disconnect between the citizens of this country and it's law enforcement and taking our money to "protect" cops and give them more weapons and what not is really a slap in the face to me.

​Before anyone jumps on me this isn't a "Fuck the police" post. This is about not wanting my money going towards protecting people who don't really need it and trying to start some BS sympathy campaign for the police when people have been mistreated by the police for a long time, and not just blacks.

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I use to drink at this bar where a cop would come in while it was closed. (I knew the owners) and he was actually a pretty cool dude. He told me once that they're trained to profile. Not sure every police department is, but he said he was. It's not just the cops and their training though. It's honestly mostly legislation. New Jim Crow laws do effect poor white people too but it's pretty clear, especially down south that racism is still very prevalent and a big part of the culture of a lot of this country. I mean, you're pretty blind if you can't see what's going on here.

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Poverty does indeed cause crime, but what causes poverty, especially for minorities?

 

You guessed it. Racism.

 

I'd argue that it did years ago. Minorities were placed into underdeveloped urban areas and given segregated housing which in turn fucked them economically. Pure racism is way way down in the past half century. It's the effects that are doing damage right now.

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"Racism isn't a problem" said the white guy.

 

Racism isn't a problem as much anymore. The effects of it are. There is a huge difference. You see any white lynch mobs rolling around lately?

Edited by Chernobyl426

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http://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2015/apr/29/baltimore-riots-sparked-not-by-race-but-by-class-t/?page=all

 

These police forces see the response of the community and believe that somehow more policing and profiling will help. It inevitably does not work out well.

 

That article up there is a good example how even though a large percentage of the Baltimore police force is black, people still have a disconnect and feel profiled by police.

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If you look at the size of police forces in rural areas vs the size of police forces in urban areas it makes sense why more blacks are incarcerated than whites for drug crimes (Note: Drug crimes are rampant in both areas. One just has more people.)

 

If you want to be pissed off because I don't subscribe to the narrative that 90% of all cops are racist pigs who love shitting on blacks then by all means do it.

 

Now if you want to argue that blacks are more likely to be targeted by police in urban areas over whites, I won't disagree. Cops are far more likely to search blacks for drugs or illegal firearms than they are to search whites in urban areas. It's profiling with hopes to meet a quota. If you want to argue profiling is racism okay let's argue that. But there is a reason why they profile. They're more likely to find illegal drugs or firearms on blacks in an urban area. (And why are they more likely? It all goes back to... what's that? Poverty causing crime.)

 

Police in inner cities aren't inherently racist or hate black people. Most white people don't. The issue stems from the government demanding arrests and officers having to make it to a certain milestone of arrests for a good paycheck. It's part of the failed war on drugs and a broken system of detaining and searching people and their property.

 

If racism doesn't really exist, as you seem to be arguing, then why are there cities like Ferguson, where the main population is predominately black, yet the police force is predominantly white?

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If racism doesn't really exist, as you seem to be arguing, then why are there cities like Ferguson, where the main population is predominately black, yet the police force is predominantly white?

I'm not arguing racism doesn't exist. Im arguing it isn't large enough to control police forces like an invisible hand. I don't have the statistics, so I can't argue for outliers or anything like that. Ferguson had a lot more outrage due to police force being white than Baltimore though. Edited by Chernobyl426

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Racism for sure exists in law enforcement, I work with 2 other blacks in my department and it's always interesting to see how coworkers treat white suspects/felons compared to black ones.

 

It's just how it is..the nature of the business, which I don't agree with but is the reason why I'm involved in law enforcement to attempt to make a difference. Police brutality is real, resisting arrest is the scapegoat for an officer beating the living shit out of someone simply because they said something an officer thought was an act of non-compliance.

 

Corruption runs amok in police/sheriff/prison depts, but honestly over time those people do something so over the top they fuck themselves in the end anyway.

 

This Blue Lives Matter law is stupid, there's a reason why most people hate the police and most officers can't take what they dish out in the long run. Karma is a beautiful thing.

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The police force seems like a playground for people with ego issues who like to feel more powerful than other people. It's gonna attract a lot of people who like having power and who like being able to use it on people, so naturally there is gonna be a decent amount of officers who overstep their boundaries sometimes.

 

Note that I'm not one of those people who hates all cops. My default opinion of a cop is that he's not gonna try to hurt me, but I'm also approaching this from the perspective of an upper-middle class white person. I do agree with Cherry that lower-class white people experience a level of discrimination that I myself don't face, but we're only a few decades removed from institutionalized racism. I haven't been able to find anything that states that low-income whites face the same level of brutality/discrimination as low-income minorities, but I'll admit I haven't tried my best to research the subject.

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Yeah, was about to say, you can call Trump supporters stupid all you want(and they are) but there are far more people attacking Trump supporters than vice versa.

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