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Comment by b112 | Hacker News Reader

And yet it wasn't a smirk, now was it? It was a smirk and other things.

Right or wrong, call it what it is. Don't drop info off the event, and focus on one part of it.

And if someone has a right not to be harassed, when doing their job in an office, why doesn't a cop, when doing their job on the street?

Note, I said "doing their job", not "doing it wrong".

For damned sure there are bad cops. But by god, there are a load of good ones, and some of them spend all day, dealing with people at their absolute worst, taking crap you or I wouldn't be able to handle for 5 minutes.

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Thanks to your comment I read through to the original article and it’s even more despicable than I’d thought from the description. She’s being accused of a “hate crime” for “intimidating the police” based on defacing a sign. It’s the most disgusting thing I’ve ever heard of, and I have no idea why any rational human being would defend it.

Several people have been charged with hate crimes for spinning their car tires over rainbow painted sidewalks, even though nobody else was present.

Hate crime is a fucking stupid term; a crime is a crime is a crime. That said, if targeting one group deserves special treatment, then targeting any group should get the same. Equal application of the law, y'know?

Police officers are given much more power than regular people; let alone a minority group like LGBT people. It makes sense for them to be held to a higher standard.

Edit: It also looks like they were NOT charged with a hate crime for vandalizing a pride crosswalk.

https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/factcheck/2023/04/14/fac...

Protected classes are part of the law and "Cop" is not one of them. Treating cops the same as minority groups would be ignorance of the law, not equal application of it.

There are no protected class allowances for assault.

This thread is a menagerie of legal misunderstanding and buzzword abuse.

> Several people have been charged with hate crimes for spinning their car tires over rainbow painted sidewalks, even though nobody else was present.

You don’t think general vandalism and targeted vandalism should be handled differently?

Also, citation needed!

>Hate crime is a fucking stupid term; a crime is a crime is a crime.

Is a crime a crime? Why are there first degree murder, second degree murder, and voluntary manslaughter? They are all the act of killing someone intentionally, with the only difference being the person's thought process and motivation. Most crimes involve taking into consideration the reasons for the act as part of what makes a crime a crime. So, hate crimes are not some outlier in how crimes are defined and differentiated.

> if targeting one group deserves special treatment, then targeting any group should get the same. Equal application of the law, y'know?

Hate crimes (and protected classes in general) are not “one group” nor are they randomly picked. At the federal level, they are race, religion, ethnicity, disability, nationality, gender, sexual orientation, and/or gender identity, which basically fall into two different categories; what you are and what you believe. None of them are for what job you happen to choose to do. The “special treatment” statements is particularly fallacious, since most hate crime laws came in response systematic violence committed against these groups and them not receiving equal protection under the law. We don’t have anti lynching laws to give black people special treatment.

That's not what first and second degree murder or manslaughter are. The result is the same for the victim, but the specific actions and intentions are different.

Put another way, why is it better if I murder someone because I hate vegans, or meat eaters, or poor people, or rich people, or car drivers or pedestrians than someone of a protected group?

Adding new laws doesn't make them be enforced any better, so I don't buy the "systemic" argument. Either someone is tried and found guilty or not.

What sidewalks are you talking about... That is just one instance of misguided outrage to drive your confirmation bias. No one has context for your sensationalized news story.

If people started attacking other people for being Gluten-free, and the government saw that there was a large amount of cases, they would create regulations trying to curtail the amount of crime targeting those people. They are creating regulation with the intention of lowering crime targeting a small group because it is atypical.

> crime is a crime is a crime

Fortunately lawyers can not win trials with that argument in particular.

> Equal application of the law, y'know?

The context here is that we have a group (the Police) already enjoys special privileges (like monopoly on the use of force legally) and want to expand those privileges even further. I don't think your argument works the way you seem to think it works.

Those of us who said, over and over again, how dumb it was to make up "hate crimes" as a thing are smirking. We did tell you what would happen. Nobody wanted to hear it. Now it's here and everyone is all "shocked Pikachu" from the middle of that slippery slope.

This isn't a problem with hate crimes this is a problem with the level of immunity cops are given. If hate crimes had never been "made up" (whatever that means) they would have just found another way to make it illegal to piss off cops.

Of course they were made up. It's a legal construct. "Hate crimes" did not exist as a legal charge fifty years ago. Why are you using language as if you did not know this?

As I understand it, legislation defining hate crimes addresses a very real issue: By creating a threatening environment hate crimes can cause dramatically more damage than what the base crime itself would suggest. For example, the minor punishments associated with trespassing and vandalism don't seem proportionate to the harm caused by the Klan burning a cross in someone's front yard.

