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Comment by mrangle | Hacker News Reader

Read assault laws. Most people think that assault is battery. It isn't. While I wouldn't comment on the event in question because I didn't see it, generally speaking people can't assault police anymore than they can civilians. What the police carry is irrelevant, and speaking to it as if it is implies a type of dissonance that will lead to someone being arrested.

Remember that this is the age wherein people are getting arrested for destroying LGBT, BLM, etc signs and art. To think that police won't get away with using a standard that approaches that isn't realistic.

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>Remember that this is the age wherein people are getting arrested for destroying LGBT, BLM, etc signs and art.

Do you mean vandalizing and/or destroying other people's property or pulling a sign away from someone else and destroying it, or do you mean being charged with assault for destroying their own LGBT sign? Because those are night and day different things. I would love to see a source if it is the latter, since you can legally burn the American flag, but you can't burn someone else's American flag.

The former. People have been over-charged for destroying the property of others, in the example given. But my point was comparative.

Also, to clarify, it should be difficult or impossible to charge someone for assault simply for destroying property. But according to how I understand assault laws, and leaving room for jurisdictional interpretation, if you do it while doing something else that can be read as intimidation then you could be vulnerable to an assault charge.

Whether or not the other person is actually intimidated won't ever be considered. Cop or civilian. The intention is what will be charged.

> The former. People have been over-charged for destroying the property of others, in the example given. But my point was comparative.

This is a inaccurate comparison. She didn't destroy any else's property

It would be inaccurate if the charges were limited to property destruction.

These aren’t comparative in the slightest. They aren’t being arrested for destroying an LGBT sign, they are being arrested for destroying someone else’s property. If you steal something from a police officer and destroy it, that is a “comparative” crime. You added false equiveillance examples because your “understanding” of assault laws has very little weight on its own. Considering there are actually many examples of anti-LGBT protestors that come armed [1] obviously to intimidate, it seems you attempting to mislead people as to the nature of anti-LGBT crimes and paint anti-LGBT crimes as “overcharged” seems telling.

[1] https://www.opb.org/article/2022/10/30/eugene-drag-queen-sto...

You can legally tell a cop to fuck off, the SC ruled on that years ago, that said if you did that where I lived (and were a minority) you'd likely get your skull cracked.

It's pretty sad that a civilian goes to jail for not knowing the law but a cop can make up laws that don't exist, arrest you for those laws and nothing can be done about it. Sure you can sue the city but that just means the residents pay for the cops ignorance and life goes on as usual for the cop.

>Remember that this is the age wherein people are getting arrested for destroying LGBT, BLM, etc signs and art. To think that police won't get away with using a standard that approaches that isn't realistic.

Black people and LGBT people are protected classes. Law enforcement is a job. People are getting arrested for hate crimes, the definition of which is a crime motivated by desire to cause harm to a protected class or members of a protected class.

You're saying it's unrealistic to think police won't get away with trying to apply protected class protections to an occupation. That's an extraordinary claim whether it's true or false.

If it's true, police can defacto make up laws. If it's false, it's reasonable to expect that police should have some oversight that prevents overreach.

There aren't protected class allowances for assault.

This thread, more than others on HN, fatally suffers from abuse of jargon.

Your last two sentences are word salad. Between the double negative and hyperbole I have zero idea what you are trying to say.

Flippant response. I didn't abuse jargon and there is no word salad. My comment is clear.

You're describing hate crimes and saying police are trying to treat actions against them the same way they treat hate crimes. It's not hyperbole to say that amounts to them making up laws.

Yes, a flippant response. The flippant response is well deserved.

It's audacious of you to defend unreadable grammar. An indecipherable double negative is word salad, as is the referential sentence that follows it. Again, because the sentence that it references is indecipherable. I'm not a pedant. I virtually never correct on grammar. I never use correction as a rhetorical device. I legitimately can't interpret your writing. Fix your sentence, if you choose to.

As long as laws have existed, their scope has been argued in court. To wit, we have strong equal protections law in this Nation.

As anti-protected-classes law and constitutional law activists have long argued, laws of this type will be used beyond their intended narrow scope and across the political isle. Also, see speech censorship efforts.

None of that means that law enforcement is conjuring laws. The part of this that you dislike was always inherent in the creation of hate crime enhancements. And, in part, this potential is why many have always seen the notion of protected classes as a terrible idea.

You're complaining now. Wait until they fully reverse the law to only apply to them. At that point, it will still be the fault of those who advocated for this unconstitutional nonsense to begin with.

> Read assault laws. Most people think that assault is battery. It isn't.

That's why you often hear"assault & battery." "Assault" is causing someone to (reasonably) feel in danger; while "battery" is the actual act.

Let's take a step back, telling someone to F- off!, even a cop is considered free speech and has been verified by the SC. On the other have telling someone I'm going to rack your F-ing skull open could be considered assault -this is threatening language and is not free speech.

Take a step back from what, exactly? What they stated was factual and generally complete.

The event in question was not someone telling a cop to F off. There are plenty of chargeable variations within the gamut of your polar examples.

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