New York's Own 'Blue Lives Matter' Bill Makes Attacking a Cop a Hate Crime

STATEN ISLAND, NY — An in-the-works state bill would make attacking a police officer a hate crime in New York.

The Blue Lives Matter Bill, as it's been named, is a project of New York State Assemblyman Ron Castorina, a squat yet reliably outspoken (and occasionally racist) Republican politician representing the cop-heavy southern end of Staten Island.

"People will now think twice before they assault a police officer," Castorina said at an outdoors press conference Thursday, in the same told-you-so New Yawk tongue he once used to refer to abortion as "African-American genocide" on the Assembly floor. (Video below.)

New York's Blue Lives Matter Bill will be modeled, according to Castorina, after a similar piece of work that whizzed through the Louisiana legislature earlier this summer — propelled by national grief and anger surrounding the recent killing of five cops at a Black Lives Matter protest in Texas.

Under the New York version, anyone charged with attacking a cop would have his or her charges bumped up a class.

Aka, a Class C violent felony would be upgraded to a Class B violent felony, and a Class B violent felony would become Class A. (Just as in other hate-crime attacks.)

"I am calling on our state legislature to pass a Blue Lives Matter Bill to add additional hate-crime-related charges on those who would violently attack our thin blue line," Borelli said.

The hate-crime sentence enhancement could mean years of additional jail time for New Yorkers accused of fighting with cops, legal experts told Patch — especially in less violent cases, as anyone who causes serious injury to an officer can be jailed for decades, if not life.

"The penalties are already quite significant," Alex Vitale, an associate professor at Brooklyn College, said by phone. "Everyone in this society knows there are serious consequences to assaulting a police officer."

Norman Siegel, a civil-rights attorney with offices on Madison Avenue, went so far as to call Castorina's bill-to-be — and Louisiana's new law — "conceptually flawed."

The definition of a hate crime throughout American law, Siegel said, is currently based on race, religion, sexual orientation, etc. — not one's occupation.

"If a cop pushes [someone] in Brooklyn, and he hits him back, is that self defense or a hate crime?" Siegel said. "And what about dentists? People hate dentists. Does that make attacking a dentist a hate crime?"

A Blue Lives Matter law, then — because no one is proposing mirror legislation to protect citizens against biased cops, and because U.S. courts don't have much of a history of punishing cops who use excessive force — would only serve as another blow "in the symbolic war against anyone who raises objections against policing in this country," Vitale said.

"You can't hang somebody twice, or make them serve two consecutive life sentences, or lock up their bones or something," said Prof. Wallace Ford, a department chair at Medgar Evers College in Crown Heights.

Ford argued that even just the phrase Blue Lives Matter "creates an inappropriate contrast."

The Black Lives Matter movement, he said, is meant to be inclusive — as in, black lives also matter. So creating a separate movement in support of cops' lives, which are already well protected by the legal system, "only exacerbates the terms of Blacks Lives Matter," Ford said.

NYPD Sergeant Joe Imperatrice, head of New York's Blue Lives Matter faction, issued the following statement Thursday in support of Castorina's bill:

“Since December 20th, 2014, with the shooting deaths of NYPD Detectives Ramos and Liu, the law enforcement world has been a target. Today, our law officials are standing up and making a change not only for our police officers but also our communities and their citizens. This is an important day, this is an important message to the world, that BLUE LIVES MATTER!”

Legal and political experts who spoke to Patch said they highly doubted Castorina's bill would make it through the majority-Democrat New York State Assembly next session, much less the entire legislature. Because while Louisiana's bill may have captured the hearts of both parties — it passed with 100 percent support, and was signed by the state's Democratic governor — "a Democrat in Louisiana is different than a Democrat in New York," Ford said.

But that's doesn't mean Castorina and his fellow New Yawk Republicans will go down without a fight.

Political debate on the bill "is going to be structured as, if you stand up against it, you're somehow against the police," Ford said. "That's sad. And it's a fake argument."

Lead photo via Assemblyman Ron Castorina/Facebook