Without hate crime legislation, it would be easy for bigots to harass people via what the law would see as minor crimes.

So I'm not necessarily opposed to getting rid of hate crime legislation. However, we would need some other way to protect people.

Repeating Elon Musk talking points in public is wild!

The concept of mens rea is not new, it’s a vital factor in the defining, charging, convicting (and dismissing and acquitting) of crimes.

I wouldn't know, I don't follow the guy. If he said the sky was blue, would you be bothered by that?

Of course mindset matters. You don't murder out of love, generally. I'm sure a few have. Putting these artificial rails on it, saying that it only matters for race or whatnot, that's the silly part and it was bound to be broken through. And so it has.

Someone scratched a slur onto the bathroom wall when I was in college and it became a campus wide hate crime and we all had a week of fishbowls and micro-aggression training. People actually believe that these things constitute hate crimes. It is absurd.

It depends on, among other things, the relative power of the speaker and target.

Prejudice, to be dangerous, requires power. Prejudice + Power = Danger. In a world of of 95% Martians and 5% Venusians, if a Martian calls all Venusians corrupt and evil, it's a danger - the Venusians may be at risk; their future - career, safety, status, etc. - depends on the goodwill of the Martians. If a Venusian does the same about Martians, it's easily dismissed because the Martians can continue to live and study safely.

IOW, punching up and punching down are entirely different things. Criticizing the government is punching up; criticizing (e.g.) homeless people is punching down.

> if someone has a right not to be harassed, when doing their job in an office, why doesn't a cop, when doing their job on the street

Please show precedent for anyone being prosecuted for rendering an “intimidating smirk” in any other context. Or filming someone working in public.

They're being prosecuted for smirking at cops while destroying pro-cop signage, which can be read as assault. Ask yourself whether in today's age someone could get away with destroying an LGBT sign amidst a pro-LGBT protest, while staring down LGBT people, and get away with it. I don't agree with where the standards are, but most people would observe that this is the standard. Whatever anyone's personal rationalization for preferencing one group over another, in this type of enforcement, it is immaterial as far as the criminal code is concerned. There are no marginalized group allowances for assault.

If she tore it up and threw the pieces in their face then maybe it could be construed as assault. If she was tearing it up and smirking without physically threatening the cops then how could it possibly constitute assault?

Read assault laws. As is common, you are conflating assault with battery.

I'm not. There has to be some kind of physical threat for it to be assault. Smirking is not that. Neither is tearing up paper.

FYI, this depends on where you live. In some states a threat of violence can count as assault while in others that’s not true. Some states don’t even have a battery charge, they only have assault.

> And if someone has a right not to be harassed, when doing their job in an office, why doesn't a cop, when doing their job on the street?

Is it not dangerous enough to give officers pretty much unlimited authority, and expect the people around them to forfeit their first amendment right?

Police officers, being enforcers of the law, cannot reasonably be protected from people exercising their rights.

First, I agree that ALL cops spend a large portion of their job dealing with the worst aspects of our society. This inevitably colours their perspective and puts them in a very tough situation, prone for very bad mistakes.

I disagree with your "some bad apples" analogy though. That would be easy to fix relative to the problem we have which is systemic. "Good" cops are in the exact same situation as the bad ones. Policing is required yet fundamentally causing the problems at the same time.

>> And if someone has a right not to be harassed, when doing their job in an office, why doesn't a cop, when doing their job on the street?

As stated in the article all 50 states already have laws on the books that prevent interference with police while doing their job. If you are in a public facing role like a police officer you most certainly do not have the right to being shielded from observation and interaction - that's a huge part of the job and probably part of the solution too.

Crumpling a yard sign doesn't deserve a year in jail, or any jail time in my opinion.

Office workers don't have a monopoly on violence. Unfortuntely there are quite a few examples of cops treating anything other than obsequience as harassment.

The problem with good police officers is that if you actually try and stand up to the institution of policing, your buddies will throw you in the psych ward on false premises and make a challenge coin to commemorate doing it.

> But by god, there are a load of good ones, and some of them spend all day, dealing with people at their absolute worst, taking crap you or I wouldn't be able to handle for 5 minutes.

There are plenty of other professions that have tough jobs that I absolutely wouldn't want to do. But that doesn't mean I'm going to start letting garbage collectors get away with murder

> dealing with people at their absolute worst, taking crap you or I wouldn't be able to handle for 5 minutes.

For sure there's bad people, but most people are good. Those people that give cops crap are just some bad apples.

Spoken like someone who has never worked retail.

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