[everforward]

So the operative theory is that someone willing to commit a very illegal assault on an officer is going to suddenly care about a minor charge for being too close to the officer?

If that’s really the goal, Louisiana _really_ needs to work on their public education and maybe check the water for heavy metals and what not. That’s stupid on a level where I’m worried if they’re doing alright down there.

[yencabulator]

No, the theory is to change the average behavior to remove excuses for the bad people.

[everforward]

What excuses are they using, and how does the average behavior feed into that? That doesn't make any sense to me unless Louisiana has a very weird legal system that operates on the average behavior rather than a codified set of restrictions and exceptions to those restrictions (they don't).

The law doesn't deal in excuses. If everyone decides to charge an officer, that doesn't suddenly make it legal. More importantly, these are tried by jury, so anyone that skates on an "excuse" doesn't have an excuse, they have the support of a jury of their peers who do not believe they are "bad people".

This is just fascists who don't like their fascism being filmed. They're a lot like street gangs in that regard.

[yencabulator]

You're so set on a line of thinking you're not really considering anything outside of your viewpoint.

If the average person, after being told so by the officer, stays 25 feet away, then that gives the officer a nice safety buffer to operate in. Anyone not following that rule now sticks out like a sore thumb.

If there are multiple people crowding the officer, leaning over them as they are kneeling on the ground, it's really hard for the officer to remain safe in case one of them decides to attack.

[everforward]

No, it's not, because that situation happens so rarely to not even be worth talking about.

Just checking some data, the FBI says 48 officers were killed in the line of duty in 2019. Of those, 44(!) were killed with firearms. So we're talking about 4 deaths that this maybe would have helped with. This data also includes prison staff, so there's a fair chance that it's really less than 4.

For reference, 20 people were killed by lightning in the US in 2019. So we're talking about an issue with a scope one fifth the size of "people being killed by lightning".

There were only 75 incidents of LEO's being assaulted and injured with "Firearms, Knives, or Other Cutting Instruments" in 2019 per FBI data. Again, this is not a substantial problem. Bouncers get assaulted at rates far higher than police, and yet nobody seems to mind.

> If there are multiple people crowding the officer, leaning over them as they are kneeling on the ground, it's really hard for the officer to remain safe in case one of them decides to attack.

Then call in backup? They love throwing on their LARP gear, give 'em a reason to use it.