Overlawyered: Chronicling The High Cost Of Our Legal System

Police union: expand hate crime law to include anti-cop offenses

Victimization as competitive sport: The Fraternal Order of Police, a national union claiming a membership of more than 300,000, “is asking for the Congressional hate crimes statute to be expanded to include crimes against police officers.” [Liz Goodwin, Yahoo News] Commentary: Jazz Shaw, Hot Air; Radley Balko (“Most states already allow or mandate sentence enhancements for crimes committed against police.”).

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3 Comments

  • After a shooting at a law firm in SF in 1993, the head of our bar suggested the same thing as to *jokes* about lawyer. Reaction to his suggestion was not charitable, to say the least.

    http://articles.latimes.com/1993-07-06/news/mn-10560_1_san-francisco-law

  • This could be a more reasonable (though still wrongheaded) proposal if virtually every jurisdiction didn’t already have substantially greater penalties for violence against police officers. Killing a police officer is also usually a capital crime in jurisdictions with the death penalty. What more do we need exactly?

    • By mx

  • If you visit Police One, where only cops are allowed to comment, you’ll see lots of bluster and outright threats posted by the police. (The site usually takes the more egregious ones down fairly quickly.) You’ll also see direct and indirect threats (“We Know Were You Live!”) made by cops on Facebook, Twitter, Reddit and other social media sites.

    If it becomes illegal to say anything “threatening” about cops, will cops be held the the same standard?

    (Just kidding. We all know that in practice, the law does not apply to cops.)

    • By Hittman