Making Assault on Police a "Hate Crime" Is a Terrible Idea

Hate crime laws are always a mistake

The town of Red Wing, Minnesota, has passed a resolution urging that assaults on police be made a hate crime, a position urged for some years by the Fraternal Order of Police (FOP) union. How bad an idea is this?

A very bad one indeed, I argue in an op-ed for the Minneapolis Star-Tribune:

Critics argue that [existing hate-crime] laws in effect play favorites, departing from the spirit of equal protection under law that aims at treating all victims of personal assault as equally important.


Not only are lethal assaults on police declining, I note, but the vast majority of them do not arise from any supposed prejudice or animus against cops, nor do such crimes go neglected and unprosecuted.

Besides, most states already allow sentence enhancements on other grounds for crimes against police:

What would [such a change in law] symbolize? The merely absurd proposition that police in the U.S. today are an oppressed minority group?


Read the whole thing.

Incidentally, the town council voted last week to let its Human Rights Commission review the resolution, a possible step toward reconsidering it. Some earlier Cato commentary on hate-crime laws hereherehere, and here.

This post first appeared at Overlawyered.

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