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Comment by 542354234235 | Hacker News Reader

>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.

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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.

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...

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