State Law Makes it a Felony to Touch a Police Officer Even Off-Duty and Out of Uniform

Greetings,

State Law Makes it a Felony to Touch a Police Officer Even Off-Duty and Out of Uniform

Two short-tempered men run into each other in a bar in Enid, Oklahoma. The combustible mixture of alcohol and ego produces the predictable reaction – a brief, stupid, and inconclusive fight in which neither side is seriously injured. When police officers arrive on the scene, onlookers expect that both parties to the altercation will be hauled away in handcuffs.

However, after one of them produces a police credential, he is allowed to handcuff the other and place him under arrest for a felonious assault on an off-duty law enforcement officer. It doesn’t matter that the individual making the arrest might have been the same one who started the fight.

This scenario is made entirely plausible by a newly enacted Oklahoma statute that makes any “assault” on an off-duty law enforcement officer a felony — and it is standard practice to treat nearly any physical contact with an officer as an “assault.” The law, which passed the legislature unanimously (always a bad sign), went into effect on November 1. In effect, this measure extends the cloak of “qualified immunity” to cover every aspect of a law enforcement officer’s life.

“I had several law enforcement officers in my district come to me this past year and explain to me that current law says that if I’m in uniform and I’m assaulted, then it is a felony,” recalls Republican State Representative Mike Sanders, the primary sponsor of the bill. Two of them, Sanders insists, were assaulted off-duty, although no useful details were provided to validate those claims.

“This is just one more tool to protect our law enforcement agents and officers,” Sanders continues. “Even though you make take off the uniform, you are always a law enforcement officer.”

This makes perfect sense – if we assume that the expression “law enforcement officer” refers to an identity, rather than an occupation.

State Senator Kyle Loveless, who co-sponsored the senate version of the measure, claimed that “there are people who stalk, threaten and assault officers when they’re off the clock simply out of revenge.” Stalking, menacing, and assault are criminal offenses in Oklahoma. Persistent and exceptionally violent offenders can be prosecuted for felonies, whether or not the victim is an off-duty police officer. The new legislation is, therefore, redundant at best.

However, it wasn’t designed to address an actual problem. It was intended to create a new entitlement for members of the state’s punitive caste, and to “educate” the public about our constant duty to serve and protect the police.

“We must do all we can to protect our law enforcement officers,” Loveless piously intoned. Sanders expressed identical sentiments in a way that unwittingly subverted one of the key tenets of the cop-worship cult: “We should make sure they’re just as safe out of uniform.”

Did Sanders mean to say that on-duty cops are actually safer than the general public, which is only protected by laws of general application? In an interview last April, Sanders sketched out a scenario in which “a criminal could pursue a law enforcement officer in their private lives and face a lower penalty” – a situation that he described as an “incentive” for attacks on off-duty officers. This would only be the case if the existing laws somehow reduced the penalties for violent crimes committed against off-duty police officers.

What neither Sanders nor other supporters of the measure will admit is that one purpose of the bill is to lower the threshold for “assault.” Any incidental contact between a mundane citizen and the sanctified personage of a police officer can be construed as an “assault on any officer.” In some circumstances, the act of a citizen is withdrawing from contact with an officer has been charged as “assault,” as well.

In predictable fashion, Sanders described his bill as an appropriate response to what he calls “the continued assault on our law enforcement officers nationally.” Given that violent crimes against on-duty police officers have been fewer in 2015 than last year, Sanders – like most people who recite the fact-deprived “war on cops” refrain – must be treating “anti-police” rhetoric as a form of “assault.” At least one Oklahoma resident has been punished, albeit through indirect means, for expressing a negative opinion of the police that was inspired by specific abuse suffered by her family.….More Here

Social

State Law Makes it a Felony to Touch a Police Officer Even Off-Duty and Out of Uniform