Washington
In Louisiana, the legislature has voted to expand its hate crime laws to include law enforcement and first responders, in addition to victims targeted because of race, age, gender, religion or sexual orientation. The governor was to sign it into law Thursday.
Similar proposals are pending in both the U.S. House and Senate and starting to creep into the 2016 campaign, framing a debate over law enforcement and its relationship with minority communities.
Police organizations say the increased protections are needed because they are under siege on the streets.
Opponents argue that the “Blue Lives Matter” bills and other proposals are election-season messaging that ignores policing issues underscored by incidents in Ferguson, Mo., North Charleston, S.C., Staten Island, N.Y., Chicago and San Francisco.
“It’s an issue that’s growing in importance — and you can’t rule out that it will become an issue in the presidential campaign and several Senate races,” said G. Terry Madonna, director for the Center for Politics and Public Affairs at Pennsylvania’s Franklin & Marshall College.
Americans are concerned, despite the fact that the number of police deaths in the line of duty is declining.
There have been a few highly publicized attacks on police. In December 2014, for example, two New York City police officers were fatally shot execution-style as they sat in their patrol car. The gunman, who took his own life, posted on social media that he was going to shoot officers to avenge the police-involved deaths of two African-American men earlier in the year.
But FBI statistics released this month showed that 41 police officers in the United States and Puerto Rico were intentionally killed in the line of duty by suspects in 2015 — 10 fewer than 2014 and the second-lowest total in 12 years.
“Any felonious death of a police officer is a tragedy,” David Harris, a University of Pittsburgh law professor who studies policing, told McClatchy in an email. “But the idea that this is necessary or desirable because there is a ‘war on police’ is not borne out by the data of the facts.”
Still, Pennsylvania’s Sen. Pat Toomey, one of a half-dozen vulnerable Republican Senate incumbents, has a YouTube ad touting his so-called “Thin Blue Line” act, a bill that would expand death penalty consideration factors if the defendant is proved to have specifically targeted a victim for being a law enforcement officer, firefighter or public official.
“Police lives matter,” Toomey says in the video. “I am sick and tired of this narrative across this country that we’re hearing from so many political figures that somehow the police are systemically a bunch of racist rogues … the vast majority of police are honest, hard-working men and women who don’t have a racist bone in their body. And, yet, they are being targeted.”
Toomey’s bill has 23 Senate GOP co-sponsors, including five who are in tough re-election fights: John McCain, of Arizona; Roy Blunt, of Missouri; Kelly Ayotte, of New Hampshire; Rob Portman, of Ohio; and Ron Johnson, of Wisconsin.
A similar “Thin Blue Line” act was introduced in the House of Representatives by Rep. David Jolly, R-Fla., who is running for the Senate seat being vacated by Sen. Marco Rubio, R-Fla.
“It is somewhat in response to the political dialog of the last couple of years,” Jolly said of his bill. “I wanted to identify a way for Congress, at least those who agree, to say to law enforcement that we stand shoulder-to-shoulder with them.”
On the presidential level, presumptive Republican nominee Donald Trump also has weighed in, saying in January that “police are the most mistreated people in this country.”
New Jersey’s Gov. Chris Christie, when he was still in the presidential race, accused Black Lives Matter activists of calling for the killing of cops.
“They have been chanting on the streets for the murder of police officers,” Christie said in October. “That’s what the movement is creating. And the president of the United States is justifying that.”
Critics contend that so-called Blue Lives Matter and Thin Blue Line bills are redundant and that the message behind them is overtly political.