Congress Moving to Make Cop-Killing a ‘Hate Crime’

Congressional legislation titled “Blue Lives Matter,” which would make cop killing a “hate crime,” will move to a floor vote in September, despite having no Democrat support.

With year-on-year gunfire deaths of police up 94 percent 16 Republican sponsors will bring the Blue Lives Matter Act, to debate and a floor vote when the U.S. House and Senate return from their summer recess.

There have been 66 police officers and 24 police K9s who have died in the line of duty in 2016, according to the “Officer Down Memorial” web site. That is actually 3 percent better than total deaths by this time last year.

Although automobile accidents and automobile assaults have historically been the largest contributor police officer fatalities, the recent ambush assassinations of police officers in a number of states has almost doubled the number of deaths associated with gunfire this year.

The Louisiana legislature recently passed a “Blue Lives Matter” law at the state level, and Democrat Gov. John Bel Edwards, whose family includes four generations of police officers, signed it in May to add up to five years to prison sentences for “targeting” police.

The covered classes include police, firefighters and emergency medical responders, on a list of “hate crime” criteria including race, age, gender, religion, color, creed, disability, sexual orientation, national origin, or ancestry.

The Louisiana debate pitted police unions and other safety unions, which usually lean Democrat, against an array of civil rights groups that claimed police have not faced the historic discrimination that hate crime designation was supposed to address.

But the movement for a national “Blue Lives Matter Act” has accelerated after television coverage of the horrific targeting of police officers in Dallas and Baton Rouge.

Kyle Huwa, a spokesman for the federal bill’s author, Colorado Republican Rep. Ken Buck, told Reuters, “Since the Baton Rouge tragedy, we’ve received calls and messages from around the country from individuals asking about the ‘Blue Lives Matter Act’, and we’re confident more members of Congress will be co-sponsoring the legislation as soon as they can when Congress reconvenes.”

The “Blue Lives Matter” movement is a reaction to the “Black Lives Matter” movement, which arose in the wake of allegations of police udeliberately sing lethal force against black men.

President Obama, Vice President Biden and Attorney General Loretta Lynch met with six leaders of ‘The Fraternal Order of Police Executives’ on July 11, following the assassination of five police officers in Dallas by a man allegedly inspired by the Black Lives Matter movement the week before.

The President compared the Dallas deaths to “horrible shootings not too long ago in Charleston at the church where Dylann Roof killed a number of black people.”

Obama claimed that there was no need for Blue Lives Matter legislation, because the Dallas shooter, were he still alive, “most certainly would” be prosecuted by the federal government for a hate crime and subject to harsher penalties.

When pressed by the Fraternal Order members regarding the Blue Lives Matter legislation, Obama was noncommittal.

Allison Padilla-Goodman, regional director for the south-central division of the Anti-Defamation League (ADL), told the left-wing Mother Jones magazine that adding police officers to the hate crime list “distorts the purpose of the original legislation.”

The ADL claims that the law should protect people who are victimized because of immutable characteristics, something that someone cannot change about themselves or should not have to change about themselves. ADL opposes Blue Live Matter legislation because “occupation is temporary and an inherently different kind of attribute.”