How ridiculously stupid. As other(s) here said, there are already other laws for attacking police. Further, just because someone may resist arrest and in the process hit a cop, does not mean they hate the cop. Consider someone being arrested for a murder they did not commit - they know they didn't do it, and perhaps they react violently and attack the cop. That is not hate, it's a reflexive desire to not get put in a cage for the rest of their life.
What about if two people get into a fight and the person does not know the other is a police officer - would that still qualify here?
These kinds of "red meat" bills are just as bad as what some Democrats do with gun control. Just write dumb laws that often don't solve anything, or perhaps even cause more problems, all to feed their base and give them the ability to say they did something.
http://www.courier-journal.com/story/news/politics/ky-general-assembly/2017/02/08/panel-approves-making-attack-first-responder-hate-crime/97650368/
The law makes attacking a police officer simply because he is a police officer a hate crime. Under current hate crime law, if I get in a fight with a black person and he dies I would be guilty of murder but not a hate crime because I wasn't motivated by a hatred of black people. I just wanted to kill this one black person.
In the situation you described, the perpetrator didn't have a hatred of police officers so therefore he would only be guilty of assaulting that one officer and not of a hate crime. This law is meant to apply to situations like the Dallas shooting where police were targeted simply because the perpetrator had a hatred for police.
Not to be a dick but you got a yellow avatar bro. Shouldn't your argument be against this because "hate crime" legislation explicitly implies that there are many cases where "murder" isn't a "hate crime"?
And in any case, yeah this is excessive. You bring up Dallas without considering that Micah Xavier Johnson died in the exchange with police (by a police robot, the first instance in US History), right? Chances are that unless it is a hit and run most suspects who kill a cop due to a hatred of cops will likely end up getting gunned down themselves. Shooting a cop in a lot of instances IS a Death Sentence (thus the phrase "SHOOT TO KILL!" you see in a lot of 80's action flicks), and why shouldn't it be? If you shoot at people who are ARMED it's a pretty safe assumption they are ready to fire back at you. This is just a safe assumption because a lot of cops generally work in areas where there are other cops or they at least have radio and bodycam communications established. Anybody who doesn't get gunned down by policemen (whether in self-defense or vengeance) will then likely get a very stiff prison sentence.
My thoughts on this is that there probably is a place for this sort of legislation, but it should cover hatred of somebody for their occupation. Hate Crime legislation should, in my opinion, be as wide and as non-preferential as possible. What matters is intent (the hatred), not what group of people was targeted.
